Nietzsche and the Political - Tracy B. Strong

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Nietzsche and the Political

Tyranny, Tragedy, Cultural Revolution, and Democracy

TRACY B. STRONG

What kind of man must one be in order to set one’s hand on

the wheel of history?

—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

T he Birth of Tragedy summarizes its political themes in the twenty-first

chapter. Its matter is the “most basic foundation of the life of a people”

(den innersten Lebensgrund eines Volkes [ BT 21; KGW III.1, 128]). The earliest

foundation had been in and from Homer. However, with the gradual development

of living in cities focused around an agora rather than a palace, of commerce, of

the breakdown of the preeminence of blood relations, and of the development

of currency and writing and with the victory over the Persians and a broader

peace in the eastern Mediterranean, the model of society based on the contest

found in Homer no longer sufficed.1 (One can already see premonitions of thetensions in the Iliad .)2 That which was Greece was in need of refounding–that

is, in need of dealing with the new developments while remaining “Greek.”

It was in tragedy, Nietzsche argues, that the Greeks managed to accomplish this:

“Placed between India and Rome and pressed towards a seductive choice, the

Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form, in classical purity” ( BT 21). 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.

The problem of BT then consists in how to transform the past from which onehas sprung into a past that is adequate to the historical realities one confronts

without ever losing oneself in the process. This is a central and constant theme

in Nietzsche. In “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” we find:

For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not pos-sible to free oneself wholly from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations, and regard ourselves free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them.The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our

knowledge of it, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritageand implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 35–36, 2008.

Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

48



TRACY B. STRONG 49

first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori,a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate:–always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limitto denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than first.What happens all too often is that we know the good but do not do it, because wealso know the better but cannot do it. But here and there a victory is nonethelessachieved, and for the combatants, for those who employ critical history for thesake of life, there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this firstnature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will

become a first. ( HL 3; KGW III.1, 261)

Not only does this passage presage Zarathustra’s wish to replace fatherlands and

motherlands with his “children’s’ land,” but we might even say that Nietzsche’s

entire life project is contained in this paragraph. The task is to implant in ourselves

a “new habit, a new instinct, a second nature.” If, Marx, Freud, and Nietzscheargued, we are creatures of our past—whether as fetishes, totems, or idols—then

it is only in changing the past that one creates a new present. If we are the children

of our parents, then it is only in changing parents—and if one changes one’s

parents, then one has engendered oneself—that we become what we are.3

What is the nature of the danger of the hold the past has on the present? In a

word, it is the danger of tyranny.

I. From Tyranny to Tragedy

In notes written during the winter 1883–84, Nietzsche elaborates the idea in

the context of establishing a hierarchy of those who have the ability to make

appearance real. He establishes a hierarchy of “creative strength,” which goes

from “the actor, who makes a character from himself … 2/ the poet, the artist,

the painter; 3/ the teacher—Empedocles; 4/ the conqueror; 5/ the lawgiver (phi-

losopher)” ( KGW VII.1, 686).4 All those named in this list have in common that

they construct, as we now say, reality—that is, they provide the terms (which

could be in a work of art) by which we understand the world. In a real sense,the world, which is understood in a particular set of terms, is the world of those

terms and, thus, to some degree also the world that the originator or origination

of those terms gives us.5 Not named in this first list is the tyrant; yet, as we shall

see, the tyrant is cousin to those of “creative strength.” In the last book of GM ,

Nietzsche draws up a similar list of those who create and shape a world. Here he

is speaking of those whose role it is to take care of the slavish morality (they are

themselves slavishly moral). They can be “a support, a resistance, a support, a

compulsion, a taskmaster, a tyrant, a god” (GM III:15).6 The sentence in which

the list appears instantiates a progressive intensification toward world creationand maintenance.



50 NIETZSCHE AND THE POLITICAL

Nietzsche finds tyranny in areas with which we moderns would normally not

associate it. In BGE 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 today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins

to believe in itself . It always creates 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 ” ( BGE 9; emphasis

added; see also KGW VI.2, 215). Though it is not only in doing philosophy that

one creates the world in one’s own image—so much we might say is the lesson

that Nietzsche draws from Kant—the philosophical 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.7 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 philosophy. 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 . To return to the

hierarchy of world makers above, philosophy is in effect a form of lawgiving,

of saying “thus it shall be.”8

Tyranny thus arises for Nietzsche from the failure to remember that we live

in worlds that we have made: tyranny is thus a forgetting of human agency, one

might say.9 Much as in the famous passage about “truth” as a “worn out meta- phor,” as an “illusion of which one has forgotten what it really is” (“On Truth and

Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” KGW III.2, 369), there is thus a kind of built-in

amnesia about tyranny, an amnesia that accompanies all acts of volition.

The point here, however, has to do with what tyranny means : it is, in essence,

taking as accomplished the world that one has defined and forgetting that the

world in which one lives is one that one has made. It is for this reason that

Nietzsche can write in BGE that the “will to truth is— will to power ” ( BGE 211).

