So? So far as I can tell, it was not necessarily Jefferson’s intention that it would be. That, after many years, that’s where it ended up doesn’t mean that Jefferson’s ideal end goal was a total end to legal slavery. After all, he kinda owned slaves himself; he may have been less unpleasant in his views than others of his time, but that doesn’t make his views acceptable or laudable.
That’s not impressive either. He would have given up slavery in return for money? That’s not the stance of a moralist. Might I ask for the cites you get this impression of him from?
But as that reason doesn’t absolve him, it’s not particularly useful. It makes him look worse - his reasons for keeping slaves were, apparently, because he preferred keeping slaves to falling into debt he could not repay. That most certainly does not a moral man make.
Good points, BrainGlutton. I am sure, you are aware that more than a hundred years of discussions haven’t led to any agreement in the interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, not even (or especially not) when it comes to his most basic statements, like “Der Wille zur Macht” (the will to power).
A discussion in Cafe Society has reminded me of one of the reasons, why thinkers like Russell have so much difficulty with Nietzsche: they follow a different narrative code! Russell speaks science, Nietzsche speaks art. I can’t help but be reminded of Inigo Montoya’s words to Vizzini: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Lets specify my objection by looking at the word “Macht”. The first problem is one of translation. Macht and power, while on the surface almost identical in meaning, have different etymological roots, which embed them in unidentical contexts of meaning.
In Althochdeutsch (Old High German) “Macht” meant a person’s skill, ability, prowess. There, we still have a close relationship to power, which, if I’m not mistaken, is derived from “povoir” which comes from the Latin “potis”, meaning powerful.
The relationship is close but there is already a difference: “Macht” is more focused on the mastery of oneself, of one’s abilities, while the Romanic root points to an outward use; the tendency is “power over oneself” versus “power over others”.
In German, “Macht” is also related to the verb “machen”, which means to make, to do, to render. The verb is used to express one’s ability to affect or form the outer world, but is has no undertone of “domination”.
During Nietzsche’s time, the word “Macht” was already mostly used in a context similar to “power”, an outwardly directed “over” was usually presumed.
But neither Schopenhauer, whose “Wille zum Leben” (Will to Live) inspired the later philosopher, nor Nietzsche himself were unaware of the roots of the word – and as artists they realized the potential in the word to describe something unique and new with something old that was, nevertheless, an etymological fit.
I think, by now you might already guess, why, in such a context, the word “Macht” has more to do with freedom than the word “power” could ever suggest in the English language.
The addressee of the “Wille zur Macht” is the individual. What power is he asked to achieve? Power over himself. How does he do it? Cognition.
The individual is asked to live to understand. Once he lives to understand, he learns to deal with everything the world hurls at him, especially the horror and the pain, which leads to absolute control over himself and therefore to freedom. That’s first and foremost “der Wille zur Macht”.
Now, if you manage to reinterpret things that happen to you in a way that the “I” is in total accordance with them (actually, that’s not a good way to say it … if I can think of a better way, I’ll get back to that point), you can accept your “fate”, and more, you can achieve to want it, which sets you free even more.
Power is for Nietzsche first the ability to overpower (the awareness of) impotence; your will gives you the motivation and strength to do so.
And once you manage to overcome your impotence, you gain the strength to affect the world around you purposefully and to your advantage – and not just yours: Nietzsche considers the underlying self-awareness and "world “apprehension” (cognition?) better and more beneficial guides for actions than trust in some belief or ideology that do not represent your own understanding but someone else’s.
Nietzsche’s “Wille zur Macht” is therefore a basic hypothesis of his theory of cognition, it’s not a justification of a political agenda.
Of course, some schools of thought would object totally with this take on “Wille zur Macht”, others partially – and each and everyone has his reasons to do so.
From my pov, Nietzsche’s artistic use of the German language is the main source of such variety of interpretation. His craftsmanship as a writer is masterful, his language powerful, but his tendency to reinterpret words, to tell symbolic stories and to exaggerate for the benefit of provocation has given most of the control in his communication to his reader … and given his stance towards the necessity of autonomy, I think, he did so deliberately.
