21st Century Nietzsche

I think we need to claim Nietzsche as one of ours, a fearless liberal. His idea of the superman is of someone who dares to think for himself. He hated the right-wing anti-Semites of his sister’s circle, which is why he broke with Wagner; it was quite an unusual attitude for his time.

Well, he wasn’t a liberal as such either, and clearly says so. That is, he wasn’t much for the improvement of society by trying to introduce more equitable laws. What he was for is the exploration and investigation of “natural laws”. Unfortunately, natural laws are by their nature not easy to pin down with the intellect. We tend to oversimplify and thereby draw wrong and damaging conclusions on the basis of our logic. One erroneous conclusion that many draw from Nietzsche is that he favoured (and so what if he did?) the existing social elite—the moneyed uppercrust. They are at the top because they deserve to be, according to many Nietzsche supporters. But the error is to transport a moralising point of view into an otherwise more naturalistic (Nietzschean) paradigm. Those who make this error are inclined to presume that the de facto elite are our MORAL superiors, when they are just de facto superiors based upon some largely unknown (and unknowable, in total) principles of natural law.

As I said, the main error that Nietzsche’s followers make is in believing that these principles of natural law are in principle knowable in whole, or that they can be harnessed by those who get inside knowledge by reading Nietzsche. This turns Nietzsche’s ideas into the basis for a cult mentality. It also gives conscious knowledge the exact inverted status to that which Nietzsche gives it. (To Nietzsche, consciousness is a limitation, an inclination towards illness, not the basis for asserting one’s superiority.) But the authoritarian Nietzscheans nonetheless have Nietzsche exactly upside down—and they will rail at you for not submitting to the authority of your “superiors” or not obeying narrow gender role parameters, and so on. This means that they are still reading Nietzsche in a moralistic way, and not understanding that the whole point of Nietzsche was to question these moralistic strictures, and try to understand how reality actually functions—according to natural laws.

Ugh, scratchy888. That sort of “natural law” sounds a bit like EvPsych. (My acquaintance with Nietzsche is rather shallow.) Your account of his critique of liberalism reminds me of much of radical ideology, the idea that there’s no point in ameliorating present conditions since the inevitable revolution will resolve everything. I accept that much of my activity is more or less predetermined, but I still have to decide everyday what I’ll have for lunch, therefore I still have to send checks to Democrats in election years,

Jennifer:No, no, no, Bad Jim! But your misreading is precisely the misreading that is most common with regard to Nietzsche. No, the natural laws are not known. They belong to the unconscious and its states. What evolutionary psychology does is to try to make out that these laws are knowable and positivistic, and that they have certain logical parameters. But Nietzschean “law” simply says that how things are, and how they appear to be to our moral sensibilities are two entirely different things. How things actually are is determined by natural law. How things appear to be is determined by human consciousness (and, I would add, such things as wish fulfilment, self-deception, wilful superficiality, unfounded optimism, and so on). What you really have to do is get away from thinking of Nietzsche’s writings as providing moral and intellectual parameters for certain kinds of behaviour as the Ev Psych’s do when they try to normalise gender roles. Nietzsche’s writing does exactly the opposite to this. What is “natural”, according to Nietzsche is not necessarily useful to humanity, or on the side of its development, nor does this notion of natural give us parameters that we ought to stick within, (as in serving for instance, our own moral edification). The exact opposite is rather true. Nietzschean thinking is not prescriptive.

Jennifer: Also, natural law pervades everything in an active way. We do not passively submit to it and decide “there is no point in ameliorating anything”. Rather, if we do in fact decide that there is a point in ameliorating something we are enacting this natural law on one particular level. The point is that reality is more complicated than moral precepts or logical precepts can account for. That is why I have suggested this broader concept—which I believe to be Nietzsche’s own—of a kind of natural system of laws.