It follows from this, however, that Nietzsche does not, and cannot, simply assume

that one can at one’s leisure forego this process. Why not? The most noteworthycharacteristics of the tyrant are his (her?) belief in his own understanding of

the world as simply and finally true and his failure to question that belief. The

knowledge that the world in which one lives is one’s own world means that that

world has no more validity than one has oneself: this can induce modesty or

megalomania, but it is not a matter of a mitigating Humean skepticism. Nietzsche

does not think that one could simply not believe in what one does, adopting, as

it were, a kind of benevolent skepticism toward oneself.

What, though, can be done about the impulse to forget? Nietzsche says that one

of the cures that the Greeks apparently found for the amnesia inherent in tyrannywas murder. Thus, “the tyrants of the spirit were almost always murdered and

had only sparse lasting consequences ( Nachkommenschaft )” ( KGW IV.1, 118;



TRACY B. STRONG 51

cf. KGW IV.1, 190: Nachkommenschaft translates usually as “descendants” or

“offspring”). The solution may appear drastic, but Nietzsche holds it as part of

the virtue of Greek politics that those who would fix once and for all the polis in

their own terms were soon done away with. Thus in the first volume of Human, All Too Human Nietzsche writes of ancient philosophers. Each of them, he says,

“was an aggressive violent tyrant. The happiness in the belief that one possessed

the truth has perhaps never been greater—so also the hardness, the exuberance,

the tyrannical and the evil of such a belief. They were tyrants, that is, that which

each Greek wanted to be and which each was when he could be. Perhaps Solon

constitutes an exception; in his poems he speaks of how he spurned personal

tyranny. But he did this out of love for his work, for his law giving, and the law-

giver is a sublimated form of the tyrannical” ( HH 261).10 This is pretty much the

theme to which he will return in the passage from BGE cited at the beginning of this essay. Inherent in philosophizing is a tyrannical element, which is the belief

in the possession of the truth. The desire that what one believes in one’s heart

be true for all is both the essence of that element and a goal fervently sought

after by ancient Greeks. It follows from this that the restraint on tyranny will not

come from philosophy. This is not only because, as Alexandre Kojève writes,

“the philosopher’s every attempt at directly influencing the tyrant is necessarily

ineffectual” but because philosophy is in itself tyrannizing .11

The additional element here is that law is understood as a form of violence, as

a sublimation of the tyrannical impulse.12 In addition, it is clear that the drive totyranny is a necessary quality of thought. If all will is will to power, as Nietzsche

will write later, then all will is the will to make the world in one’s own image

(whatever that image be). The praise that Nietzsche finds for this arrangement

derives from the fact that precisely the competition set up by the desire of each

to be tyrant produces a situation where nothing is lasting.

In this early period, what kept philosophy from tyrannizing? Here Nietzsche’s

answer is importantly political. The political system required the killing of

tyrants. Yet this solution to tyranny—one that was later to be given a central

place in Machiavelli’s conception of political foundation—cannot be complete.What if a tyrant is not killed? What if he constantly wins? This matter is not

limited to what we would ordinarily name “philosopher.” The paradigmatic case

here is Homer, who is in effect a kind of philosopher-tyrant for Nietzsche. He

writes: “ Homer .—The greatest fact about Greek culture remains the fact that

Homer became Panhellenic so soon. All the spiritual and human freedom the

Greeks attained goes back to this fact. But at the same time it was also the actual

doom of Greek culture, for, by centralizing, Homer made shallow and dissolved

the more serious instincts of independence. From time to time an opposition to

Homer arose from the depths of Hellenic feeling; but he always triumphed. Allgreat spiritual powers exercise a suppressing effect in addition to their liberating

one” ( HH 262). Homer, Nietzsche concludes, “tyrannizes.”




Homer had in effect defined what it meant to be Greek; a problem arose when

that which was Greek had difficulty in escaping the definition that Homer had

achieved. (One must remember here that in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit

of Music , Nietzsche had designated Homer as the prototype of the Apollonian.It is worth noting here also that Nietzsche does not attribute this achievement to

a putative person, “Homer,” but thinks that “Homer” became the name for what

was achieved.)13The point of his analysis both of the “pre-Socratics” and of trag-

edy as a political educational activity was to explore how it was possible (for it

was necessary) to redefine what it meant to be Greek in light of the developments

(that had intervened). This was one of the central concerns of his early book,

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (especially KGW IV.1, 180–81). This

book, which remained unpublished and indeed unfinished, is about philosophy

and politics and tragedy, about the possibility of philosophy and about the role of philosophy in making culture possible, about what that might mean in terms of a

valuation of the everyday. Philosophy offers the possibility of the production of

(one’s own) genius. Nietzsche saw tragedy as the locus of collective participation,

a common festival, the focus where the culture came together and pursued its

understanding of itself. What, though, was the relation of tragedy to philosophy?