Sorry, BrainGlutton, if my objection to your posts looks like cherry-picking, since I have ignored every point you made but one. The simple reason for this is my insufficient knowledge of Nietzsche’s work.
Sorry, your cite doesn’t work. Why was Jefferson unable to free his slaves - it mentions he cannot, but doesn’t say why, and limits it only to his deathbed.
Note that apparently only five of his servants are worth freeing, to his eyes. What of the others? Not worth freeing? Not worth pleading to his creditors for? If pleading for the freedom of his slaves is evidence of his paragonship of human equality, what does not pleading for his others say about him, exactly?
Declaring that he believed blacks did not belong in a seperate but unequal category still doesn’t prove he believed them to be equal; a particular and not rare belief was that slavery was bad, but that blacks were still inferior to whites and should be treated such. Unfortunetly, the cite you have there simply declares it, and does not cite Jefferson himself so as to show their working, as it were. I maintain that actually owning slaves is pretty much still the trump card in this debate; you’re going to have to come up with something pretty powerful and impressive on his behalf to overcome the problem of his actually owning slaves.
Here is a simple question; can a moral man own slaves?
Perhaps in a society where it is impossible to free them or get them out of the society in question ( a primitive island culture or a worldwide slave state perhaps ), and the only alternatives would be to kill them or hand them over to another owner who will probably treat them worse. I can’t think of anything that would apply to Jefferson’s case though.
Since slaves were considered property back than his creditors would not care much about freeing Jefferson’s slaves and since Jefferson had great debt the creditors effectively were seizing Jefferson’s slaves and Jefferson couldn’t do much. Also my source shows a Jefferson quote. As to your question in addition to Der Trihs’ answer I will add the possibility that oftentime freedmen were more prone to lynchings and was heavily restricted by law thus were he a slave he might have in reality more freedom.
Except freeing them before he knew he was going to die. He had quite a while to do so. Or, you know, not own slaves in the first place.
Yes, but not one that fully backs up the entirety of the passage you cite.
Ah, but here you’re arguing both ways. Jefferson apparently plead for the freedom of his slaves, in the quote you cited; yet, you consider that freeing slaves might well have done them a harm. You can’t argue both that Jefferson was noble to attempt to free his slaves after his death, and noble to keep them because freed slaves were worse off. If they were worse off, then Jefferson is cruel to ask for their freedom; if they weren’t, he was cruel to keep them.
Well, I wish I could just say: “because Nietzsche was an ass” and leave it at that. Unfortunately, that’d be unfair.
For now, I’ll simply cite the guy; if you feel any interest in discussing this particular point further, I might have to reread (some of) his stuff … oh, boy :eek:.
(“Socrates, just to acknowledge it, stands so close to me, that I am almost continuously locked in struggle with him.”)
[Nachgelassene Fragmente (no idea what it’s called in English, KSA 8, 97]
(Leo Strauss, considered an intellectual godfather of modern American neoconservatism, would appear to have shared Nietzsche’s assessment of Plato, if Earl Shorris’ analysis is correct.)
It is rather curious that Nietzsche would have charged Socrates or Plato with a “democratic moral bias,” considering that Plato, writing as Socrates, proposed a famous utopia, The Republic, which is essentially Sparta with the few democratic elements of the Spartan constitution subtracted, and elite of philosophers placed above the elite of warriors. But that says more about Nietzsche than about Plato/Socrates.
Never heard of An Incomplete Education before, but the summary made me smile. The passage concerning Nietzsche, however, displays not just an “incomplete” view, but also an insufficient and even misleading one.
When Jones & Wilson say, there is still no consensus regarding Nietzsche’s work, I couldn’t agree more, I’d just go the already mentioned step further and call it consistent with his approach towards cognition: Every individual has to find understanding for himself; any thoughts by another one are merely stimuli or suggestions, providing food for thought, not its substitute.
