References
- Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, (University of Chicago Press, 1990). Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989). Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, (MIT Press, 1988).
- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 143.
- Bloom, p. 202. See also p. 150, where Bloom offers the following somewhat strange and telling conditional: “There is no doubt that value relativism, if it is true and it is believed on, takes one into very dark regions of the soul and very dangerous political experiments”. It is strange that Bloom here even considers the possibility of relativism (“if it is true”), which is out of character for him. It is telling in its reference to the soul, as in Bloom's subtitle, which is a clue to his strong religious agenda. And as a conditional, it is unconvincing. The one thing Bloom never considers is the possibility of the truth of relativism, along with the possibility that nihilism is not the only logical consequence of relativism.
- Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche: “the Last Antipolitical German”, (Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 7.
- Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed., (Princeton Univeristy Press, 1974). Kaufmann does use the term anti-political to describe Nietzsche, but it is clear that his portrayal is of Nietzsche as thoroughly a-political. For a summary of this problem, see Walter H. Sokel, “Political Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in Walter Kaufmann's Image of Nietzsche”, Nietzsche-Studien 12, (New York: Walter deGruyter, 1983). Sokel argues that, in portraying Nietzsche as an existentialist, Kaufmann over-emphasizes the “…profoundly humanistic essence implied in Nietzsche's concept of power”. This over simplifies and distorts Nietzsche and “diminishes his stature”—“The whole political dimension of his thought is bracketed out by Kaufmann. He considers Nietzsche to be an ‘a-political’ thinker”. (Sokel, p 438).
- Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration..Expanded Edition (University of California Press, 1988).Like Bergmann Strong also defends Nietzsche against the charge of being a-political, and qualifies the term “anti-political” to mean highly political, but extremely negative towards the politics of Nietzsche's time: “This is not the position of a man who is ‘against’ politics but rather one who is against the human consequences of what we now call politics…he is opposed to what Germans call politics”, (pp. 201–208.) But while Strong does strongly claim that “Nietzsche's understanding of contemporary times goes in fact in a ‘political’ direction” (p. 186); his version of Nietzschean politics remains highly individualistic and spiritualistic, concerned with the values of “true creativity” and autonomy, that is, similar to Kaufmann's Nietzsche. According to Strong, since modern nation-states so effectively dominate and determine the lives of individuals, “…true creativity, such as was possible with the strong sensuous political life of the Greeks, is impossible. Never has politics been so important, but never has it been so remote. For Nietzsche, in opposition to Marx, the solution to this dilemma must first be individual, and only then social”, (pp. 216–217).
- Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life As Literature, (Havard University Press, 1985).
- Jacques Derrida, “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions”, Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer, trans. Philosophy and Literature, 10 October 1986, p. 256.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. pp. 30…28.
- Detwiler, p. 13. Notice how Detwiler attributes this holism to Nietzsche's intention (“in his view”), without documentation. Surely, whether this was Nietzsche's intent or self-understanding is questionable, and not one of the things which Detwiler establishes well. This suggestion begs the question—whether there is such a unity to Nietzsche's thought, especially the exclusive identity of his philosophy and politics which Detwiler maintains.
- Warren, p. xi.
- It is interesting to note that the first book-length American feminist interpretation of Nietzsche also conforms to our format of taking sides on both hermeneutic holism and logical integrity. Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, (University of Chicago Press, 1984). Schutte comes out closer to the Right in her insistence that there is a “whole” of Nietzsche's thought, and that his politics are “not superfluous” and that “Nietzsche's defense of exploitation cannot be entirely separated from his other theories”, (p. 163) She also claims that Nietzsche's more objectionable statements on women, slavery, etc “…are not simply isolated opinions…They are logically tied to other notions that Nietzsche is commended for holding”, (p. 188) Schutte thus would agree with Detwiler that this holism demands that Nietzsche be held accountable for his objectionable politics, and that “…the weeding out of the least attractive elements in Nietzsche's work amounts to either self-deceit or censorship, and that, in any case, this practice keeps us from understanding the whole of Nietzsche's vision”. (p. 186) Schutte leans towards the Left, and towards agreement with Warren, when she speaks of the tension between Nietzsche's philosophy and politics, “…the contradiction between his intended affirmation of life and his reactionary and nihilistic politics”, (p. 188) So Schutte vacillates between wanting to criticize Nietzsche for his politics (which she claims follows logically from his philosophy), and wanting to redeem that part of Nietzsche's thought which might be useful for feminism (which implies that there are other positive political implications to Nietzsche's thought.) Schutte's feminism is a liberal humanism which retains some metaphysical and essentialistic tendencies, accounting for her proximity to both the Right and Left Nietzscheane.
