Nietzsche’s Posthuman Political Vision

ABSTRACT

In repeated rejections of the reality of free will, agency, self-consciousness and moral accountability, Nietzsche espouses views consistent with “cosmic” determinism. The salient features of determinism all follow from Nietzsche’s own view of organic reality as will-to-power. His position denies also the substance of any ascription of merit or blame, hence any stable ground for the ranking of human ends or types. The crises Nietzsche forecasts, and the demands he makes on humanity, all fundamentally political, arise from this nihilistic stance. It projects the inevitable arrival of an era when Nietzsche’s “deadly truths” are accepted by the great mass of humanity, sketching an essentially posthuman future. The article argues that Nietzsche’s fundamental position is the reality of determinism and rejection of free will and even the coherence of the concept of willing; further, that a Nietzschean age when this is accepted remains to come, and in closing that appreciating these facts permits access to the key conceits of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the will to power, the eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, and to amor fati as his formula for greatness.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• nihilism
• free will
• agency
• the posthuman

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

A = The Antichrist

BGE = Beyond Good and Evil

CW = The Case of Wagner

D = Daybreak

EH = Ecce Homo

GM = On the Genealogy of Morality

GS = The Gay Science

HATH = Human, All Too Human

TI = Twilight of the Idols

UM = Untimely Meditations

WS = The Wanderer and his Shadow (HATH part 3)

Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Posthumously published writings in English:

PPP = The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

PTAG = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Nietzsche’s notebooks:

KSA = Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabem, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari

Notes

1. I use the standard English-language abbreviations (title and section) for citations of Nietzsche’s works. I use KSA for Nietzsche’s original works; the translations relied upon are listed in the bibliography.

2. The question was posed, fairly, by one of the referees of this article, why the appropriate comparison, given the focus on inevitability and insistence on Nietzsche’s political import, was not with Marx. I think the answer is twofold (discounting the incidental and generational aspect for why the comparison eluded me: Marx has not mattered or counted as a serious thinker in my intellectual lifetime). First, Nietzsche pushes us toward the inhuman, indeed the posthuman, and toward a hard, ferocious politics which, like Nechayev and de Maistre and quite unlike Marx (whatever may be said of regimes established in his name), scorns the legacies of humanism. Second, Marx is a purveyor of a variety of socialism. I take Nietzsche seriously enough here to go along with his view that such “emancipatory” political movements as socialism and feminism are at best forgivable follies, which will not survive the further enlightenment of western society or the inauguration of the Nietzschean crisis, and are at any rate relatively unimportant phenomena in the longer run.

3. Nietzsche himself rather recoils from it, in a lengthy and important notebook entry “on combating determinism” from 1886, KSA 12.9[91]. But his claim amounts to the fact that we cannot access determinism as a demonstrable truth, only as a logical construction which amounts to an interpretation: this may allow him to reject mechanism as unproven, but it leaves in place all the salient implications of cosmic determinism for a conception of human life and the larger world—and some of his published passages support just this mechanistic picture quite clearly, while nothing in his view goes toward restoration of anything resembling free will. Pietro Gori examines Nietzsche’s critique of mechanism in “Nietzsche and Mechanism,” and draws a comparison with the work of Ernst Mach, but it is clear that the critique is based on mechanism’s trust in the senses and in the concept of matter as simple and a given. Again, the same implications for free will that follow from unqualified mechanism remain in Nietzsche.