Here Nietzsche’s analysis is one of a failed opportunity—a political failure.

In PTAG , Nietzsche argues that the philosophers before Socrates had political

reformation in mind. They were, as he says at one point, lauter Staatsmänner

(“Wisdom and Science in Conflict,” KGW IV.1, 178–79). But, he is clear also,the project of reformation failed: the “dawn remained almost only a ghostly

appearance.” Failure came even to the philosopher who came the closest—

Empedocles—whose “soul had more compassions [ Mitleiden ] than any Greek

soul [and] perhaps still not enough, for in the end, Greeks are poor at this and

the tyrannical element became a hindrance in the blood of even the great phi-

losophers.”14 This despite the fact that “something new was in the air, as proves

the simultaneous emergence of tragedy” ( KGW III.4, 131).

To grasp how tragedy as reprised in Wagnerian opera was supposed to effec-

tuate this cultural revolution we have to look at several elements. They are all present in Nietzsche’s writings of the 1870s. The first element of the cultural

revolution project has itself three separate elements, each of which operates

on a different level. The Birth of Tragedy is an analysis of how a particular

society can reground itself in the face of important changes in various spheres.

It examines this without distinguishing politico-cultural transformation on the

individual level from that on the collective level. Tragedy is an art form that

does not make that distinction, and that has always been the source of its com-

plexity. In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche develops an understanding

of individual transformation; in the next of the Untimely Meditations, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth , he takes up a similar analysis but here on a social-cultural

level. I propose now to examine each of the elements individually.



TRACY B. STRONG 53

II. Elements of the Project of Cultural Revolution

1. THE I NDIVIDUAL LEVEL

The aim of SE is to establish what is necessary for it to be possible for one toattach one’s heart to that which one wishes to become—in this case, to a great

man. It is important to note that the essay is not actually about Schopenhauer but

about the particular relationship in which Nietzsche found himself in relation to

Schopenhauer’s work. As he planned the essay, Nietzsche entertained the pos-

sibility of calling Schopenhauer the German Zuchtmeister , he who brings one

up or into line ( KGW III.4, 411). The figure of Schopenhauer is what is called

here an “exemplar.” An exemplar is what one recognizes as part of oneself but

which one is not yet and to which one feels an obligation of becoming. This rela-

tion between the self that one is and the exemplar one is not yet but desires to become is called “love.” It is a recognition that happens only occasionally, when

“the clouds are rent asunder, and we see, how we in common with all nature,

press towards some thing that stands high over us” (SE 5; KGW III.1, 374).

This relationship is explicitly said to be available to and, indeed, required of all:

“The artist and philosopher … strike only a few and should strike all” (SE 5, 7;

KGW III.1, 378, 401).15 Note that he says that in principle all are capable of this

response. This goal, though, is hard to obtain because “it is impossible to teach

love” (SE 6, KGW III.1, 381). It is, however, the case that, if you will excuse

me, what the world needs is love—a concept Nietzsche takes from Emerson:16 “Never was the world … poorer in love… . The educated classes … become

day by day restless, thoughtless and loveless.” They have, in other words noth-

ing to love, especially after “the waters of religion” have receded (SE 4; KGW

III.1, 362). I take these considerations to refer to the claim that there is nothing

in the modern world for anyone to love—and that this is one of the reasons that

philosophy has become impossible.

Nietzsche now wants to establish three claims. First, the question of love and

philosophy—of education—is not one of self-recognition. The question is if it

is possible to find exemplars that one can recognize as one’s own and with theexplicit knowledge that one is not (yet) the exemplar. Exemplars will also be dif-

ferent for each. It is thus not coming to know howyou know yourself: “Wie finden

wir uns selbst wieder?” ( KGW III.1, 336).17 It is a question of finding and how

one will recognize something as one’s own find. Nietzsche explicitly rejects what

one might call the artichoke model of the person where one could discover the real

person, the heart, by peeling away the inessential layers. The focus of SE is toward

the future: toward becoming what one is. Knowledge must be a form of becoming

rather than recognition. But what one is has no existence prior to its existence.

Second, for Nietzsche, “one must not look back towards oneself for eachglance will become the ‘evil eye’” (TI “Skirmishes” 7). The governing trope

in this situation is not looking back but, rather, oversight and love. In SE he




proclaims that one will have found oneself when one has lost oneself and been

freed from what one is by love: “What have you … truly loved? What has

pulled out your soul, mastered it and at the same time made it joyful?” Love

pulls us away from ourselves and dissolves the self into what Nietzsche herecalls “freedom.”18

Love and freedom are linked. Love we know is learned, even if it cannot be

taught. So how is freedom learned? The second claim in SE is that whereas

before freedom had been learned from exemplars, in the present day and age

these models are by and large not available.19 (As I noted above, Nietzsche is

quite clear that such models are in principleavailable to everyone.) Why, however,

are such models—the ones that one might love, that are the principle of freedom

and finding—not available? Nietzsche’s answer cannot detain us here but is the

beginning of what will be a lifelong theme. He tentatively attributes this to adouble fact: first, Christianity had triumphed over antiquity, and, second, it is

now in decline. People are now in a “vacillation” (SE 2; KGW III.1, 340–41),

drawn toward two incompatible poles—belief and nonbelief—by virtue only of

having been hung between them. The contemporary world is characterized by

Nietzsche as always going someplace but with no destination able to evince the

quality of being satisfactory. It was from this condition, Nietzsche says, that he

found release when he found an educator.

