Frederich Nietzsche was an aphoristic writer to be sure. Systematic, organized, and deductive, not so much. For this reason, it is difficult to ascertain from his work a coherent, unified philosophy.
I recently picked up a copy of his 1886 manifesto, Beyond Good and Evil. It was one of the many texts assigned to me as a graduate student and I wanted to return to it with fresh eyes and a broader perspective. Re-reading him with some distance from the seminar room was slightly less frustrating (perhaps because I wasn’t worried about getting called out for having the “wrong” interpretation), but it was no easier to digest.
For what it’s worth, I found the first and last sections of the book to be most revealing about Nietzsche’s perspective and also most applicable to the epistemic, ontological, and political issues of today. Reading it feels radical, even today. I’ve no idea how radical it must have felt for Nietzsche’s contemporaries.
Philosophers are still brimming with prejudice.
One area where Nietzsche holds up impressively well is his criticism of idealist philosophers. This first section of the book takes special aim at Immanuel Kant, but throws barbs in the direction of Plato, Stoics and logicians as well. These specific gripes clutter the overarching point: that dogmatism is a natural consequence of philosophizing. That is, those who claim to have found knowledge cannot resist the urge to totalize their conclusions or try to impose them systematically on others.
This premise informed the early practitioners of what would eventually become deconstruction and critical theory.1 Nietzsche challenged the unacknowledged presuppositions of Kant et al: that they, and they alone, had seen outside the cave and understood the form of the good. He may have an epistemological point as well, but the more salient observation for the modern reader is the one about absolutism.2
As Nietzsche opined, “as soon as philosophy begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive.”3 The same idea was put differently by one of my favorite thinkers, Kenneth Burke. As part of his “Definition of Man,” Burke posited that humans were “rotten with perfection,” by which we meant we take things to the logical extreme of their telos, a concept that Aristotle described as entelechy. I don’t think Nietzsche and Burke would agree on much, but they certainly agreed about the totalizing tendencies of language.
This lesson is one that is easy to preach, but much harder to practice. Just think about the vogue philosophers of my lifetime and how their ideas have become almost unquestionable. To criticize Michel Foucault’s view of power or Judith Butler’s approach to gender, for example, is simply anathema in the modern academy. Despite being thinkers who were influenced by Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the uptake of their ideas was still subject to entelechy.
Caveat about Nietzsche’s own Prejudices
It is true that Nietzsche regularly expressed misogyny and antisemitism in his writings. This fact should not be ignored simply because he was a man of his time, but neither should it be something on which we dwell. In my limited dealings with him, I found him to be more virulently anti-Christian than antisemitic. I will leave others to speak about this if they wish, but I tried to set it aside to focus on the core philosophy, which might with close attention be discerned. If his writings were primarily about bigotry, I highly doubt he would have been so influential to the development of post-structural and post-modern critical perspectives.
The Will to Power means never having to say you’re sorry.
In the final section of the book, Nietzsche explicates two concepts for which he would subsequently become well known. The first is the master-slave morality and the second is the will to power. He believes that a master morality is connected to the will to power. Under this morality, “the noble man feels himself to be the determiner of values, and does not need to be approved of.”4
The morality of rulers who exercise the will to power is “most alien and painful to contemporary taste,” he writes, because they are under the spell of a slave morality. The noble man is the strong man, whose will must necessarily be imposed on those who are destined to be led. The decadence Nietzsche foresaw in early-modern Europe was driving toward the normalization of this weakness, and would eventually lead people away from freedom, toward servitude.
Democracy, he believed, was a major contributing factor to this devolution among the population. In a passage that actually proved quite predictive, Nietzsche asserted that “the democratization of Europe will lead to a type prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense” and moreover that democratization was “at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.”5 With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see a connection between Nietzsche’s concerns and the emergence of totalitarian governance that overtook the continent during the 20th century.
So was it worth re-reading this classic text? Yes. It provided for me a fuller view of what this important thinker seemed to care about and de-cluttered my mind of the other associations I had about his work.
He is not everyone’s cup of tea— I certainly do not plan on picking up Genealogy of Morals or The Gay Science to read next. Nevertheless, these ideas have proven to be important starting points for what turned into modern critical theory, even if Nietzsche would probably hate where some of these ideas ended up. Sometimes it pays to engage with thinkers who you want to hate, because you may realize more affinity than there might at first seem to be.
See e.g., Bradford Vivian, “Freedom, Naming, Nobility: Convergence of rhetorical and political theory in Nietzsche’s philosophy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 40, no. 4 (2007): 372-393.
Nietzsche is more a perspectivist and among ancient philosophers presumably preferred Protagoras, or so I deduce from the allusion to Protagoras’ aphorism that “man is the measure of all things” in section 3. c.f., Joel E Mann and Getty L. Lustia, “A Model Sophist: Nietzsche on Protagoras and Thucydides,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42, no. 1 (2011): 51-72.
Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R.J. Hollingsdale (New York: Penguin, 2003), 39.
Ibid., 195.
Ibid., 173.