Will to Power, Nietzsche's Last Idol

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137363190
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The book proposes a critique of Nietzsche's works 'from within'. In doing so, it answers the continuing question asked by any reader of Nietzsche: Why did he decide not to write the major work he said he would write?

1

Introduction: Writing on Nietzsche

1. The first challenge that a commentator on Nietzsche faces, even before attempting to make a case for the relevance of his work, is to justify the work’s very existence among a flooding tide of literature. It was observed in 2006 that over nineteen thousand books and articles about Nietzsche the man, his life or his philosophy had been published since 1960.¹ Judging from the trend of the last few years, the flood shows no sign of abating and this figure must be now well exceeded. In about fifty years, the pendulum has thus swung from Marx to Nietzsche, the two almost contemporary authors of the end of the nineteenth century. The disgrace of the former has paralleled the seemingly unstoppable rise of the latter. The tangible symptoms of this phenomenon are plain to see. In the postmodern West, if a diffuse but perceptible nostalgia for a tighter community lingers, the emphasis is more than ever on individual aspirations. One is constantly urged to strengthen one’s personal values to resist the centrifugal forces of an atomised society. ‘What does not kill me, makes me stronger’,² Nietzsche’s famous but often unattributed defiant catchcry, has become everyone’s motto. Oxymoronic as it may sound, the expression ‘popular philosopher’ seems to fit Nietzsche to perfection.

Not that Nietzsche’s influence is limited to those who, in their overwhelming majority, have never read him. Nietzsche’s name has long hypnotised many who have engaged his works, if only superficially. They read Nietzsche’s acute critiques of Western postmodernity and his prescient prophecies of its unfolding plights like rabbits staring at a spotlight, paralysed by fear and awe. The fact is that Nietzsche uncannily predicted, here joyfully, elsewhere with despair, the rise of scientism, the weakening of the Christian credo and the collapse of cultural, moral and epistemological standards. His strident warnings have proven so prescient that one would have grounds to accuse him of single-handedly inventing the never-ending fin de siècle atmosphere that marks the West today. Technology is the new god; Eucharist is celebrated over an Apple. Victims are no longer ostracised: they are honoured for holding a secured debt over society. Underneath the pseudo-existentialistic varnish of consumerism’s spoilt children, the victory of bad conscience over personal responsibility seems complete. The legacy of the Enlightenment, for all its shortcomings, has been mercilessly liquidated even in what used to be its strongest bastions. The absence of culture is still culture. Junk is now art. Nihilism prevails. Modernity has given way to acclaimed postmodernity: the ‘last man’ has triumphed.

This much is, for many, more than enough to vindicate Nietzsche’s phenomenal popularity. Whether Nietzsche, who declared, genuinely or to put a brave face on the commercial failure of his works, that he wrote only for very few ‘free spirits’, would have enjoyed this irony of fate is a moot but intriguing point. Everything that Nietzsche wrote has been the subject of repeated, if not always rigorous, analysis. Some hundred and twenty-five years after his collapse in near-absolute anonymity and indigence, Friedrich Nietzsche has become ‘Nietzsche’, the worshipped icon of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape, whose name has been associated with every possible agenda.³ Yet beyond his current popularity or topical relevance, there is another and more compelling reason to read and write on Nietzsche. It relates to the very peculiar state of the secondary literature dedicated to his works.

2. After the eclipse that followed World War II and the accusations that were levelled in its aftermath, many commentators resolved to restore Nietzsche’s reputation through novel interpretations of his writings. On the Continental side, Nietzsche’s name became utterable again in the 1960s mainly thanks to the works of such French philosophers as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Kofman. They made him appear a liberating alternative, not only to Sartre’s attractive but impossibly demanding concept of freedom, but also to Platonic-Kantian world dualisms and their exacting notion of absolute Truth. For these authors, the ‘death of God’ and the ensuing disappearance of Being enabled the dissolving of antiquated moral values unmasked as contemptible servants of ideologies. The same events also made possible the jubilant overthrowing of all epistemological certainties, which were revealed as illusory, arrogant and oppressive. Instead of logical or empirical truth – so this reading of Nietzsche argues – one can pursue only a never-ending upturning of masks and deciphering of metaphors, knowing that behind each one there will always lie another. Explanation is described as a vile grab for power, for knowledge is the expression of vested interests. Liberation is to be achieved through antidialectics; epistemology is displaced by perspectivism and deconstruction; ontology is blurred into genealogy; metaphysics is demoted to metanarrative. Philosophers’ traditional quests fade into irrelevance. There remain collective and individual texts that are to be analysed, interpreted and re-interpreted.

Paradoxically, in the English-speaking world, Nietzsche’s now enormous fame has been largely ignited by Walter Kaufmann’s translations and influential study of his philosophy that followed the broad wake of Jaspers’ interpretation. These works, which preceded the French revival, helped create a picture of Nietzsche as an audacious proto-existentialistic, yes-saying and experimental philosopher advancing further the romantic agenda, successfully exploding with his hammer the idols of mainstream philosophy and opposing the stifling traditions of Christianity. According to that reading of Nietzsche’s texts, meaning and value are not to be discovered in this world or lie in another but can be produced through a resolute and joyful affirmation of power. This task, if daunting, is within human reach; in fact, such a project is humanistic and reinvigorating. It forms the ground upon which human existence and freedom are to be justified, nihilism defeated and through which moral and epistemological standards can be re-established, if necessary by reaching back to the Renaissance and pre-Socratic philosophy. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is circumscribed to existential angst. The contrast with the postmodern reading could hardly be stronger.