They miss how much value Nietzsche put on autonomy, on the man who chooses his path instead of following blindly a prophet – a position described extensively in one of the works they mention: Thus Spake Zarathustra. For Zarathustra, though a prophet himself, does not expect anyone to put faith into him but to consider his words a cause for thought.
Since they miss the context, it’s no surprise that they illustrate the “Übermensch” by using the common but inadequate synonym of the “Superman” – and there, they start to mislead their readers, because that word does not just support a false association but also an invalid dichotomy that was already mentioned in a prior post.
No. The Nietzschean “Übermensch”, described in Zarathustra, can very well exist without an “Untermensch” (subman) for two reasons:
The Übermensch is not the result of breeding, he doesn’t have more brain than a Mensch (human) or more muscles or more beauty or any ability that is beyond our own. Nietzsche didn’t think like Hitler.
No, the Übermensch distinguishes himself from a human by virtue of his insight into the (mechanics of the) world (aka “die ewige Wiederkehr [des Gleichen]”, “the eternal recurrence [of the same]”), the acceptance of the lack of any preset and fixed goal of existence within it (so there is also no “Moral” (morality) to be found that can be legitimized by anything beyond the human will) and, finally, the joyous affirmation of such a truth.
The “Über” in front of “Mensch” doesn’t point to a “Super”-form of human but to one who has “Over”-come an illusionary view of the world.
Thus, the Übermensch finds his foil not in some Untermensch or subhuman but in the far too ordinary human, “der letzte Mensch”, who believes whatever he is told, follows blindly custom and authority, concentrates his energy on personal safety and comfort and needs the prospect of reward or punishment handed out by some eternal being to follow a behavioural code.
But this kind of human isn’t stuck on some lower step of the “evolutionary” ladder leading towards a superior human being, they are stuck in an illusion – even though they too have inherent the gift of understanding.
Nietzsche is angry with them because they fail to do what they are able to, not because they couldn’t do it anyway.
Sure, the figure of the Zarathustra shows a vision of a man who does exceed human abilities in some way; so the thought of some pseudo-evolutionary aspect in Nietzsche’s philosophy, one that deals with the future of humankind, isn’t far fetched. But let’s not forget that Nietzsche is an artist, not a scientist. His Zarathustra is a literary device, an ideal, unreal and beyond reach – yet crucial in his double function as a surrogate prophet of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and his dreamt embodiment.
Call me a blockhead – I don’t know what you’re aiming at? That Nietzsche was anti-democratic?
I’ve reread some of Nietzsche’s remarks towards Socrates and I can’t see any way to condense his view into one position. It changes over time, with the focus of his work and, finally, with his descent into mental illness.
In Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche is mainly critical of Socrates; he sees in him the main reason why the ancient Greek tragedy could be destroyed by Euripides who resolved the old irrational and pre-rational conflicts of instinct by showing rational motivations and “optimistic” solutions, even if that meant the appearance of a “deus ex machina” to resolve irreconcilable differences positively.
Translation:
“Rationalization wins over instinct, the intellect over art”, cries Nietzsche – and Socrates is to blame!
But is Nietzsche’s thinking sufficiently described by such simple contrasting pairs? Nope, they are just one aspect of the whole picture. While Socrates influence on the arts might have been ruinous, the thinking he inspired has also done much to counter the old self-destructive pessimism (described, for example, in Homer’s Ilias) and inspired optimism that might have helped to save us from ourselves (see “The Birth of Tragedy”, 15).
In later works, Nietzsche discusses other consequences of Socrates thinking and shows, that his view was a necessary stepping stone in the development of our understanding of the world – but not the end of it and not without fail.
Whether we take a look into Menschliches, Allzumenschlisches (Human, All-Too-Human) or Morgenröthe (The Dawn) or Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), which pictures Socrates more positive than any other book, we always find an ambivalent but also devoted or fervent Nietzsche. And I think, there is much self-reflection in his approach and self-criticism pointed outwards.
