Nietzsche and Political Education

Bruce Detwiler notes at the very beginning of his careful study, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, that interpreters of Nietzsche’s political views have placed him all over the map, from anti-political to nationalist, Nazi to socialist, individualist to Social Darwinist to liberal constitutionalist. Detwiler’s book goes on to show the weaknesses of these various claims and to show that aristocracy, by far, emerges as Nietzsche’s preferred regime. Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1.

Consider Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 264: “The goal of Nietzsche’s politics is the enhancement or heightening (Erhöhung) of the type human, an enhancement achieved by individual souls. Aristocratic society and the slavery it presupposes are instrumental necessities, preconditions of the true aim, the aristocratic individual. The politics of the philosopher Nietzsche … serve the interests of philosophy, but these are the highest interests of humanity.”

Thomas Heilke argues that Nietzsche did have a political education, not one that served any existing regime, rather one that sought to produce human beings who could belong to the type of aesthetic regime Nietzsche wished to bring into being. “Nietzsche sought to be a pedagogical legislator: he attached to his aesthetic notion of politics a specific idea of political education that would bring forth the polity he envisioned.” Thomas Heilke, Nietzsche’s Tragic Regime (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 7. This aesthetic state is to be understood as “a political state that is fit for flourishing life” (Heilke, 121).

Heilke admits that the regime Nietzsche aims at does not last, “Nietzsche’s new education for an aesthetic state was not a possession for all time, but for his time and for the beginning of the age he hoped was yet to come” (Heilke, 186).

See Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 23: “Es ist Kultur, und es ist diese allein, deren Gelingen und Scheitern ihm zum Maßtab des Politischen wird.” (It is culture, and it is this alone, whose successes and failures, will be the measure of the political.)

The “higher should not degrade itself into the instrument of the lower” On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 14.

In order to explain why Nietzsche himself and others have called him anti-political, Bruce Detwiler writes, “one who believed as Nietzsche apparently did in the subservience of the political sphere to higher cultural and spirituals ends could well consider himself anti-political as the term was commonly used” (Detwiler, 59).

Ibid., 34–35.

Ibid., 78.

The real-life city of Bayreuth, although it provided substantial support for Wagner, did not live up to the idea of Bayreuth. The whole city was not at the disposal of his art. To see something of what Nietzsche saw of the real-life Bayreuth, see Ecce Homo, “Human, All Too Human,” section 2; see also Heilke, 160–161; see also Shilo Brooks, Nietzsche’s Culture War: The Unity of the Untimely Meditations (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 187.

What I am calling a culture-city here is a political institution subordinated to culture, not what is sometimes called a “culture state,” by which is intended a situation where politics and culture cooperate. Nietzsche does not believe such cooperation is possible. “Culture and the state – one should not deceive oneself here – are antagonists. ‘Culture-state’ is merely a modern idea.” Twilight of the Idols (TOI), “What the Germans Lack,” section 4; cf. Brooks, 198: Brooks emphasizes the dependence of Nietzsche’s cultural project on its actual reception by a community of human beings.

The Greek State in Friedrich Nietzsche, Prefaces to Unwritten Works, trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2005), 57.

Ibid., 59.

Ibid.; cf. Ottmann, 45. Ottmann says that Nietzsche’s preferred state is “Erziehungsstaat wie bei Platon, seine Spitze bilden die ‘Genies’, mit dem Unterschied nur, daß Nietzsche – anders als Platon –die Künstler aus dem Idealstaat nicht vertreibt, sondern, neben den Philosophen, gerade für die Exempla des Genialen hält”. (The educational state as with Plato, at its peak cultivating the “genius,” with the only difference, that Nietzsche—elsewise than Plato—does not drive the artist out of the ideal state, rather, he holds him next to the philosopher, precisely for the exemplar of genius.)

See The Gay Science (GS), section 362; see also Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), section 251 end.