To add further confusion to the debate, a third interpretive line has more recently emerged and taken firm hold, especially within English-language Nietzsche scholarship. It is advocated by commentators who, following the impulse of Richard Schacht, recognise in Nietzsche an heir of the tradition exemplified in the works of John Locke and David Hume. Nietzsche is here said to write as a naturalist – if not always in his convictions, especially those regarding the goals and consequences of science – at least in his methods and starting points, which are analysed as compatible with those of empiricism and nominalism broadly understood. In this outline, Nietzsche emerges as a resolute opponent of world dualisms; his metaphysical-sounding writings, mostly found in the posthumous fragments, are deflated to inconsequential thought experiments that a more lucid Nietzsche subsequently discarded. This reading, which staunchly rejects the postmodern one, leads to ontological consequences in direct opposition to those implied by Nietzsche’s existentialism (if existentialism there is), however, for naturalism leads to behaviourism and psychological determinism by dissolving the self, redefined as ‘human nature’, into the body.

The difficulty is, to be sure, that the views outlined above and many more find rewards aplenty in Nietzsche’s writings, especially when these are expanded to the posthumous texts. Even a casual reader cannot fail to note that Nietzsche wanted to do away with the dominant metaphysical and epistemological frameworks of his time while praising the methods of natural science and peppering his writings with numerous biological metaphors, that he opposed Christian with Homeric ethics and that he extolled the creative power of the great individual. As a result, the Nietzsche literature is not unlike a colourful but unassembled jigsaw puzzle: rich and attractive yet, above all, fragmented and seemingly irreconcilable, even if there are some rare elements of consensus.⁴ The fracture lines appear today more multiple and gaping than ever, if at times obfuscated by debates on countless ancillary themes, among which are Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’, his stance on language and his cryptic Übermensch figure, not to mention the issue, always simmering in the background if now seldom directly raised, of his possible anti-Semitism and proto-Nazism. Beyond what can or cannot be found in Nietzsche’s texts, however, the divides as they exist in the specialised literature today appear as miniature replicas of the much broader ‘analytic’ versus ‘postmodern’ chasm that scars Western philosophy as a whole and that Nietzsche’s works have, if not triggered, at the very least fuelled.⁵ Resolutions of the current controversies appear nowhere in sight; one can predict with a reasonable degree of certitude that the literature on Nietzsche is to remain in its fragmented and intellectually unsatisfying state for many years to come.

This frustrating state of affairs is all the more likely to endure as all parties to the current debates – exchanges of name-calling would be a better description in some instances – claim to interpret Nietzsche correctly, accusing their opponents of seriously misreading him. Exceptions to this mostly uncritical stance are rarely found in the literature, with almost all authors following, in the words of Julian Young, either the ‘quasi-biblical’ or the ‘perspectivist’ approach to Nietzsche’s texts.⁶ Examples of either type of exploration are too numerous to mention. The former takes the Nietzschean corpus to be a source of enduring truth (mostly of a proto-existentialistic or naturalistic type) uncovered by Nietzsche along his philosophical journey. The latter holds that Nietzsche’s true message rests precisely in the absence of overall unity in his writings, that Nietzsche achieved coherence and lasting significance exactly through his resolute incoherence, which a recent commentator reads as a voluntary aporetic stance.⁷ The way Nietzsche expressed his thought, of which his famed aphoristic and metaphoric style is reputed to be a crucial feature, becomes here more important than its actual content. If such is the case, Nietzsche’s work is a textbook example of McLuhan’s expression ‘the medium is the message’.

Beyond their differences, both approaches thus embrace the same overall method and objective: ordering and presenting Nietzsche’s writings as leading to either a somehow first-degree coherent vision or to an altogether inconsistent whole still forming a second-degree coherent vision by virtue of its very incoherence. In these enterprises, the philosophical sophistication brought to bear on Nietzsche’s texts finds no equivalent in a corpus better known for its literary brilliance than for its structured arguments. In all of them, Nietzsche is described as pursuing a philosophical quest that he could, for one reason or another (failing health is a good candidate), only imperfectly or incompletely develop but that has lasting importance. Whatever the case, although no one is able to formulate an interpretation without being exposed to vehement rebuke as to what the core of Nietzsche’s thought is, all current readings, from the postmodern to the most rigorously analytic, rest on a common but unstated assumption. They all believe that the work of the most influential philosopher of the day still requires the enlightening comments of modern interpreters for its message to be revealed and the genius of its author to be appreciated.

Perhaps. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style, his frequently unconventional use of terms and his love of metaphors notwithstanding, there is no obvious reason why writing on Nietzsche has to limit itself to perspectivist or ‘biblical’ exegesis as opposed to rigorous critical evaluation. To this observation, since Poellner’s noted study,⁸ the Nietzsche literature appears to have become more sensitive. The possibility, beyond all the fascinating insights which illuminate Nietzsche’s best pages, that no general philosophical ‘message’ could be extracted from Nietzsche’s writings has not received much currency, if any at all. Nietzsche was not a trained philosopher, but an expert philologist.⁹ To the frustration of his readers, he did not care to, perhaps could not, develop his philosophical insights and their consequences as these deserved. Except for what I believe to be a unique and controversial exception,¹⁰ commentators have not seriously contemplated the possibility that Nietzsche was failing, let alone knowingly failing, in whatever project he was pursuing – assuming he was. Could it be that Nietzsche’s condescension for systematic thinking, his conviction that he would be understood only by a few and his recommendation that one is to approach problems onl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Writing on Nietzsche
• 2  Will to Power and Ascetic Ideal
• 3  Will to Power and Materialism
• 4  Will to Power and I
• 5  Conclusion: The Twilight of an Idol
• References
• Index