Politics & International Relations
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher known for his critiques of traditional morality, religion, and the concept of truth. He is often associated with the idea of the "will to power" and the concept of the Übermensch (Overman). Nietzsche's work has had a significant impact on political theory and has been influential in discussions about power, ethics, and the nature of human existence.
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11 Key excerpts on "Friedrich Nietzsche"
eBook - ePub- Manuel Knoll, Barry Stocker, Manuel Knoll, Barry Stocker(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
In the Anglo-Saxon world, it was in particular the achievement of Walter Kaufmann’s and Arthur Danto’s books that Nietzsche received the attention and recognition as a philosopher he is still enjoying today (Kaufmann 1950, Danto 1965). Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche from his usurpation by the Nazis and the Fascists, and from the distorted interpretation he had undergone with the aid of the Nietzsche-archive and his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. However, Kaufmann’s interpretation depoliticized Nietzsche’s thought, which led to the assumption “that Nietzsche was not a political thinker at all, but someone who was mainly concerned with the fate of the solitary, isolated individual far removed from the cares and concerns of the social world” (Ansell-Pearson 1994, p. 1).This view prevailed in Anglo-Saxon studies for several decades. It was mainly Tracy Strong’s book Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration , published in 1975, which opened the way for several monographs on Nietzsche’s political philosophy (Strong 2000).1 However, again in 1994 Keith Ansell-Pearson remarked in his Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker : “Inquiry into the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thought still remains the most contentious and controversial aspect of Nietzsche-studies” (Ansell-Pearson 1994, p. 2; cf. Ansell-Pearson 1991). In the meantime in Germany, one of the main centers of research on Nietzsche, Henning Ottmann’s voluminous “Habilitationsschrift” on Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche had appeared in 1987. Like Ansell-Pearson’s book, Ottmann’s study concludes that Nietzsche is clearly a political thinker (Ottmann 1999; Ansell-Pearson 1994, p. 1).2 This is also the argument of Daniel Conway’s book Nietzsche & the Political from 1997, in which he took Nietzsche seriously as a political thinker (Conway 1997). According to Conway, Nietzsche’s “commitment to the position known as perfectionism ” is at the center of his political thinking: Nietzsche “locates the sole justification of human existence in the continued perfectibility of the species as a whole, as evidenced by the pioneering accomplishments of its highest exemplars” (Conway 1997, pp. 6f.; cf. Siemens 2008, p. 235).One might think that after the publication of these three important monographs, among others, the issue of Nietzsche’s relation to politics was settled. On the contrary, not only has this issue remained a topic for heated debates, but new disputes concerning Nietzsche and political thought arose. In 1998, Thomas Brobjer argued for The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsche’s Writings
eBook - PDFNietzsche, Power and Politics
Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought
- Herman Siemens, Vasti Roodt, Herman Siemens, Vasti Roodt(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
But while Aristotle finds the basis for the political nature of humans in their rationality (their ‘having logos’) and their being friends, Nietzsche points to their being enemies, to a violent submission – that is, to ‘will to power’. In the same way that the stories about the social contract do not refer to a historical origin, Nietzsche’s myth of origin does not refer to a spe-cific first moment in history. Overpowering, submission and struggle are not so much the first steps of the development of the human being as they are its continuous principle. Human beings are from the beginning, always already, characterized by and through this distinction (which therefore seems to be even more fundamental than sexual difference). The human being is not only in its origin, but also in its development, a political being: humans originate and develop and grow in strength and nobility through this tension-full distinction between them (BGE 257), through struggle or fighting (BGE 262). Paul van Tongeren 80 6. Nietzsche as ‘ Ƞber-Politischer Denker ’ It now seems that we have to conclude that Nietzsche is in fact a political thinker. His philosophy seems to be through and through political, as he develops a political ‘anthropology’ on the basis of his political ‘ontology’ of the will to power. And although it is not the friend-foe-distinction of Carl Schmitt that is constitutive here, it seems that we can say with the neo-Schmittian Chantal Mouffe, that it is ‘the dimension of antagonism’ which is constitutive not only of human societies, but of human existence altogether (Mouffe 2005 9). It seems that Nietzsche is not only a political philosopher, but even a super-political philosopher. How could I combine this conclusion with my earlier criticism of in-terpretations that call Nietzsche a political philosopher? I think that we should not forget that ‘politics’ has to be taken in a Nietzschean sense.
