Friedrich Nietzsche

Tracy B. Strong, Tracy B. Strong

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351935623
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Filosofia
• Thema: Storia e teoria della filosofia

From his first readers to the present, Friedrich Nietzsche has found supporters and detractors on every point of the political spectrum. In the introduction to this volume, Tracy Strong analyzes the reasons for this diversity of reception. They are to be found, not only in modern social and political developments but, more importantly, in the purpose and style of Nietzsche's writing. The volume includes selections from all major interpretive schools, including some from the early part of the twentieth century, an appendix presenting a new translation of one of Nietzsche's most controversial writings, The Greek State, and a lengthy bibliography of writings on Nietzsche and politics. The essays gathered together in this volume are the work of the most seminal Nietzsche scholars and, taken together, provide a comprehensive study of Nietzsche's political thought.

Part I
Nietzsche and Political Responsibility

[1]

NIETZSCHE AND THE WAR.¹

WILLIAM MACKINTIRE SALTER.

I.

THE present European War is sometimes closely connected with Nietzsche. It is even called “Nietzsche in Action,” or the “Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War.” ²

In speaking of it, or of anybody’s connection with it, one goes on the basis of a certain view of it—and I am obliged to give briefly my own, contestable as it may be. To me the war is a not unnatural outcome of the working of a certain set of conflicting national interests. In Servia there was a Great Servia agitation, which became inevitably, in a measure, directed against Austria-Hungary, since the latter included Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainly populated by Servian stock. Austria-Hungary as inevitably looked askance at the agitation—its success would mean her partial dismemberment. If, however, she should attack Servia, Russia, as a sister Slav State, and with ambitions of her own in the direction of Constantinople, would come to Servia’s assistance; she had yielded to Austria-Hungary, when the latter had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina—she would yield no more. But if Russia took sides against Austria-Hungary, Germany, as kindred to Austria-Hungary, and with desires and hopes of her own in the direction of Constantinople and the Near East, would intervene for her. With Germany aligned against Russia, France was bound to be drawn in—she was Russia’s ally, and, moreover, she wished her lost provinces back, Alsace and Lorraine, and war would be a chance to get them. England’s hand was freer and all her immediate interests lay in peace—she already had “control of one fifth of the earth’s surface and the care of one in five of all the inhabitants of the world”;³ yet she could not contemplate with serenity the rise of an overtopping power on the continent, and Germany might prove such a power, if there were a general Continental war, and she stood quietly by.⁴ She had fought Spain, Holland, and France in successive centuries from such motives; in the American Civil War she desired “the severance” of our country as “a diminution of a dangerous power”;⁵ and an overshadowing Germany at her very door was an intolerable thought. She would move reluctantly, but she would move, if Germany drew the swords.⁶

Unhappily, this train of possibilities anticipates the actual course of events. One situation involved the next—the peoples and their ambitions or interests being what they were. It does not appear that any people wanted war, unless perhaps Austria against Servia, and Germany and England, if not Russia, strove to keep the conflict between Austria and Servia within its local limits;⁷ so little did Germany wish to fight England, that she only hoped that England would not fight her—and yet all preferred the risks of war rather than not put their interests through. We might almost say that the war was in each case defensive, even in Austria’s; it simply happens sometimes that offense may be the best defense. I do not dwell on the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination or Belgium’s invasion; they were minor causes, or occasions rather than causes—we now know that a year before the assassination Austria was ready to take up arms against Servia⁸ and also that even if Germany had been willing to respect Belgian neutrality, England was not willing to agree to stay her hand.⁹ Delay, particularly on Germany’s part in declaring war, might have changed matters, but we do not perceive the full tragedy of the case till we see that it was just the apprehension, the fear, the tension of the parties concerned that forbade delay.

If I am right in this analysis, the war is at bottom a gigantic struggle of conflicting national interests. Each nation thought of itself only, put its own interest before anything else in the world (save as self-interest begot alliances); they distrusted and feared one another; there was no common bond between them—there was no common aim from which a common bond could arise. The war proves that national sentiment is now the strongest sentiment in the world. Christian ideals go down before it—Christianity is practically reduced to a set of national religions, as in the antique world; Socialist ideals equally go down before it; nothing conquers it, and it conquers everything. Yes, such is its pressure that men of letters and men of science in the various countries turn against one another and belittle one another—all their former respect for one another undergoes a sea-change; even artists do not escape the tremendous tide. If a man does not join heart and soul in the national cause, if he has scruples and reserves, if he sees some good in the foe and thinks that other lives may be precious besides those of his own people, if like Romain Rolland he dares to call young soldiers of all the nations his brothers and to lift himself above the mélée he becomes suspect to his countryman, and is cast out, or frozen out—I have heard it said of certain Englishmen now that they are “never mentioned.” Such and so grounded, appears to me the war. There have been abhorrent developments in the struggle—things that, if there had been a will to a clean and honorable war, would not have happened; but I do not enlarge on them—in their wandering mazes would one be lost; it is the essence of the phenomenon that I am trying to grasp.

