The transformation of Nietzsche's große Politik in the epoch of Bismarck (original) (raw)
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Nietzsche on Politics: The Cause of a Culture Driven Polity
Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most important thinkers of modernity. His biting critique of culture and politics still resonates today. It is clear that throughout his life, Nietzsche believed that the goal of political life should be the production of high culture and great individuals, as Keith Ansell-Pearson writes in An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker “Nietzsche’s distinct political theory… [has an]… emphasis on political life as a means to the production of great human beings and culture”(63, Ansell-Pearson). His great question was, ‘what are we to become?’ However, there were different stages in Nietzsche’s thinking: his early period, heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, Wagner and his study of Ancient Greek culture; his middle period, in which he tries to commensurate the liberalization of the time with his cultural ideals; and his later years, which are marked by an extreme position which has been characterized as ‘Aristocratic Radicalism’, and his strongest criticism of western nationalism and liberalism. Because of this there is much disagreement about what kind of political programs would meet his goals, even within his own writing. Nietzsche set his goals for humanity and left it to us to figure out how to get there.
Reconsidering Nietzsche and Politics
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2020
Preprint version of a review essay of Hugo Drogon's Nietzsche's Great Politics and Gary Shapiro's Nietzsche and the Earth.
Nietzsche is a Political Thinker Revised
2023
This paper takes it starting point from the basic assertions of Martha Nussbaum’s 1997 paper “Is Nietzsche a political thinker?". In the paper she argues that seven criteria are necessary for a serious political philosophy: 1) understanding of material need; 2) procedural justification; 3) liberty and its worth; 4) racial, ethnic and religious difference; 5) gender and family; 6) justice between nations; and 7) moral psychology. She argues, that on the first six criteria, Nietzsche has nothing to offer but does make significant contributions on the seventh. In her estimation, then, we should forget about Nietzsche as a political thinker and instead focus on the enlightenment political philosophers he found to be so boring instead. Her basic conclusion is threefold: either Nietzsche is a racialist, inegalitarian, misogynistic, and elitist, he is puerile, or he is incoherent (Nussbaum 6-9). In opposition to Nussbaum's appraisal of Nietzsche's political thought, I argue that he is in fact a serious political thinker. To present the case I focus on the inclusion of Nussbaum's six criteria in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. My focus on this work is motivated by Nussbaum's own recognition that in this work Nietzsche makes numerous allusions to Plato's Republic, a seminal work of political thought in the tradition. Surprisingly, however, Nussbaum doesn't consider Zarathustra in her appraisal of the lack of political thought in Nietzsche.
Nietzsche Is a Political Thinker Revised and Expanded
This great city, and not only this fool, disgusts me. In both there is nothing to make better, nothing to make worse. Woe to this great city! And I wish I see already the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed! For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. Yet this has its time and its own destiny. But I offer you in farewell this precept, you fool: Where one can no longer love, one should-pass by!" (Zarathustra "Of Passing By") ".. . therefore the one ran faster and the other slower, for still in the outer circles of that world a cruel purpose could outspeed a vague pity. But the cruelty could not reach its end" (Charles Williams All Hallows' Eve 84-85).
Nietzsche's Political Naturalism: Beyond Logocentrism and Anthropocentrism
Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, 2024
This essay argues that although political thinkers frequently draw on his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche has not been read as a 'thinker of politics' in his own regard because the Euro-American field of political thought owes its very notion of 'politics' to the conceptual heritage Nietzsche's project directly challenges. The first part of the essay traces the prevailing conception of politics to Aristotle, in whose view politics is the quintessentially human (anthropos) activity of organising collective life through reason/speech (logos). The second part presents Nietzsche's project as a novel type of political naturalism, one which replaces the two Aristotelian axioms underpinning standard construals of politics, namely logocentrism and anthropocentrism. For Nietzsche, politics is not a unique, intra-species behaviour of certain bipedal primates, but the relational power dynamics present in all of nature, humans included. Nietzsche's political naturalism thereby gifts us an image of politics befitting the thoroughly entangled, volatile world we urgently have to come to terms with today.
Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, 2023
Here, precisely the political aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy is at stake. Undoubtedly, Nietzsche aimed to "philosophize with a hammer." 1 What he was trying to destroy was nothing but houses of idols, Nietzsche's word for 'ideals,' or "houses of cards," as Wittgenstein would say. 2 However, the first question for us is whether the Nietzschean hammer can also be observed and interpreted as a political tool, the annihilator of the modern state as the New Idol-"Only where the state ends, there begins the human being." 3 I am inclined to answer this question in the affirmative;
Constructing the Agon Nietzsche and contemporary political philosophy
In any ordinary sense, Nietzsche's standing as a founder of modern social and political thought is clear. His influence on social and political movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century spanned feminism, anarchism, Zionism, socialism and the radical right. In the context of social and political theory, his first great inheritor was Max Weber but his mark can also be clearly discerned on the first generation of the Frankfurt School, on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau and Bernard Williams as well as on the major trinity of post-structuralism -Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault -among many others. However, considered in the context of modern political philosophy, it is notable that Nietzsche does not offer normative theories in the manner of Rousseau or Rawls and the central political problems of political obligation and the legitimacy of the state are secondary to his interests. Rather Nietzsche's guiding problem, as he puts it in The Anti-Christ, is this: The problem I am posing is not what should replace humanity in the order of being (-the human is an endpoint -): but instead what type of human should be bred, should be willed, as having greater value, as being more deserving of life, as being more certain of a future. (AC s3) In more classical terms, Nietzsche's question is 'What is Noble?' and in virtue of this question he belongs to a tradition of social and political thought (encompassing Aristotle and Machiavelli) whose focus is on government in its most general sense, that is, the government of self and others as it manifests itself in the realms of aesthetic, ethical and political value through the institutions, practices and imaginaries that compose our relationships to ourselves and others: this what Nietzsche will gather together under the concept of 'culture' and which I'll refer to as ethical culture. 1