eBook - PDF- Hans Barth(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
It was possible to refute every thesis by a counter-thesis out of his own writings. Where, then, was the synthesis, and did a "whole" Nietzsche exist at all? A unifying interpretation clearly presents a problem because the unity of the work and of its author is in question. Nietzsche and the political philosophy of the twentieth century is a topic worthy of reflection. Though he was not a first-rate political theorist, he did supply the early part of this century with some effec- tive political slogans. In the view of one of his most faithful dis- ciples, Oswald Spengler, he also paved the way for the "ultimate understanding" of historical life. In this opinion, Nietzsche's merit consists in having provided, by his "grand" critique of morals, a means of measuring the value of historical moralities by their success, rather than by some supposedly "true" morality. If the will to power justifies itself by its success, a universal theory of ethics supported by philosophical argument becomes superfluous. Then, too, politics and history are relieved of "doctrines" and "prin- ciples," "ideologies" and "reformist plans," all declared to be reflections of social sickness and decline. In Spengler's words, Nietzsche "has shown the most history-hungry people of the world what history really is. His legacy consists in the task of living history accordingly." 2 With regard to twentieth-century totalitarianism, Nietzsche may be cited as an opponent or an advocate. Like Jacob Burckhardt, he foresaw and warned against the all-powerful modern state made necessary by the welfare of the masses. From this point of view, nineteenth-century socialism was nothing but the "fantastic younger 1. Gisela Deesz, Die Entwicklung des Nietzsche-BUdes in Deutschland (Würz- burg, 1933). The author appears to have neglected the book of Lou Andreas-Salomé, for which see fn.
eBook - PDF- D. Dombowsky(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
What Nietzsche says about the nature of morality is that it is politi- cal in motivation. It is motivated by self-interest and power, guided by an instrumental rationality in which the ends proposed justify or measure the value of the means (P XVIII). Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche subordinates morality to political practice and comprehends the praxis of all morality and politics, whether Christianity or Bismarckian policy, in terms of the ‘Machiavellianism of power’ or Realpolitik. 30 As Nietzsche formulates it, all ‘virtues’ achieve domination and power exactly as a political party does: through ‘immoral’ means, through ‘slandering, inculpation, undermining of virtues that oppose it and are already in power, by rebaptizing them, by systematic persecution and mockery’ (WP 311 Nachlaß 1887 KSA 12 9[147]). 31 Even Martin Luther, according to Nietzsche, was as much a Machiavellian disciple ‘as any immoralist or tyrant’ (WP 211 Nachlaß 1887 KSA 12 9[147]). Immoral means have been exploited by all moral and political systems in coming to power. Nietzsche’s understanding of politics as guided by self- and class- interest, and ultimately by the sacrifice of principle for immediate advantage, is vividly demonstrated in his discussion of nationalism in Human, All Too Human where he writes that nationalism is ‘a forcibly imposed state of siege’ imposed by a minority – ‘princely dynasties’ and ‘certain classes of business and society’ – on the majority, and who manipulate the latter through ‘cunning, force and falsehood’ (H 475).
eBook - PDFHeidegger's Politics of Enframing
Technology and Responsibility
- Javier Cardoza-Kon(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
15 See HR (226): “ ‘The will to power,’ ‘nihilism,’ ‘the eternal return of the same,’ the ‘ Übermensch ,’ and ‘justice’ are the five basic terms of Nietzsche’s metaphysics.” In contrast to Sena, Ullrich Haase makes the observation that Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche “serves to elevate his [Nietzsche’s] thought until it is understood as the end of metaphysics in the double sense of that word, or even as the fate of European history. For Heidegger, thus, everything is at stake in his interpretation of Nietzsche and only from this perspective does his presumed remark ‘Nietzsche has ruined me,’ make any sense at all.” 16 The “ruining” also points to Heidegger’s realization that in the course of reading of Nietzsche that any and all parts of his older project, articulated in Being and Time as “fundamental ontology,” is still within the purview of the history of Western metaphysics and must be completely abandoned if he is to even point to a possibility of a “new” inception of Western history. The attendant consequence of this is that any thought on “regrounding” of German (or even Western) spirit (as Heidegger articulates in An Introduction to Metaphysics ) must also be abandoned. This means, in terms of the distinction between ontological politics and outward or “ontic” politics, that if the old metaphysics must be abandoned, hence the old ontology, so must the hope that any system of politics devised before establishing a new “history” will be within the purview of what Nietzsche and Heidegger call Platonic nihilism, which gets articulated later as technology or as “technological politics.” 3.2 In the exegesis of these passages, Heidegger notes that “Nietzsche divides the history into six parts, which can be readily recognized as the most important epochs of Western thought, and which lead directly to the doorstep of Nietzsche’s philosophy proper” (N1, 202).