II.

What now is the relation of Nietzsche to it? Or rather first, what is the real mind and spirit of Nietzsche? He was born of pious parents—essentially religious by nature. His first thought was to follow his father’s calling, who was a pastor, but doubts assailed him—he was thoughtful and speculative from an early age—and by the end of his first semester at the University, he definitely renounced his first intention, and turned to philology and philosophy. He did some notable, at least creditable, work in the former branch of learning, and became professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel when but twenty-four. His deeper cravings, however, were not satisfied by philological research and teaching, and he sought the ampler views, the broader ideals that might more or less make up for his lost religious faith. He was deeply impressed by Schopenhauer, and gathered from him a view of life and the world as a whole, and of his own place and function in it. A goal for life seemed suggested in Schopenhauer’s exaltation of the philospher, the artist and the saint as the great types of existence; he wished to see these possibilities of our human stock pushed to the highest point, to have a new human culture that would aim that way. It was not perhaps a religion, but to some extent it satisfied instincts for the great and unattained and far away, which are close to the heart of religion. Schopenhauer, indeed, had regarded the supreme types as means by which we may be led to see the vanity of existence and be weaned from it—as steps, bridges to another order of things than this suffering, struggling, contradictory, evanescent life we know, and Nietzsche at first followed him. But soon he came to regard the types as good on their own account and wholly for their significance in relation to this actual earthly life; and this life as the only life he knew he accepted, instead of turning from, as Schopenhauer had—accepted it with its suffering, its struggle, its contradictions, the evanescence of all its forms, was ready to take a man’s part in it, to suffer himself, to struggle and fight and die. He measured life not by its pleasures and pains, but by the quality of mind and will that might come forth in it—if it gave opportunity for worthy striving, it was enough. If this very faulty order of things still left it possible to aim for those great types of human achievement, on which he set his heart, if by the wise concerted effect of mankind they might be measurably attained, he asked no more. Grant that chance (that is, no design) ruled in the world, that chaos was the natural order in the human world as well, that unregulated desires and ambitions made history a scene of unreason and caprice, mightnot a master-hand, a master-motive and thought bring order out of this chaos, and more or less subdue nature herself and the world-tree yet bring forth fair and consummate fruit? Oh, the waste of the possibilities of the world, the blind, near aims that shut out the vision and attainment of far and great ones, the tragedy and comedy of the idea that the world is being guided well anyway and we may trust to Providence !—such, if not his words, was the undercurrent of his thought. It was a supreme exercise of human power, a regulating and refashioning of the stuff of which man and nature are made in the interests of the production of great specimens of humanity, men who, in comparison to the common run of us, would be supermen and half divine, and a new people and a new culture looking this way and replacing the peoples and cultures that now exist—it was this toward which his mind turned and his aspiration went out. Early we hear from him an ejaculation like this (and it is the undertone of his whole life): “I see something higher and more human above me than I myself am; help me all to attain it, as I will help everyone who feels and suffers asI do; in order that at last the man may arise who is full and measureless in knowledge and love and vision and power, and with his whole being cleaves to nature and takes his place in it as judge and valuer of things.” Schopenhauer had maintained that humanity should continually labor to produce individual great men, that this and nothing else was its task; and now Nietzsche says to us, “How does thy individual life receive its highest value, its deepest significance? Surely only in that thou livest to the advantage of the rarest and most valuable specimens of thy kind, not to that of the most numerous, i.e., taken singly, least valuable specimens.”¹⁰

Accordingly he wins a graded conception of humanity—all are not equal; some are more valuable than others. Certain men—at least certain types, when they come—are ends in the highest sense of that word, since they represent the highest evolution of humanity; others take themselves best as they make themselves means to serve them, or facilitate them. The higher are not to serve the lower, but the lower are to Serve the higher. The idea that all can be all things is a fancy picture—there is a difference in the capacity and fitness of men; all may serve the highest and may have the dignity of serving, but not all are the highest or can be. A true society will be aristocratically organized—and some, the many, must serve, willingly or unwillingly, rather than be served, though they need not be mistreated, and every effort should be made to have them happy, contented, efficient, to give them, indeed, pride and solid satisfaction in doing their piece of service well. On their labour the whole superstructure of society rests—they literally support not only themselves, but those above them, it is only as they produce more than is necessary for their own needs, that others can be free for those higher activities that make human life supremely worth while: without leisure, no higher culture. But they are not their own end, and to make them think that they are as much entitled to consideration as anybody, that institutions are good as they favour them and allow them to do as they please, to accumulate and spend as they please, to seek happiness in any of the myriad...