But such an educator, such love—the capacity for philosophy—is rare, almost

nonexistent. Why so? Nietzsche then ties this to a tendency in modern philosophyto moralize the world and morality in particular, to become a “reformer of life”

rather than a philosopher (SE 3; KGW III.1, 358).20 The third point in SE is thus

a consideration of what is wrong with modern so-called philosophy. I will take

up this theme in more detail below.

2. THE CULTURAL LEVEL The second element in this project of transfiguration is addressed in Richard

Wagner in Bayreuth . Here Nietzsche names the possibility of encountering at anymoment of one’s life “something higher than” oneself, whose claim nonetheless

one cannot deny, as it is “the sense of the tragic.” Wagner showed the possibility

of this by finding or rather uncovering a relationship between “music and life”

and “music and drama.” And it is in this relationship that Wagner bids to set

right the ills of the day ( RWB 4–5; KGW IV.1, 24–26).

What are these ills? Language was “originally supremely adapted … to

the [expression] of strong feelings.” Now, forced to “encompass the realm of

thought,” it is “sick”: “Man can no longer express his needs and distress by

means of language; thus he can longer really communicate at all.” It is now thecase that language drives us where we “do not really want to go” ( RWB 5; KGW

IV.1, 26). In fact, it makes association for common action impossible.



TRACY B. STRONG 55

Nietzsche writes:

As soon as men come to an understanding with one another, and to unite for acommon work, they are seized by the madness of universal concepts, indeed even

by the mere sound of words, and, as a consequence of the incapacity to communi-cate, everything they do together bears the mark of this mutual misunderstanding,inasmuch as it does not correspond to their real needs but only to the hollownessof those tyrannical words and concepts: thus to all its other sufferings mankind adds suffering from convention, that is to say from a mutual agreement as to wordsand actions without a mutual agreement as to feeling. ( RWB 5; KGW IV.1, 26)21

The problem thus is in getting people “to feel correctly ” (richtig empfinden ),

and this is what the “music of our German masters” makes audible: correct feel-

ing . Nietzsche sees this as a “return to nature, while being at the same time the

purification and transformation of nature; for the pressing need for that return tonature arose from the souls of men filled with love, and in their art there sounds

nature transformed in love” ( RWB 5; KGW IV.1, 26).22

What does this mean? If nature is transformed in love by music, it means,

given what we have seen about love in SE , that music opens the space to which

we can be called by that which stands beyond us, by that which can be taken to

be our exemplar. Nietzsche goes on to argue that “the soul of music now wants

to create for itself a body,” that mousike “reaches out … to gymnastics” ( RWB 5;

KGW IV.1, 30). Right feeling thus occurs when a world comes into being in

which the words we use no longer reflect our illusions. Such people, “the thou-sands in populous cities,” have what Nietzsche calls “incorrect feelings,” which

“prevents them from admitting to themselves that they live in misery; if they

wanted to make themselves understood by another, their understanding is as it

were paralyzed by a spell… . Thus they are completely transformed and reduced

to helpless slaves of incorrect feelings” ( RWB 5; KGW IV.1, 33).23

In Wagner’s music “all that is visible in the world wants to become more pro-

found and more intense by becoming audible and wants, as it were, to assume

bodily form” ( RWB 7; KGW IV.1, 38).24 Right feeling goes to the ear, not the

eye, or, more accurately, as Zarathustra muses, one must learn to “listen withone’s eyes.” Indeed, and in consequence, the beginning of the philosophical

mind, writes Nietzsche, comes in the amazement that becoming is the actual-

ity of that which is ordinary. In an early text, he writes, “The intellect must not

wish only to enjoy this furtively but must become completely free and celebrate

saturnalia. The liberated intellect looks clearly at things: and now, for the first

time, the everyday appears to it as noteworthy, a problem” (“Die vorplatonischen

Philosophen,” KGW II.4, 215). This is then said to be the true marker of the philo-

sophical drive. At the end of RWB , he indicates that it is the glory of Wagner’s

music to “enlighten the poor and lowly and melt the arrogance of the learned… .[N]ow that it has come about, it must transform the very notion of education

and culture in the spirit of everyone who experiences it; it will seem to him that




a curtain has been raised on a future in which there are no longer any great and

good things except those which all hearts share in common. The abuse [Schimpf ]

which has hitherto clung to the word ‘common’ will have then been removed

from it” ( RWB 10; KGW IV.1, 75–76).25 Wagner was to be for everyone, at leastin Nietzsche’s understanding.

