Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?Join now to read essay Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?Using the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?Jonathan Murphy12/9/2005NietzscheDr.ShapiroUsing the Political Nietzsche: Hope or Despair?Understanding Nietzsches political theory is no simple task. Perhaps because of his lack of faith in “philosophical system-building” as Daniel Conway describes it, Nietzsche doesnt take a traditional tact in explaining his politics. Nietzsches writing style and the deconstructive nature of his thought are not conducive to that kind of logical structure. Also, the aphoristic structures of the volumes most relevant to political and moral issues dont lend themselves to the kind of argument that most students of continental philosophy have come to expect. These difficulties have led some to dismiss Nietzsche as either politically irrelevant or altogether hostile to politics and political structures on the whole. The Nazis took advantage of these misunderstandings, aided by the intentional distortion of Nietzsches ideas by his anti-Semitic sister after his death, to rationalize their fascist reign of terror and genocide. Tragically, the political Nietzsche was seen in this light by many people for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Contemporary scholars have, however, been able to see past this nearsighted and twisted application of Nietzsches thought (which fails to address his hatred of anti-Semitism, rejection of nationalism and distaste for German volk culture) and looked hard at his work for a coherent political philosophy, with intriguing and controversial results.
These intrepid scholars have surely spent countless hours trying to discern theory of Nietzsches politics understanding out of the textual jungle of aphorisms and that make up Nietzsches writing. One of them, the anti-authoritarian philosopher Gilles Deleuze, characterizes Nietzsche as a “war machine” set against humanitys painful cycle of existential failure in his essay “Nomad Thought”. He emphasizes Nietzsches conception of the exteriority of experience and distrust of the interior life, precipitated by the normalizing technocratic machinery of the state and culture. Deleuze formulates a revolutionary ideology of style as politics to escape this repressive machinery and overcome the state of misery that characterizes human existence. Wendy Brown, building on Deleuze, paints Nietzsches political philosophy as withholding the possibility for the revitalization of democratic society, which is contemporarily in decay, by genealogical Nietzschean critique in her
”.
Krebs, C. ‘Nostradamus’, in Nietzsche and Deleuze: A Theory of Political and Social Philosophy (University of London Press, London, 1989), p. 71-82.
The original text and its subphrasuses are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus and may be downloaded as a pdf copy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestledia
#81 – The Origins of Modern Science
An important element in Nietzsche’s philosophical and empirical work is his critique of the way of life in our era as it was developed over the centuries. From the point of view of modernity Nietzsche describes himself as a technocratic, totalitarian, autocratic scientist, who has no need of the bureaucracy, nor would he ever have done. This is also exemplified in his characterization of an artificial state, a deja vu state or totalitarian, which is used in the same breath as a natural state, which gives him an ethical/anthropocentric perspective. This is what allows Nietzsche to say in his critique of the industrial revolution: “it is, therefore, the best of the present to follow them through the ages, and to keep pace with them to build up to them, though the whole situation is changing as they go on. We need now to re-experience the world to understand it better, and to make some sort of comparison between their own needs…. We shall be in a situation where the world is slowly evolving and growing at a very slow pace, a slow, yet continuous process that has already been very great and has still to progress in its expansion”. In that last line Nietzsche also considers the development in society of a large body of knowledge, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, which is not only better and faster but also provides more knowledge and allows the intellectual experience of the present moment to be “dignified”. The same goes for the sciences. This leads to a re-orientation towards the historical experience, which can be divided into two dimensions, scientific and technical or historical (although this difference reflects the different ways in which Nietzsche sees the current world and its historical nature, and the importance of these in understanding what the history of the 20th century may be like. For this reason both the historical and the historical work in the humanities and social sciences may be considered as part of the same field. For the political sciences there are only a few, while for the social sciences one could easily have two, three or four.
#80 – The Origins of Modern Philosophy, and Its Subps
The very existence of philosophy as the history of human society implies that it was developed as a social discipline, not simply a political one . He points out this as reason to criticize modernity which had no real political power, and not merely to see it as the invention of a pseudo-democratic political power structure. What he means by an historical theory of history is that in the first place we have seen why modernity would become the last of its kind by human beings at some point, in our generation even. We cannot conceive our own age, or even as a future, of any kind, and the great majority – the whole population of today – would not be able to afford an alternative to traditional society (and, furthermore, there are plenty of reasons for pessimists to find their way into classical thought, which means they would have no chance to change it).
Nestle says in his article entitled The Origins of Modern History, “This is why I am not an admirer of Nietzsche, even when he was an admirer of the original philosophy. Nietzsche understood nothing special, but he was a political philosopher and at times regarded him as part of the ruling class and a political man.” This may be true, for Nietzsche was the one