While Nietzsche spent much of his philosophical career sharpening characteristics of self-affirmative, noble, self-propelling personalities who are supposed to bear history and carry us into the future. He never, however, follows up his critiques with any sort of determinate political statement. He cannot do so because of the nature of his affirmative characters. Nevertheless, his most substantive and destructive criticism is pointed directly at Christianity and Judeo-Christian-Islamic values. His overman will certainly break out of slave morality and take many with him. Thus, while the particular actions and ideas of the overman cannot be ‘predicted’ (or in any way understood at the time), in laying the groundwork for the overman, Nietzsche provides significant negative descriptions concerning who he will be. So, was Nietzsche a political thinker?
I’m asking this question because Nietzsche is very politically provocative. When I read Nietzsche, I find myself filling in the space left by his sweeping criticisms with many political ideas. These ideas don’t directly come from Nietzsche’s texts, I recognize them as my own, but they seem to follow with necessity. Further, having read Nietzsche for years, I have traced down, written papers, gone to the bar with friends over, etc. the passages that inspire these thoughts. Without fail, it turns out that Nietzsche stops short at a certain point and it was me that took the step into a clearly political position. So, was Nietzsche a political thinker?
You remark also that Nietzsche seems to stop short of becoming a political thinker in terms of particular political propositions, and that is because he views everything in terms of agon. It would be impossible to predict what political issues etc. would be in effect on the far side of an agon. So he doesn’t even try to talk about questions of polity after the coming of the Transhuman (a term I find less problematical than “Overman” or “Superman”).
However, in setting up a dialectical picture of human history consisting of a series of agons, one succeeding the other, driven by conflicts between “the good and the just” in a decadent society with a transvaluer, Nietzsche has created a picture of human politics, painted in very broad brushstrokes. So in that sense, Nietzsche is a political thinker.
"The petty squabbles of both local and international politics… "
I share the same thought about politics - it’s nothing: political science is nothing scientific; left, right, red, black are nothing complicated; political history is nothing more than an account of bloody cock fights; contemporary politics is nothing less than the most shameful acts man has yet to accomplish…
So maybe there is nothing to philosophise about politics for Nietzsche, except that he would define it as one of the most primitive forms of power struggle.
Blair reminds me of the savana monkey tribe king all the time…
On one hand he creates an ideal for the anti-political individual advocating self expression and freedom from moral custom. On the other he envisaged a political system governed by the relationship between averages and exceptionals.
A true political system would be based on a material ethics and morals would be necessary and treated as absolute, as the material conditions are absolute and objective. But this is directly opposed to the formula for the individual that Nietzsche proposes as the final ‘law’ of the Will To Power. He professes that although evolution is a process where physical forces interact with some precision, the process itself was without purpose. Therefore he’s eliminating ‘Value’ objectivity, where it is indeed required for political economy. Nietzsche’s perfect political individual is that which breaks laws…not writes them and enforces them as a leader to some following, or a follower of some leader.
Politics for Nietzsche then must stop at his Darwinistic/materialistic economy of the Will in the individual, so we might as well say he was an anarchist in the sense that he did not advocate any necessity in this material economy; there was no inherent government in a chaos.
A political system as a whole is hard to find in Nietzsche although there are political means for the betterment of individuals. I think that by ‘political,’ Nietzsche would mean something like: “the dynamic behind relationships and interaction where energy and effort is exchanged during exploitative attempts.” A simple science that is as apparent and active in an individual as it is in larger macrocosmic models such as a civilization. There needs to be no governments for politics to ensue. For Nietzsche the State was an abstraction of the Individual. That took balls back then.
One animal plus one animal in one environment equals politics. Its hard material economy…nothing more. The worlds resources and the genes function do not care about our ‘politics.’ That’s the stuff you read about in magazines and see on bill-boards…
I think he romanticized an ‘ideal government’ frequently but found it hard to express during those times. Remember that he was set in a contextual period of history where there was much turbulence in world politics. Ideas were being ‘tried out," I think, at least theoretically. There’s no tellin’ what kind of shit one could come up with back in da days.
I wonder what Nietzsche would think had he lived today. I wonder if he’d own a corvette and a wide-screen TV. I bet he would wear sun-glasses and shop at Wal-Mart to save money.
I bet he’d be a real angry university professor, the kind who’s always in the news because he’s so far out there. Until he went blind and insane and collapsed in the street talking to a horse.
For what do you “care” in your life, if Nietzsche put in your head that politics is nothing? Is Bush killing innocent Arabs? Fuck Bush and fuck the Arabs! Fuck politics!
Any man, any philosopher has some form of political concepts, even Nietzsche, although he would never say that. His “positive” nihilism (which leaded him to insanity) his negation of everything which he didn’t like was just a form of expressing his frustation for loving ancient culture and ancient civilization, and not be able of living in that time which he loved so much. Overman is a creation from Nietzsche’s frustation, it is an illusion, a philosophical character, there was never and there would never be this “Ãœbermensch” about whom he talked. Don’t take that seriously, please. Nietzsche was so “superior” to other men, that he lived his last 10 years as a vegetable- what a lesson of superiority! If we should examine his visions on politics (the way he ridiculed democracy, anarchism, communism and so on), we should come to the following conclusion: as a philosopher, the man was worth reading. As a political thinker, he was ridiculous!
In other words, Nietzsche would be grateful to be considered a mediocre political thinker. If he had written more things on politics, this famous “relation” would certanly become clearer…