Here we have an insight into the nature of Nietzsche’s esoterism or his elitism.

One can think of elitism as corresponding to natural or acquired traits that some

have that set them above others. Or one can think of elitism in relation to the fact

that most people live, as Thoreau puts it, “lives of quiet desperation” and ask why

this is the case. As Mark Twain noted once: “All of us have music and truth inside

but most have a hard time getting it out.” In this case the elitism is of those who

can “get it out”—and the question becomes: What is it about the world that keeps

most people from doing so or even thinking that they might be able to?

3. POLITICAL (R E)FOUNDING: T HE B IRTH O F T RAGEDY As I noted at the outset, BT is about how, through the sociopolitical cultural prac-

tice of the tragic festivals, the Greeks managed to “remain themselves,” that is,

Greek . One of the key points of Nietzsche’s book is (as Wilamowitz-Moellendorf

noticed in a footnote to the lengthy review in which he excoriated Nietzsche)

a quiet questioning of Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics that the high point of

tragedy came at the moment of anagnorisis , the moment when

the protagonist recognizes or finds himself for what he is.26 The paradigmaticmoment for Aristotle comes when Oedipus’s insight into who he is leads him

to blind himself. It is as an attack on Aristotle’s idea of the self as something to

be found by being seen that Nietzsche notes in the Genealogy that one should

not rush about with one’s only intention being to “bring something back home”

(GM P:1), a passage I take to be related to the implied critique of Aristotle that,

in turn, I take to govern BT —Aristotle having held, in Nietzsche’s understanding,

that who one is would be revealed at home and that one’s task, volens nolens , is

to get back. So Oedipus recognizes himself at the end in the home of his parents,

which, tragically, is also his home. Home, after all, is “the place where, whenyou go there, they have to let you in”—which Robert Frost noted as a tepid

consolation of necessity in an absence of freedom.27

The presumption in Nietzsche’s version of Aristotle is that for Aristotle one

must encounter who one is, as if who one is needs only to be seen . (As noted,

the key passage for Aristotle is the moment of recognition in Oedipus the King .)

The governing trope for Nietzsche is not looking back but looking forward. One

will have found oneself only when one has lost oneself and been freed from

what one was by love. Freedom here is the call to both the transforming of the

self and the building of a new culture, or a culture new because renewed—it isthe image of a journey rather than a return. The task is to transform the old such

that it can be appropriate for the new, without changing the quality of that which



TRACY B. STRONG 57

is Greek. Given the transformations of society, economy, and politics in the

eastern Mediterranean, Homer would no longer do, but Homer was the starting

point from which to reground Greece through tragedy. Thus already Aeschylus

knew that he was to give the Greeks, as we find in a fragment, “slices fromHomer’s mighty dinners.”28 Along these lines, I note that Nietzsche’s appeal to

the Dionysian does not refer to an attempt to go back to something that lies under

Greek life or the origins of that which is Greek but, rather, to more new devel-

opments that might serve in the transformation of the older Apollonian world.

Dionysus is not the origins of things Greek but, as we saw, the possibility of the

renewal and recovery, something the Greeks “succeed in inventing.”29

Against Aristotle, Nietzsche argues that tragedy produces Verwandlung (trans-

formation) and not (self-)recognition. The self is not found but achieved; the

picture is not that of turning around but of a path. Successful tragedy constitutesfor Nietzsche the sealing of a change not so much in what one is but in the natu-

ralness by which one is able to deal with the historically evolving conditions that

affect a culture (see PTAG 1; KGW III.2, 302–3).

How might one achieve this? Such an ability first requires, paradoxically, the

sense of an involved distance or objectivity from one’s own world. Nietzsche

writes of an audience that, helpless in its seats, is, like the chorus onstage,

unable to affect the course of the dramatic action and will thus not “run up and

free the god from his torments” ( BT 8). As spectators, the audience is in the same

inactive Dionysian state as is the chorus. Nietzsche writes: “The process of thetragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see oneself [as embodied

in the chorus] transformed before one’s very eyes [as member of the audience]

and to begin to act as if one had actually entered into another body, another

character” ( BT 8).30 It is thus, he argues, that tragedy effects a cultural trans-

formation in the citizenry-spectators. A potential subtitle to BT from fall 1870

reads “Considerations on the ethical-political significance of musical drama”

( KGW III.3, 106).

What might an age of a marriage of philosophy and tragedy have made pos-

sible?31 Part of the answer is to be found in Nietzsche’s claim that only in Greeceduring the “immense” period between Thales and Socrates has the philosopher

beenat homeand not a “chance random wanderer” ( PTAG1; KGW III.2, 303–33),

“conspiring against his fatherland” ( KGW III.2, 304–35). For a philosopher not

to be a “comet,” a culture is needed. His task, as he sets it, is “to describe the

world, in which the philosopher and the artist are at home” ( KGW III.4, 5). Thus,

Nietzsche writes that he wants “to know how philosophy behaves towards an

existing or developing culture which is not the enemy” ( KGW III.4, 141). In order

to know this, “one must know that which we call his age” ( KGW III.4, 221).