Anyway, BrainGlutton, I couldn’t fail to notice that you rely pretty much exclusively on secondary sources to describe Nietzsche’s view. The shortcomings involved are known to you, so my guess is that you deliberately concentrate on the reception history of Nietzsche’s work … But why?
And I don’t get that at all. Just what did Socrates, or Plato, or any philosopher ever do to damage the artistic tradition of Greece? Or “to deny the essence of Greece”? In hindsight, the Greek philosophers define Greece no less than the poets.
No argument there. But, you know, the sources you have mentioned so far write clearly but blunder.
Nietzsche wrote specifically about the Greek tragedy that was the model for our understanding of a tragic situation; that specific predicament was an expression of a duality inherent in the ancient concept of art, embodied by Dionysos and Apollon. Ecstasy, frenzy, instinct, the natural pre-rational are as inherent in the Greek tragedy as the thoughtful and heroically acting individual. The hero in a tragedy cannot escape his fate, whatever he might do to prevent it – and worse, his actions advance the predicament he is trying to avoid.
Euripides, however, found ways out of this dilemma, and Nietzsche considers Socrates the intellectual father of the writer’s rationalizations. Euripides’ heroes are analytical, composed beings who are no longer in the grip of fate. Even if they don’t find a way out, a god acknowledges their honest struggle by solving the conflict for them.
But such a situation isn’t tragic any longer, its conflict is shallower and the bite lessened.
Consider for a moment a rescue of Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 by some resistance … what would that do to the story? Nothing good.
And while Nietzsche could still see the genius in Euripides, he was underwhelmed by the Attican Comedy that he described as the logical next step of the Greeks’ failing understanding of the world’s inner mechanics.
Nietzsche acknowledged time and again the exceptional accomplishments of ancient Greek culture, but he thought that they ventured away from the truth when they focused on pre-modern rationality.
Addendum:
Even nowadays, we revisit the problems that are born out of a deliberate segmentation of the rational and irrational.
Nietzsche would probably say that the modern idea of, well, a homo (o)economicus follows the Apollonian tradition, represented in ancient Greece by Socrates and his disciples. Psychology, however, tells us that we are far from the rational being described there and cannot do but fail if we were to model our society, or in that case, our economy solely on such an approach.
Without acknowledging the Dyonesian, the irrational, we fall short in the prediction of our choices.
Nietzsche understood that the Apollonian ideal was an effective shield against our instincts; but the denial of the later obscures the truth and leads, ultimately, into disaster once the shield gives in.
You seem to be saying that Nietzsche’s philosophy has no social or political implications, that the Superman is simply one with superior gifts of mind and/or will who works out his intellectual, esthetic and/or moral self-actualization within the existing social framework. But, then, why are his chosen heroes men like Napoleon, who was a conqueror, not an intellectual? Napoleon could not have been a “great man” in the sense that he was, without subjects to lord it over. And what shall we make of such pronouncements as, “Men shall be trained for war and women for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” That sounds like he is hoping for a fundamentally different kind of society than that of his own time and place – a society not simply bolder in a mental or spiritual sense, but fiercer.
BrainGlutton, I totally forgot about this thread over Spring Break! It’s obvious you’ve put a lot of time into your posts and I want to return the same effort (also this is the most exciting GD thread ever.) This is on my to-do list…
If I gave that impression, I blundered. The Übermensch in the Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s counter project to nihilism, he is the unambiguous acceptance of life, the sole designer of his values, goals and code -– and he lives by them, which (almost) necessarily puts him into conflict with the world.
[insertion]
I’ve searched for an on line source of the complete Ecce homo in English, but couldn’t find one. Sorry, I know this isn’t the way to do it. If you have the book at home, look for the third chapter, Why I Write Such Excellent Books (such humility) and you’ll find Nietzsche’s thoughts concerning the reception of the “Übermensch” by his readers.