4. See e.g. HATH 18, 39, 99, 102, 105–7; WS 1, 9–12, 23–24, 28, 81; D 128; GS 345; GM II.7; TI VI.3, 7–8; A 14–15, 38. See too BGE 21: here, “unfree will” is rejected along with the free (as in A 15), the question displaced onto that of strong and weak wills: the latter distinction however does not refer to anything in which there is choice, or that can be cultivated, worked toward or willed (how, after all, could one will the nature or quality of one’s will?). The distinction makes sense only in a world where “strong” or “weak” wills are indexes of blind power or necessity—essentially, as will be elucidated below, aesthetic categories that characterise fated quanta of force. Again, the range of implications normally assumed to follow from the assertion of a mechanistic universe are intact. I cannot agree with Tracy Strong’s position that, though Nietzsche quite explicitly denies the reality and critiques the very concept of free will, he “does not thereby affirm that men are ‘really’” not free (Friedrich Nietzsche, 67–68). One cannot reject one side of a dialectical proposition without also rejecting the other: Nietzsche’s argument rests on the proposition that men are never so separate from the world as to be in a position—physical or epistemological—to have or not have free will. Man’s inseparability from the world or the whole is a part of what leads to the denial of free will. I suspect that the relative rarity of direct affirmation of the determined unfreedom of man in Nietzsche is rooted in his aversion to the vulgarity of mechanism, not his dissent from or even philosophical complication of the position that man is not free. And though such direct expressions of the position are rare, they are neither absent nor, when they occur, ambiguous.

5. TI VI.3; KSA 12.1[58], 12.2[103].

6. KSA 11.37[4]; GS 11.

7. KSA 11.36[10].

8. GM I.13; KSA 12.2[139]; 12.2[158]; 12.4[8]; 12.7[1]; 12.7[63]; 12.9[79]; 12.9[91]. One is ever “being done,” not “doing,” a perpetual grammatical error: D 120.

9. KSA 12.9[35]; TI V.5.

10. GS 301; BGE 108; TI VII.1; KSA 11.34[253]; 12.2[77]; 12.2[95], 12.2[108].

11. KSA 13.11[411].

12. GS 357; GM III.27; KSA 12.2[127]; 12.2[131]; 11.38[3].

13. E.g. HATH 33–34; D 90; GS 107, 110–12, 115, 121, 344; BGE 4; KSA 7.19[36]–[37], 7.19[43]; 7.19[49]; 7.19[64] 7.29[17]; 11.38[4]; 11.34[253]; 12.7[63]. Truth, or what counts as it, in fact is a complex of errors or illusions, providing Nietzsche with grounds for his assertion that the will to illusion is prior to the will to truth, and the will to deception remains strong. KSA 12.2[108]; 12.7[54]; cf. GS 37, 265.

14. TI V.6; WS 61.

15. HATH 107.

16. HATH 459.

17. KSA 12.10[52].

18. KSA 13.14[196]; cf.12.10[50]; 13.23[1].

19. Z III, “On Old and New Law Tables,” 29 (the passage quoted from here constitutes the final, eleventh section of TI). And see Z II, “The Wanderer”: “Now what is mildest in you must become hardest.” Also, the content of BGE 257, which hymns the fundamental inequality of man, espousing acceptance of this as a condition of great accomplishment, and which closes with a curt: “the truth is hard.”

20. GS 362; and see HATH 477, EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” 1; cf. KSA 10.24[25] for a link between an age of inward wilting or decline—fate of the majority of posthuman mankind, resigned to its purposelessness—and an external era of tumult and terrible wars. Despite such rhetoric, Nietzsche’s vision of savage wars seems to be predicated not on technological innovation but on a change in the conception of man. Though he could foresee air travel (HATH 267), Nietzsche does not seem to have forecasted air warfare, or the scope and potential for savagery in war which technological advances would bring. His own experience and perception of war could be argued to have limited his capacity here. This has been put well by Peter Bergmann: “[Nietzsche’s] agonal ideal emerged during a series of storybook wars which had spread from the Crimea to Italy and Germany before finally concluding in France. Such conflicts brought little sense of devastation or loss. The ferocious bloodletting of the American Civil War was recognized by few Europeans to be a harbinger of future wars. Instead, ‘militarism,’ a neologism of the 1860s, connoted a relatively benign view of war and awakened a fascination with the ‘great men’ tested in limited wars.” Bergmann, Nietzsche, 61 and see 80, 82, 165, 180.