eBook - PDF- T. Erskine, R. Lebow, T. Erskine, R. Lebow(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
India is the undervaluation of politics and leads, says Nietzsche, to the orgy and then Buddhism; Rome is the overvaluation of politics and leads to secularization and the Roman imperium. Note by the way that tragedy – ‘the tragic age’ – is in effect the resolution to what one might call a proto-problem of international relations or at least of cultural imperialism. 16 The greatest danger for Greece was that it would become caught in a single way of thinking and acting. Nietzsche considers this a form of tyr- anny. In Beyond Good and Evil he argues that the limitations of the Stoics came from the fact that they insisted on seeing nature as ‘Stoic and that with time this became what nature was for them … But this is an old everlasting story: what happened then with the Stoics still happens Tracy B. Strong 147 today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always cre- ates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world’, to the causa prima’. 17 Though it is not only in doing phi- losophy that one creates the world in one’s own image – so much we might say is the lesson that Nietzsche draws from Kant – the philosophi- cal and eventually political difficulty comes when one comes to believe and insist that the image that one has created is in fact the way that the world is. 18 Here Nietzsche designates the belief in the naturalness of what one understands the world to be as the essence of the tyrannical impulse and holds it to be a more or less natural consequence of any phi- losophy. Philosophy is or wants to be a creation of the world, but it also fatally takes the world it creates to be the world simpliciter. Philosophy is in effect a form of lawgiving, of saying ‘thus it shall be’.
eBook - PDFHans J. Morgenthau's Theory of International Relations
Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment
- M. Neacsu(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Chapter 2 examines the intellectual roots of Morgenthau’s approach, pointing to certain readings or encounters, especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber, which influenced his formulations. Chapter 3 explores Morgenthau’s diagnosis of the times – which according to the present interpretation mirrors similar issues addressed by Nietzsche and Weber – and shows that starting from the position of ‘God’s death’, Morgenthau follows Nietzsche’s and Weber’s views regarding human beings’ increased prospects for affirmation as one of the consequences of this ‘death’. Here the book focuses on Morgenthau’s concept of ‘power’ and interprets it as meaning imposition. Chapter 4 points to a certain kind of relativism and perspectivism which in Morgenthau’s view characterise the realm of politics. The chap- ter once again focuses on the analysis of power as meaning imposition while also introducing the concepts of the disenchantment of politics and of the responsible, superior political agent. Chapter 5 is devoted to the analysis of Morgenthau’s concepts of universality, tradition and superior leadership, and shows that Morgenthau’s views pave the way to a sophisticated account of leadership which retains much of the Nietzschean and Weberian ideas of the Übermensch and the responsible political hero respectively. This view is reinforced in Chapter 6, which restates and re-emphasises the relevance of Morgenthau’s writings to the modernity/postmodernity dichotomy in IR. On modernity and postmodernity in international relations According to Rengger (1995), modernity understood as a mood is an epoch which, he argues borrowing from Connolly, carries ‘no well-defined beginning or end’ (Connolly, 1988, p. 2; see also Rengger, Introduction 5 1995, p. 41), and which has ‘more to do with the growing dominance of certain ways of thinking and certain sets of assumptions than it does with discrete historical periods’ (Rengger, 1995, p. 174).
eBook - PDFFrom Kant to Lévi-Strauss
The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory
- Jon Simons(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
His work was generally not well received by the academic or broader public during his writing career, but by the time of his death his reputation was spreading dramatically. Taken as a whole, Nietzsche’s work amounts to an astonishing critique of Western culture, from its Greek and Jewish origins, through its Christian development, and into its modern, secularised and scientific form. If Kant’s task was the establishment and justi-fication of values, Nietzsche’s was the transvaluation of all values. Nietzsche figures himself as a philosopher who uses a hammer when asking questions, probing the hollowness of idols, of unquestioned beliefs and principles. 1 Kant’s problem was to establish the validity of already agreed upon enlightened human judgements. But Nietzsche grasped that this human desire to be rational, this will to truth which he traced back through Western history to his present by means of genealogical critique, is an expression of the will to power, or affirmation of life. In his view, however, the truths and values of his time were the opposite of life enhancing, plunging culture into a crisis of nihilism in which all sense of purpose was being lost. Nietzsche’s central concern is with the connection between cultural values and the sort of person that is bred by, or is the product of, Western culture. In Nietzsche’s view, those being bred by modern culture, characterised by a will to scientific truth and levelling social values, were mundane and mediocre, a herd. In his affirmative mood, he tried to propose new values, ‘beyond good and evil’, to quote the title of one of his most significant books, which could breed a new kind of person, the Übermensch or Overman who could create his or her own values and purpose. This chapter traces in broad brushstrokes Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture and his affirmation of an alternative culture.