[/insertion]
Pure power seekers, like Caesar, Napoléon or Cesare Borgia, personified in Nietzsche’s mind major aspects of the Übermensch, like his will to (re-)shape the world “in his image”. He seemed to believe that a free conflict of wills would lead to a society that showed more understanding of the true nature of things. That a world of conflicting wills isn’t exactly a place where lamb and lion lie in peace together, isn’t hard to imagine; fierce isn’t a bad word to describe the reality of some of the phases we would go through if Nietzsche’s vision came<->were true.
So, was he a warmonger?
As usual, the answer is complex. There is no doubt that Nietzsche approved of war, as he considered it a part of the Dyonesian aspect of the true nature of things. But most of his recipients were not sure, what Nietzsche meant when he talked about war.
Some have yet to become tired to point out that he criticized the French-German war of his time, that he was one of the first to warn of the doom of the world wars, that he considered the influence military thinking had in Prussia self-destructive and that he promoted deliberate defenselessness to achieve permanent peace (see Human, All Too Human II: The Wanderer, 284 – the German speakers find it here).
They focus a) on the “war of ideas” that is a necessary step in the process of the transvaluation of values and b) on the war of the individual with himself in his self conquest leading to autarchy.
And yet, this ignores Nietzsche’s acceptance of war in the world among nations and cultures. And while it’s true that he tended to lament the destructive nature of such wars, he also considered them an antidote against the weakening of a culture and an instrument of self-purification within a society. [Shudder]
Even if we were to accept that Nietzsche fatalistically accepted outer wars without promoting them in general, his advocates cannot deny that he considered a specific war advantageous: the one that is fought in the interest of truth.
Here he shows some uncharacteristic naïveté, when he seems to think that victory follows the truth … though this idea is so widespread in the world in times of war – and in their propagandistic preparation – that it’s hard to call an idea outlandish that so many people want to believe in.
Anyway, Nietzsche’s attitude towards war conveys a characteristic ambivalence in his thinking: always aware of the pros and cons, he tries to express them in all their aspects. His books are therefore more a protocol of his thinking than their result.
Which doesn’t mean he is a post-modern “anything goes”-type of guy, he considers the complexity of a situation from a coherent position –- though this position isn’t icebound; it changes over time in accordance with new ideas.
And his state of mind.
When we talk about the Zarathustra, it’s important to realize, that this is the one early book that introduces the few ideas and conveys within them the signs of his mental illness that seem to have shaped most of the public image of Nietzsche and his philosophy within the Angloamerican community.
Although the Übermensch plays a minor role in his oeuvre, it’s the one catchphrase everyone seems to know; and this is not surprising, given the megalomania and exorbitance of Nietzsche’s words in the Zarathustra.
But if we reduced Nietzsche to the one idea in this book, we wouldn’t be fair. Not evident there is the complexity of his thinking that led in other books to the mentioned weighing pondering of pros and cons. Not evident is his understanding of our psyche that was far ahead of its time. It’s also devoid of his usually clear writing style, which already gives some idea of his state of mind at that time.
His later correspondence indicates that he was critical of some of his more excessive statements and was taken aback by any reception that put him in the immediate vicinity of any kind of (social) Darwinism. Whatever he might have thought of the Zarathustra, he didn’t go back to this kind of presentation afterwards.
Otoh, the book reveals the first imbalance of the antagonisms in Nietzsche that would get out of control later. So, in more than one sense it’s quite a prophetic work.
Speaking of contradictions: the quote you mentioned, shows a misogynous streak that is often mentioned about Nietzsche and cannot be read nowadays without a shake of the head. Interestingly, Nietzsche was friends with two women who were far ahead of their time in their emancipation from men: Malwida von Meysenbug and Lou Salomé.
He was also one of the four professors (of ten) at the university of Basel who voted for the right of women to do a doctorate … A misogynist who listened to women and supported their rights in his own domain – it’s hard to pigeon-hole him.