21. UM II.9.

22. BGE 242; KSA 12.2[13].

23. On this point compare Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, 39, 54, 115.

24. HATH 261; WS 292; BGE 208, 211, 251; KSA 11.37[8]. And see Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 150–71; Strauss, On Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, 66, 68. Strauss’s remarks show he is attuned to the duality of the Nietzschean position, that man must henceforth be both “owner of the earth” and “loyal to the earth.”

25. A word on another conception of fate, which—though the aphorism does not use the word—is captured in BGE 70, intimately related as this conception is to the idea of character (“If one has character, one has one’s typical experience, which recurs”). This notion of character is crucial for an understanding of fate that holds it irreducible either to blind determinism or a supernaturally-apportioned destiny. A notion of fate evacuated of necessity, this is an ancient understanding of the concept, extractable from Aristotle as it is from the tragedians, and, if Alcinous, one of the most interesting middle-Platonist expositors of the master, is to be trusted, present also in Plato. Writes Alcinous (whose directness about Plato’s beliefs would, admittedly, give many a reader of the dialogues pause):

On the subject of fate, Plato’s views are roughly as follows. All things, he says, are within the sphere of fate, but not all things are fated. Fate, in fact, has the status of a law. It does not say, as it were, that such and such a person will do this, and that such and such another will suffer that, for that would result in an infinity of possibilities, since the number of people who come into being is infinite, and the things that happen to them are also infinite; and then the concept of what is in our power would go out of the window, and so would praise and blame, and everything like that. But fate consists rather in the fact that if a soul chooses a given type of life and performs such-and-such actions, such-and-such consequences will follow from it. (Handbook of Platonism, 3, 34–35)

And see Dillion, the Handbook’s editor’s, exposition of the topic, 160–64. This idea of fate no doubt attracted Nietzsche, but it never receives adequate expression; one concludes that it could not withstand or accommodate his ultimate belief in the unfreedom of the will.

26. Thus the resonant ambiguity in the question posed apropos of the eternal recurrence: “Must not what can happen to all things already have happened … ?” (Muß nicht, was geschehn kann von allen Dingen, schon einmal geschehn … ?), Z.III, “Of the Vision and the Riddle,” 2.

27. PPP, 63 (Heraclitus offers a “cosmodicy” with respect to the question of justice), 70–74; PTAG, 62–65, 68, 112, 116.

28. I refer here of course to the distinction introduced by Gemes and Janaway in “Nietzsche on Free Will,” between “deserts free will” and “agency free will”; the authors argue that Nietzsche affirms the latter while denying the former. Their concern is to explain and salvage Nietzsche’s oft-deployed notion of sovereign individuality, in the face of his denials of the reality of free will. The solution is in Nietzsche’s restriction of true personhood, or sovereign individuality, to those who, fortuitously or through effort, achieve agency free will. I will not dwell on the distinction except to say that I hold it untenable: in reality, either notion of free will here implies or requires the other. The authors themselves, framing agency free will as a great achievement, write that only the achiever of such “deserves the honorific ‘person’”—restoring at a stroke, and seemingly unawares, the notion of desert. Further, restricting subjectivity or sovereign individuality to the very few, call them chosen, fated, lucky or simply naturally superior, and including oneself among their ranks—for Nietzsche must, if he is fully to recognise and understand this distinction attributed to him by the authors—is in rather poor taste: to recur to a Nietzschean trope, it ought to offend one’s metaphorical sense of smell even more than one’s sense of intellectual probity. Finally, pushed to its logical conclusion, this would have to represent a metaphysical claim—even a physical one—positing one, comparatively small cohort of humanity, as literally, qualitatively different animals to the rest of the species, actually possessing free will where the majority does not. One cannot translate the idea into a concrete statement about physical matter without committing oneself to this. If it is only figurative, meanwhile, it lurches toward banality, any attempt to make sense of it drawing it into the orbit of positions Nietzsche would reject. It can only be a self-aggrandising species of romanticism; a substitute form or modification of Aristotelianism (development and refinement of the “intellectual conscience” as a matter of habitus); or indeed a not very interesting variation on the now-shopworn old Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. It would certainly accord with Nietzsche’s interpretation of Theognis’s term esthloi, distinguished from the kakoi, as “those who are, the truly real” (GM I.5), but there is no suggestion that what distinguishes this noble group from the base, that is, the possession of loyalty, honour, liberality, etc., supports a metaphysical claim that their “freedom” resides in possession of real free will.