These early philosophers (to whom we refer as the “pre-Socratics” but whom Nietzsche usually calls the “pre-Platonics”) can only be understood, he avers, if

we “recognize in each of them the attempt and the initiative [ Ansatz ] to be a Greek




Reformer” ( KGW III.4, 131). The culture in which these philosophers were at

home was the “tragic age.” In other words, each of these philosophers embodied

an element of what it meant to do philosophy, something that in Greece was done

as the exponent and proponent of a culture. Philosophy and politics and tragedyare close to being coterminous–or they should be. The focus on the tragic age

has to do with whether or not the Greeks would successfully incorporate these

elements into the world that issued from the Peloponnesian War. In a collection

of fragments to which Nietzsche gave the general name “Science and Wisdom in

Conflict,” we find: “One can describe these older philosophers as those who felt

the Greek air and customs as a constraint and barrier: thus as self-liberators (the

war of Heraclitus against Homer and Hesiod, Pythagoras against secularization,

all against myth, especially Democritus)… . I conceive of them as the precursors

of a reformationof the Greeks: but not that of Socrates… . One set of occurrencescarried all of the reforming spirits along: the development of tragedy ” ( KGW IV.1,

180–81). Tragedy in this understanding is a “means” to carry out a reformation

and is to be seen as made possible by and as a continuation of the individual

achievements of the philosophers. Thus, PTAG is an investigation of what lies

behind and leads up to the developments discussed in BT . In the latter book, the

elements of that which was “Greek” remained unexamined. More importantly, the

role of philosophy in making tragedy possible and of tragedy in putting an end to

a tyranny and in making the polis possible had disappeared under the destructive

Socratic enterprise. If philosophy is consequent to and evincing of the “humanwillingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction,”

thus of humanness itself, then Nietzsche’s accusation against Socratism is that

its effects make such philosophy and the human impossible.32

This is, as I understand it, the central message in Heidegger’s analysis of

the great choral ode in Antigone on the human.33 Heidegger calls attention to

he who is hupsipolis —which he translates as hochüberragend : standing high

above, that is, not part of the polis. The polis, as Heidegger understands it, is

the “historical place, the There in which, from which and for which history

happens.”34To be above this—as a tyrant—is to beapolis . This is why philosophytempered with and by tragedy could have led to a “tragic age of the Greeks” and

to political health.

III. The Problem of Tyranny in Modern Times

Nietzsche in fact writes to Erwin Rohde in March 1873 that he is working on

a book about Greek philosophy that he thinks he may call “the philosopher as

the physician of culture.”35 He has hopes, in other words, to accomplish in his

time that which Socrates obviated in ancient Greece. However, that project—the

joining of philosophy and politics in tragedy—failed in Greece, and we are, for



TRACY B. STRONG 59

Nietzsche, the inheritors of that failure. What, then, is the problem of tyranny in

modern times? It makes a difference, says Nietzsche, whether it is “Homer, or

science [Wissenschaft ] or the Bible that tyrannizes” ( HH 262). But if it “makes

a difference,” the difference is not simply of the substitution of one tyrannical paradigm for another. It also makes a difference which paradigm it is that happens

to tyrannize—there is a difference in the kind of tyranny. In the second volume

of HH , he returns to his theme in a new context:

Tyrants of the Spirit —In our time we speak of each who would forcibly be theexpression of a moral discipline, such as the characters in Theophrastus and Molière, as ill and speak of a “fixed idea” in that relation. The Athenians of thethird century would appear to us as deluded madmen, if we could make a visit tothem. Now the democracy of concepts rules in every head:—the leader is manytaken together: a single idea that wishes to become master is now called, as wassaid, a “fixed idea.” This is our way of killing tyrants—we send them to an insane

asylum. (WS 230; KGW IV.2, 218)36

How has mankind passed from one to the other? What are we to make of that

change? What is the nature of that change? These are all questions that concerned

Nietzsche throughout his life. Indeed a preliminary answer is given already in

the continuation of an earlier citation from HH :

The period of the tyrants of the spirit is past. In the spheres of higher culture therewill always have to be a mastery, to be sure—but this mastery will hereafter lie

in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Despite their territorial and politicaldivisions, they constitute a close-knit society whose members know and recognizeone another, a thing which public opinion and the judgments of the writers for the

popular papers may circulate as expressions of favor and disfavor. The spiritualsuperiority which formerly divided and created hostility now tends to unite: howcould the individual keep himself aloft and, against every current, swim along hisown course through life if he did not see here and there others of his own kind livingunder the same conditions and take them by the hand, in struggle against both theochlocratic character of the half-spirited and half-educated and the attempts thatoccasionally occur to erect a tyranny with the aid of the masses? The oligarchshave need of one another, they have joy in one another, they understand their

emblems—but each of them is nonetheless free, he fights and conquers in hisown place, and would rather perish than submit. ( HH 261)37