- Mark Warren calls Nietzsche's actual politics (which Warren argues, as we shall see, is a kind of mistake on Nietzsche's part), “neo-aristocratic conservatism”, (p. 211) This ambiguity in terminology (the same thing being labelled both radical and conservative), is a general problem which plagues my presentation. Admittedly, the terms Left, Right, and Liberal may have lost much of their utility and clarity in contemporary discourse. But we must still attempt to get a grasp on some complex theoretical debates, as we still use labels in our postmodern world, in which terms and ideologies are more embattled and equivocal than ever.
- Detwiler, p. 5.
- Warren, p. 208. See also p. 3, where Warren again claims that Nietzsche's actual politics “…violated the internal integrity of his critical, postmodern insights…His insights into the nature of domination are invaluable to critical, postmodern, political thought, but his judgment about its necessity and desirability are not…they were inessential to the progressive aspects of his philosophy”.
- Warren p. 210.
- Detwiler at one point directly acknowledges and challenges Warren on this issue. Dewiler correctly attributes to Warren the claim “…that Nietzsche's politics…are not in fact consistent with his underlying philosophy”. But Detwiler understands his own book as generally directed against this claim, aiming to establish how “…it does not necessarily follow that Nietzsche's admittedly illiberal and inegalitarian politics of domination are inconsistent whith his philosophy of power”, (pp. 95–96) It would seem then that only one of these two, Detwiler or Warren, could be right on this issue, as they both conceive it, a question of logical consistency. What neither can envision is the possibility of two political positions, both “consistent” with Nietzsche's philosophy, but “inconsistent” with each other (as, for example, in Derrida's theory.)
- Rorty, p. 99.
- On p. 111, Rorty argues that “…if one holds the view of the self as centerless which I put forward…one will be prepared to find the relation between the intellectual and the moral virtues, and the relation between a writer's books and other parts of his life, contingent”.
- Rorty, p. 83.
- Ibid. p. 68.
- Ibid. p. 119.
- Rorty, p. xiv. We should “…begin to think of relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools”. But again, Rorty's project of radically seperating the public and private forces him to take the position that the language game of autonomy is incommensurable with the language game of justice, (a position which Lyotard also takes.) But I would argue that this incommensurability functions as a dogma or axiom in Rorty's book. The “firm distinction between the public and the private” (p. 83) which Rorty makes is based on this claim of radical incommensurability. Rorty is a good enought postmodernist to know that these categories and language games tend to have very fluid boundaries and inter-penetration. But he could be a better pragmatist in using all the “tools” available to build a postmodern politics.
- Detwiler, p. 66—“If the goal of the political sphere is the enhancement of man in the Nietzschean sense, by negative implication the primary goal of politics cannot be the promotion of virtue in the classical sense, or morality, or public security, or prosperity in the rights of the individual, liberty, social justice, or the happiness of the greatest number. Nietzsche's political orientation implies a thoroughgoing repudiation of the dominant aspirations of the regnant tradition in Western political philosophy”.
- Detwiler, p. 83.
- Ibid. pp. 90–91.
- Ibid. p. 113. The religious background of this criticism is one latent in Detwiler, as seen for example in his rhetorical questions—“Have all gods died in the modern world…Is Nietzsche really convincing when he argues that the foundations of Western philosophy have collapsed?” (p. 195).
- Rorty, p. 29 italics added.
- Warren goes so far as to argue that “…postmodern literary approaches are apolitical, uncritical, and often nihilistic in their implications”, (p. 6) This charge specifically indicts Derrida, Deman, and Nehamas, and I am arguing, is easily extendable to include Rorty. For Warren, this lack is one of a needed materialism: “The fundamental problem is the analogy between text and world…Textual models fail to capture the contingencies and openendedness of actions, nor do they capture the otherness of the world that partly constitutes experience or the material forces embedded in the relations of domination”, (p. 5)
- Rorty, p. 120.
- Ibid. p. 63. Rorty also describes how liberal society flourishes—“…when the press, the judiciary, the elections, and the universities are free, social mobility is frequent and rapid, literacy is universal, higher education is common, and peace and wealth…“provide bountiful leisure, (p. 84) Just what fantasyland Rorty is decribing here I do not know, but the simple point is that certainly there is plenty more radically critical theory and practice required to make America conform to this vision.
- Ibid. p. 67.
- Warren, p. 2
- See note 30, above.
- Warren, p. 247. See also p. 157.
- Ibid. pp. 232…235.