29. HATH 32; Z.I “The Thousand and One Goals.”

30. See e.g. BGE 9 with its traducing and wilful travestying of the Stoic (and by extension, earlier Platonic-Aristotelian) idea of the life kata physin, “according to nature,” and BGE 230 on the need to retranslate man, or the text of homo natura, back into nature. For an extensive analysis of this latter and related themes, see Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, chap. 8, “Philological Genealogy and Misology,” 134–200.

31. An exception is Leiter who, in Nietzsche on Morality, 64–90, fundamentally accepts Nietzsche’s fatalism. One need not tally the commentators who support a form of agency or individual sovereignty in Nietzsche. It ought to be sufficient to say that anyone who considers Nietzsche’s projected Übermensch figure, however one interprets or envisions it, to have some say in or direct influence on his attainment of Übermenschlichkeit has not reckoned with the problems I consider central to Nietzsche’s position (and in fact accepted by him). It came to my attention after this article’s submission, but the reading of Peter Sloterdijk in Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism shares similarities with that offered here. Instructive on this score for its insistence on salvaging sovereign individuality and agency in Nietzsche is the critique of Sloterdijk offered by Ansell-Pearson, “Transfiguration of Existence.”

32. KSA 12.5[9]. In speaking subsequently of this distinction, and of certain doctrines in Nietzsche such as life-affirmation and even the eternal recurrence, as exoteric, I consider solely what is warranted by this passage. I make no claim whatsoever to have grasped some deeper or secret teaching which is obscured or “told slant” by sleights or stylistic feints. On the contrary, what is put perhaps a touch more concisely and explicitly in this unpublished passage than elsewhere is nevertheless easily deducible from the published works as Nietzsche’s fundamental position.

33. Recurring to the thesis of Gemes and Janaway, and their effort to salvage sovereign individuality, one might well connect this with the premise of Reginster, in Affirmation of Life, which sees Nietzsche as showing his readers the way beyond nihilism, and assume that Nietzsche’s real readers, those whom he would recognise as the types he wishes to reach and who are capable of sovereign individuality, are rare. I have some sympathy with both positions, which do of course marshal a good deal of textual evidence in their support; but ultimately I would incline more to the view of Stanley Rosen, that any seeming advocacy of “active nihilism,” life-affirmation or similar in Nietzsche is a kind of exoteric doctrine, and that comprehensive nihilism (and finally, I would hold, determinism) is Nietzsche’s true teaching. Rosen, Mask of Enlightenment; and “Remarks on Nietzsche’s Platonism,” 159. For a single but perhaps convincing, at least arresting, indication that strategies of “life-affirmation” might be held in some way “exoteric” and not to reflect Nietzsche’s real views, compare Zarathustra’s apparent advocacy of turning every “it was” into “thus I willed it” (Z II, “On Redemption”) with Nietzsche’s earlier, barbed remarks at D 124: “What is willing!—We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: ‘I will that the sun shall rise’; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says: ‘I will that it shall roll’; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: ‘here I lie, but I will lie here!’ But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression: ‘I will’?”

34. KSA 11.38[12].

35. On this conception of soul, see e.g. BGE 12; cf. BGE 19; KSA 12.2[76]; and see C. Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche, 101–2, 108, 161–62. Thoughts themselves might be construed as in a sense “externa” in origin, KSA 11.38[1], 12.2[103].