Nietzsche here differentiates between tyranny and oligarchy. He opposes

both to ochlocracy, the rule by the mob. The nature of modernity is not only the

replacement of tyranny by oligarchy but a transformation of the political system

into one divided between a ruling elite and a potential mob. In “Politics as a

Vocation,” Max Weber lamented the disappearance of what Nietzsche saw as

the politics of antiquity. For the Fachmenschtum of the present, he writes, “the

price that has to be paid for having leaders… is only this stark choice: either a

democracy with a leader together with a machine, or a leaderless democracy, in

other words, the rule of professional politicians who have no vocation and lack

the inner charismatic qualities that turn a man into a leader.”38 Charisma—the




gift of grace—is of course the belief in oneself and in the universality (at least

for a people) of one’s voice. Paradoxically, the absence of those who take their

own vision to be universally valid generates both stability and a mass–elite

division. The present situation is one in which there is, as Nietzsche remarksin Z , “one herd and no shepherd,” where everyone is the same and wants the

same and where anyone who feels differently is sent to the insane asylum (Z

P:5). Tyranny in the ancient world was a natural potentiality. The achievement

of tragedy was to make tyranny impossible. But in the modern world, trag-

edy has disappeared. It has disappeared consequent to what Nietzsche calls

Socratic rationalism: if we do not want to blame Socrates, we can at least see

that the dynamic that he has identified is the same as what Weber called “the

demagification [ Entzauberung ] of the world through science.” The modern

world holds that there is an explanation for whatever happens and persistsin the pursuit of such explanations. The belief that there is a final and once-

and-for-all understanding is for Nietzsche a modern prejudice, consequent to

modern science unconsciously taking over the drives of Christian theology.39

The pursuit of such an understanding is thus a search for the tyrannical. But

since this search can never accomplish itself, modern man is in the position

of pursuing the unattainable—the consequences of which form the basis for

Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism.

It is for this reason that Nietzsche insists that the philosopher-tragedian (poet)

is a lawgiver, one who is able to say and to have acknowledged, “thus it shall be.” In the period of the morality of custom, “whoever wished to raise himself

above that had to become lawgiver, healer and in some manner a demi-god: that

is to say that he was to create customs—a task both frightening and of a mortal

peril” ( D 9).

It is important to realize that Nietzsche does not think that any pronounce-

ment of “thus shall it be” by any person will constitute the giving of a law. The

point of the above analysis was to show that Nietzsche thinks that a lawgiver

must have acquired certain qualities, qualities that he or she will have by training

rather than by constitution. It is a matter of entitlement. This is the point behind Weber’s question that serves as an epigraph to this essay.40

The matter is not as distant from us as we might like to think. What underlies

law? Take the following case. In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

the setting is a small western town, on the edge of the world of law, established

enough to have women and farmers, not established enough to have churches

and schools. The town is controlled by a cartel. Two characters set each other

off: the one, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is a feared gunslinger who lives by

his own law; the other, Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin), is also a gun-

slinger and enforces the will of the cartel. Both are men of skill and ability withthe guns that allow them to live by their own will. Into the town comes Ransom

Stoddard (James Stewart), a lawyer (whom Doniphon calls “tenderfoot” and

“Pilgrim”). He helps the women, is seen in an apron washing dishes, and winds



TRACY B. STRONG 61

up in a duel with Liberty Valance, a task that he does not avoid though he has

no skill with a gun. In the gunfight, Valance is shot dead. From the resultant

fame, Stoddard is elected senator when the territory becomes a state, breaks

the power of the evil cartel that had controlled the area, and institutes numerous progressive policies. He brings the rule of law. It turns out though that Valance

was shot not by Stoddard but by Doniphon, from hiding. Doniphon had been

in love with the woman whom Stoddard marries; knowing that her happiness

would only come with civilization, he had broken his own code, murdering

Valance by shooting him in the back so that it would appear that Stoddard was

a hero. When the now senator Stoddard later reveals this in an interview with

some reporters, one of them famously says: “When the legend becomes fact,

print the legend.” Like Nietzsche, Ford recognizes that law and civilization are

based on myth: in the f ilm he deconstructs this myth for the viewers without,however, depriving the myth of its power. Nietzsche would have been pleased

with the Apollonianism.

The Wayne character, like the Marvin character, is beyond the law, beyond

good and evil. The Marvin character can get away with it because he is strong; the

Wayne character can get away with it because he is strong enough to bring law into

existence, that is, to allow the existence of something other than the realization

of his own will.41 The effect of what Doniphon does in killing Liberty Valance

(such is the price—the valence—of human liberty under law, as it were) is to make

possible a legal and moral code. He makes it possible by killing Valance, but that possibility can only come about because it is not known that he killed Valance. In

Ford’s presentation, law and morality depend upon a veiling of origins, origins

that have as their intent bringing about a moral and legal world.