Too many readers are tempted to associate Nietzsche’s use of the term “great politics” with the narrowly political, with conquest on a global scale, with world wars. “Clearly politics alone is insufficient to bring on the revaluation of all values. We have seen that the great politics of the future involves a heavily spiritual component as well as a political one, and of the two the spiritual aspect is undoubtedly the more important. No simple shift from democratic political institutions to the right kind of aristocratic ones could by itself bring an end to the decadence that afflicts the modern world. The ‘lies of millenia’ must also be overcome, and new truths must be created” (Detwiler, 62); see also, Ottmann, 240: “‘Große Politik’ ist ein mißverständlicher Titel. Im Verein mit dem nun allgegewärtigen Machtvokabular Nietzsches könnte er den Eindruck hervorrufen, als sei Nietzsche nun doch eingeschwenkt auf den Geist der Zeit, die nationale und imperial Politik. Nichts ist weniger der Fall. Noch immer versteht Nietzsche Größe so, wie er sie mit Burckhardt seit der Geburt des Deutschen Reiches begriff, als Größe der Kultur, nicht der Imperien.” (“Great Politics” is a name given to misunderstanding. In union with the now ever-present power vocabulary of Nietzsche it can call forth the impression, as if Nietzsche now indeed was swept up in the spirit of the time, the national and imperial politics. Nothing is less the case. Ever still Nietzsche understands greatness thus, as he conceived of it with Burckhardt since the birth of the German Empire, as the greatness of culture, not of the empire.); cf. Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997), 144: Conway characterizes the late thought of Nietzsche as having abandoning his hopes for great politic: “Powerless to redeem modernity as a whole, he turns instead to the creation of underground communities that might convey his teachings into the next millennium.”

BGE, 62.

The kind of free spirit included here in this “we” seems to include Nietzsche and to be more willing to employ the church and to lie about it than the “free spirit” mentioned in BGE 105.

Laurence Lampert sees the distinction of these three types of human beings as based upon a more fundamental distinction, one that subsumes the philosophic type as well within its higher category. “The distinctions among human beings described in this section are based upon a more fundamental division into two kinds, ruler and ruled, or the commanding and the obeying” (Lampert, 129).

Ibid.

Shilo Brooks makes a very helpful observation regarding critical history. “The description of the critical mode of history is unique among the three modes featured in sections 2–3 because Nietzsche does not differentiate between a proper use for culture and its destructive abuse” (Brooks, 104).

UDH, section II.

Ibid., section III.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Nietzsche 2004, 67.

See Brooks, 86: “The significance of the phrase ‘above all’ [vor Allem] cannot be overstated. History belongs first and foremost to those who act and strive, and not to those who think or philosophize.” Despite the emphasis on action, Brooks’s book goes on to describe the untimely meditations on Schopenhauer (philosopher) and Wagner (poet) as examples of monumental histories; cf. Quentin Taylor, The Republic of Genius: A Reconstruction of Nietzsche’s Early Thought (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 143; “Of the three main types of history, Nietzsche is particularly interested in the instructional value of the monumental variety….history … ‘belongs above all’ to the man who would fain achieve something great.”

Martin Heidegger also recognizes the unity of the three types of history. But, characteristically he understands this unity to derive from the unity of the three ecstasies of human temporality. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986); cf. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, II. Abteilung, Band 46, Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II. Unzeitgemäßer Betrachtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003).

Or even to knowledge, if knowledge does not compel its own acceptance.

In HAH, 221, Nietzsche describes a situation in the historical development of poetry when a stabilizing force disappears: “… Goethe attempted to save himself from this by always knowing how to bind himself in ever new and varied ways; but even the most gifted get only as far as continual experimentation once the thread of development has been torn ….”

Nietzsche says this happens especially when the weaker elements have descendants. This seems to mean that deviance tends to weaken stability more when the deviance is sustained over time.

In a fragment in his late notebooks entitled “On the Mastery of Virtue,” and subtitled “A Tractatus Politicus,” Nietzsche calls Machiavellianism, “perfection in politics” KSA, 13, p. 25 (note 11[54]).

BGE, 126; In his notebooks, an earlier version of this section says “5,6 great men” (KSA 10, p. 105, aphorism #433). One might wonder what made Nietzsche increase the numbers in his revision.

Nietzsche 2004, 66; this is said by the old philosopher.

HAH, 41; cf. what Nietzsche says about even so exceptional a human being as Goethe, “Extremely vigorous men, such as Goethe for example, traverse as much distance as four successive generations can scarcely manage; but they therefore get so far ahead that other people catch up to them only in the next century, even then perhaps not fully, because frequent interruptions weaken the continuity of a culture, the logical coherence of its development” (HAH, 272).

This was why, at least in part, Nietzsche opposed the women’s liberation movement—because the movement expected something from individual education that it could not give.

Nietzsche 2004, 82.

Ibid., 84.

J. Harvey Lomax notes regarding this section that “‘Nature’ is unambiguously synonomous (sic) with becoming or history.” Lomax then goes on to draw the conclusion that nature cannot be the standard. J. Harvey Lomax, The Paradox of Philosophical Education: Nietzsche’s New Nobility and the Eternal Recurrence in Beyond Good and Evil (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 104.

UDH, section II.

Ibid.

UDH, section III.

Ibid.

BGE, 259.

See BGE, 13.

BGE, 23.