36. Nietzsche’s high regard for Aristophanes seems rooted in the idea that there is redemption in comedy, and that his comedy offers redemption of an Athens soon to be lured to the entrancement and decline of Socratic dialectics and Euripidean rationalism, all of which is too serious, and foolishly so; worse perhaps than the seriousness of a severe temper, the Socratic impulse offers laughter which is hollow, in which it is not at home, a laughter which is neither natural to it nor accessible to the uninitiated. The playwright simultaneously ridiculed and redeemed his society and his era—in his way, of course, treating it with its measure of seriousness. A reader might profitably meditate on Nietzsche’s assertion (BGE 28) that Plato’s “sphinxlike” nature was shown by the fact that under his pillow, upon his death, was discovered a volume of Aristophanes’ plays—though Nietzsche’s “source” seems to be a conflation of Olympiodorus’s report in his Vita Platonis that copies of Aristophanes were found on Plato’s couch after his death and the well-known claim from the dedicatory epistle from Aemilius Portus’s 1607 edition of Aristophanes to the scholiast Bisetus, that St. John Chrysostom slept with a copy of Aristophanes under his pillow, and derived much of his eloquence from him.

37. A most interesting and instructive reading is that of Paul Loeb in “Eternal Recurrence,” but it is also startling and eccentric, hinging as it does on the claim that Zarathustra dies, and that the doctrine is a kind of deathbed vision. (This view was first set forth in his 2010 commentary The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.) Alexander Nehamas in “This Life—Your Eternal Life” is alive to the fact that the doctrine might well induce indifference rather than terror, and construes it as suggesting a way to redeem one’s past by accepting it all and integrating it into the willed and projected future.

38. Hence sense can be made, in a book in which little enough is entirely literal, of Zarathustra’s apparent reference to the overman as his (willed or anticipated) beautiful new “species” (Art) Z.IV “The Welcome.”

39. Or, the gradual assimilation of “great state” into a “monster-state,” preceding, in the absence of external threats to the latter, fragmentation of the whole into atomistic states (KSA 8.19[60]), each presumably more resembling cantons (WS 292) than members of the former system of competitor nation-states.

40. Z.II, “On Priests.”

41. There have been no overmen, perhaps, but Nietzsche’s “free spirits” (among which he is counted, is perhaps foremost) represent for him already, in themselves, a “revaluation of all values.” They are pioneers of the spirit and intellect and harbingers of the posthuman, but still have ranged against them current prejudices and stupidities of monumental proportions, as well as a historical prejudice, enduring through centuries, which viewed all such spirits as enemies of God. A 13; cf. GS 283. Zarathustra similarly predicts that the “highest human beings” he has known would call his overman a devil. Z.II “On Human Prudence”; EH “Why I am a Destiny,” 5; and on animosity toward the free spirit, Z.II “On the Famous Wise Men.” Compare Nietzsche’s imagining of the “genius of culture,” HATH 241.

42. A 14. The role physiology plays in Nietzsche’s philosophy—in which the body is the self—can hardly be underestimated. I have deliberately refrained from discussing it, as I believe that Nietzsche is committed to a variety of physicalism that lurches on occasion toward biological determinism. We can only guess how Nietzsche might receive and integrate twenty-first-century genetic science into his philosophical vision, but it is likely it would have bolstered and further emboldened his frank views on the physiological basis of the (idea of the) self, of thought, of individual principle and preference. I do not discuss it partly because the subject is too large adequately to treat here, but also because I believe the position is subsumed by what I have called Nietzsche’s cosmic determinism. Physiological determinism becomes a special case of the latter, or indeed its basis: man’s material and physical being is not exempted from the interplay of forces within nature, of which he is a part, which he cannot control and by which his thoughts and actions are ultimately determined.

43. Note to CW 9. Vivetta Vivarelli in “Greek Audience,” 186–87, details the views of predecessors such as August Wilhelm Schlegel and Joseph Anselm Feuerbach on the sculptural quality of ancient drama; the latter’s views were identified by the early French Nietzsche expositor Charles Andler as one of the sources for The Birth of Tragedy. J. L. Myres somewhat similarly posits the influence of the plastic arts on narrative composition and the representation of time in ancient historiography, noting instances of what he calls “pedimental” composition in Herodotus: Father of History, 62–63, and see 69–70. In a long notebook entry of 1872–3 (KSA 7.25[1]), Nietzsche insists on the kinship between the theatrical presentations of antiquity and its sculpture. The Doric dran does in fact correspond to the Attic prattein, to act or do; noting this, however, Vernant still acknowledges, in a fashion occasionally reminiscent of Nietzsche, that Greek tragedy is characterised by tensions and ambiguities regarding the responsibility for “action,” and particularly regarding concepts such as agency or the will. See chapters 2 “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” and 3, “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 29–84.