eBook - PDF- Otfried Höffe(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
III Power and Truth 8 Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Will to Power Wolfgang Müller-Lauter When Nietzsche writes that the world is the will to power and nothing else, he seems with this clear statement to be giving us a key to under- standing that aspect of his thinking with which philosophical interpreters are acquainted: he is naming the ground of being, and from there deter- mining being as a whole; his thinking is metaphysics in the sense familiar to us from the long history of Continental philosophy. Understanding his thinking in this way does not confront us with fundamentally new prob- lems. Even if Nietzsche expressly turns against metaphysics, we can still quickly persuade ourselves that he is speaking of it only in the sense of a two-world theory. If we do not construe it so narrowly, then Nietzsche’s claim that his philosophy is not metaphysics cannot be supported. Nietzsche, we could say, only adds a further link to the chain of meta- physical interpretations of the world. Heidegger granted special significance to Nietzsche’s philosophy within the history of metaphysics. He interprets it as the completion of Western metaphysics insofar as its essential possibilities can be exhausted in the reversal of metaphysics that takes place within it. In Nietzsche’s thinking, however, something else occurs as well: the destruction of metaphysics from within itself. It can be shown that this subjectivity, as the highest pinnacle of the “metaphysics of subjectivity,” sinks down into groundlessness. The metaphysical “will to will” becomes, in the form of the will to power that sees through itself as itself, a willed willing that no longer refers back to something that wills, to the will, but rather only to the structure of the thing that wills, which withdraws, if one inquires into 155 its ultimate factual givenness, into what cannot be determined.
eBook - PDFNietzsche's Culture of Humanity
Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period
- Jeffrey Church(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
In my view, Nietzsche synthesizes the Kantian call 37 See Patten’s (2010) helpful analysis of Herder’s commitment to the democratic nation-state. 28 Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity for what is highest in human subjectivity with the Herderian emphasis on individuality and wholeness by looking to exemplary human personalities to constitute the substance of culture (Chapter 4). Furthermore, the enduring disagreement between Kantian cosmopolitanism and Herderian nationalism illuminates Nietzsche’s complex early concept of culture (Chapters 5–6) and his view of education (Chapter 7). Finally, the division between politics and culture helps explain Nietzsche’s early political views as moving beyond aristocracy and democracy and as embracing a liberal skepticism of the growth of the modern state (Chapter 8). The Influence of Kant and Herder 29 2 Nihilism and the Contradiction of Human Nature With the debate between Kant and Herder in the background, we can now turn to Nietzsche and in particular to what motivates his interest in culture. The basic problem driving Nietzsche’s concern for culture is that natural human existence is not worth living. 1 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche voices Silenus’s truth about “the terrible or absurd nature of existence,” a view already anticipated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (BT 7/40). This idea of the valuelessness of natural existence – what he comes to call “nihilism” – can be dangerous, tearing a “people” apart and leading to “utilitarian vulgarity” (UM.2.9) and a “horrifying ethic of genocide” (BT 15/74). In response to nihilism, Nietzsche argues that we must uphold culture, especially in the wake of the modern age’s steady erosion of traditional and religious justifications for existence. The problem of nihilism, then, frames Nietzsche’s understanding of the basis and purpose of culture.
eBook - PDF- James McGuirk, Hans Rainer Sepp(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Traugott Bautz(Publisher)
This is a fairly accurate delineation of that famous Nietzschean notion, the will-to-power. For, according to Nietzsche, all of existence is will-to-power, This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end...this world is the will-to-power- and nothing else besides and you yourselves are will-to-power- and nothing else besides. 150 If life is fundamental, then life is fundamentally will-to-power. Life wills itself and human beings will themselves as a function of their own strength. This does not mean that all human beings are possessed of equal strength. In fact it is only the few, the noble and strong of spirit that are capable of af-firming existence as it is. Most require the kind of lie with which they can live. But for the few possessed of this strength, joy resides precisely in the affirmation of life as it is . In relation to the previous chapter’s analysis, we might say that Nietzsche embraces life as physis that is limited only to the degree that it is vital. This, then, becomes the transvalued nomos of the strong as an active and spontaneous interpretation of existence. The weak, because they lack the strength for this kind of affirmation, crave limits to be 149 This is a complex point inasmuch as, while both are fictions, they are unavoidable and cannot, therefore, be excised in being unmasked as fictions. Furthermore, Nietzsche will describe the distinction between ‘good and bad’ as rooted in a posi-tive valorisation of existence in the Genealogy of Morality . It is thereby also distin-guished for the concept pair ‘good and evil’, which are reactive and negative. 150 Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power. Translated from German by R.J. Holl-ingdale and Walter Kaufmann. Random House: New York, p. 550. All future refer-ences are to this edition. Henceforth WP. 96 set for them. Thus, they crave a nomos that can subjugate the truth of a phy-sis they fear.
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