44. The idea of becoming what one is has often occasioned difficulties or confusion which would be dispelled, perhaps, if one were to assume Nietzsche everywhere to be taking as read, even while eliding, the circumstantial participle mathōn in the original Pindaric imperative. In a strictly Nietzschean view—at least for the mature philosopher, if not the early philologist—“learning” however is not the activity of an agent, but something that occurs, that is imposed by or results from the interplay of mysterious forces. The imperative then is a call to recognise and accept that nothing, thinking cosmically, could be other than what or as it is, and that one’s fate is fixed. (It can indeed sometimes feel that Niezsche’s wisdom might be distilled into some combination of Bishop Butler’s “Everything is what it is, and not another thing” and Spinoza’s “One and the same thing can be both good and bad, and also indifferent”—provided both lines were delivered with appropriate mischief.)

45. “Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker?” asked Martha Nussbaum in the title of an avowedly polemical article, and answered it with a barely-qualified negative. The qualification is that in one of the seven areas Nussbaum identifies as requiring systematic attention for any philosopher to be considered a serious political thinker, “moral psychology,” she acknowledges that Nietzsche made great contributions—though even here, she suspects those contributions are mostly “pernicious.” In the other six areas (“procedural justification,” “justice between nations,” “material need,” “gender and the family,” “liberty and its worth,” and “racial, ethnic and religious differences,” Nietzsche either contributes nothing or his treatments are, for Nussbaum, “utterly childish.” I, and I think most, would demur. Ansell-Pearson’s volumes, Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker and Nietzsche and Political Thought, indicate by their titles alone, but more importantly show in their content, that Nietzsche can be considered a genuine political thinker (and Nietzsche himself, as Nussbaum acknowledges, considered himself to be such); as much is shown also by Conway in Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game and Bergmann in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s contributions to moral psychology are so original, comprehensive and impressive that one is reminded that, as would equally be the case with economic science, a sufficiently brilliant moral psychology is automatically of the greatest relevance for political science. I do suspect that Nussbaum’s professed disillusionment with Nietzsche, whom, she writes, she once did but no longer can take very seriously, has at least some root in her frustrations with Bernard Williams’ coolly cynical outlook and disinterest in moral theory, a position Nussbaum felt was fundamentally without hope for the world and which she linked with the waxing of Williams’ regard for Nietzsche. Nussbaum’s obituarial appreciation of Williams in “Tragedy and Justice” suggests as much (she goes as far as to consider Williams’ attitude to exemplify Nietzschean amor fati), and aspects of her complaints are interestingly echoed in a profile by Larissa MacFarquhar in “How to Be Good,” of another great moral philosopher, Derek Parfit, who found himself similarly dismayed by Williams’ view of morality as an entirely human construct without foundation in truth—or what could be recast as Williams’ assent to the famous Nietzschean dictum that there are no moral facts or phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena. Conor Cruise O’Brien, in “The Gentle Nietzscheans,” a piece highly critical of Nietzsche and more so of his liberal-minded apologists, written for the New York Review of Books in 1970 (reprinted in Conor: A Biography), was in no doubt as to the pernicious nature of much of Nietzsche’s thought, but in still less doubt as to its inherently political content.

46. D 453.

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Paul O’Mahoney

Paul O’Mahoney completed his PhD at University College Dublin, focusing mainly on Jean Baudrillard and postmodernity. His research interests include political philosophy, continental philosophy, classics and, professionally, health and social care policy. His recent publications include articles and review essays on resilience among family carers, maintenance obligations in Irish law, death and end-of-life care, the state of medical research, Žižek and (in The European Legacy) Hesiod. He works in a research capacity with a Dublin-based NGO.