There is, one feels, something admirable about what the Wayne character has

done. Yet he has clearly acted beyond the law that makes civilization possible—

being hupsipolis, he is apolis. Like the Marvin character, he is unto himself, but

contrary to the Marvin character, while his actions are also beyond the law, they

make law possible.42 He knows that he does not matter, in the end. The fact that

we admire him is an indication, I think, of a response to what Nietzsche wasgetting at in his suggestion that law and philosophy will always carry the danger

of tyranny. The consequence for Doniphon is that he accepts his condition as

hupsipolis —he makes human society possible by removing himself from it, by

foregoing the fruits of his tyranny.

This is also the conclusion of The Tempest . To recognize others as human the

great magician Prospero knows what he must do:

But this rough magic

I here abjure, and, when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do,To work mine end upon their senses thatThis airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,




And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (Act V, scene 1)

Something like this understanding is captured by Nietzsche in the following

passage, which can, then, serve as conclusion. It is also entitled “tyrants of the

spirit,” but it is from Dawn :

The tyrants of the spirit .—The march of science is now no longer crossed by theaccidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case.Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance withthis universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everythingin the world seemed to be accommodated to man , the knowability of things wasalso accommodated to a human timespan. To solve everything at a stroke, witha single word—that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the imageof the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that inthe domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one’s goal in the manner of Alexander or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. “Thereis a riddle to be solved”: thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philoso-

pher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultationof being the “unriddler of the world” constituted the thinker’s dreams: nothingseemed worthwhile if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion

for him ! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyranni-

cal rule of the spirit—that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve—one only!—was doubted by none, and several, mostrecently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one.—From this it followsthat by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrow-ness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. “What do I matter!”—stands over the door of the thinker of the future. ( D 547)43

This is a philosophy for the “day after tomorrow” ( BGE 214): it is truthful and

does not believe in itself; only thus will it liberate and not tyrannize.44

Conclusion

These thoughts are, I hope, relevant to our times. As a personal, but not only

personal, note by way of concluding, in a public forum, George Kateb of Princeton

University called Bush a “tyrant.” In what does tyranny consist? For Nietzsche,

as we have seen, it is the insistence that the world is and is only as I will it to be.

Challenges should be ignored or eliminated. Similarly, in the Persian Letters ,

Montesquieu argued that it consists in requiring that others have no existence

for oneself except that which one allows them. This seems to me exactly right:tyranny consists in speaking for oneself and having the power to impose that

speech on others, to hear only one’s own words. I note with political distress that



TRACY B. STRONG 63

when Bush comes on the TV, I turn to the World Poker Tour. I did not do this

with Nixon or Reagan, much as I disagreed with them. My distress is almost

unpolitical, for my channel changing is a form of not being willing to share the

world with G. W. Bush. I want, in other words, not to deal with the fact that he isour president, that is, not to accept that he and I share what Nietzsche called, in

the sentence I quote in opening this essay, “the life of a people.” My avoidance

strikes me as dangerous: it is as if I were pretending to myself that he is not our

president, refusing to acknowledge the world of which he and I are a part. This

is a consequence of tyranny. As a response to tyranny it consists in allowing

that tyranny to be, as if it were not mine. (Hence we see the importance behind

Nietzsche’s approval of murder in ancient Athens.) If, speaking for myself, the

government in Washington today is hardly mine , we must not forget or avoid the

knowledge that, speaking for us, it is still, but perhaps barely, ours . That murder is not possible does not mean that we must be helpless.

University of California, San Diego

NOTES Portions of this essay are revised from my “Nietzsche on Tragedy and Tyranny,” in Confronting

Tyranny Ancient and Modern , ed. David Tabachnick (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,

2006), and from my “Philosophy and Cultural Revolution,” Philosophical Topics 33, no. 2

(2008).

1. It is often overlooked that Nietzsche discusses all these things in both BT and GM , as wellas elsewhere.

2. Compare the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseus in book 2 with that

between Menelaus and Antilochus over the relation between the order of victory and reward in the

chariot race, as mediated by Achilles in book 23.

3. See my “Oedipus as Hero: Family and Family Metaphors in Nietzsche,” boundary 2

(spring/fall 1981): 311–36.

4. See KGW VII.1, 686: “Die Grade der schaffenden Kraft / 1) der Schauspieler, eine

Figur aus sich machend, z.B./la Faustin / 2) der Dichter/der Bildner/der Maler / 3) der Lehrer—

Empedocles / 4) der Eroberer / 5) der Gesetzgeber (Philosoph)/überall ist erst der Typus noch zu

finden, außer auf den niedrigsten Stufen: es ist noch nicht die Leidens- und Freudensgeschichte

nachgewiesen. Die falschen Stellungen z.B. der Philosoph, sich außerhalb stellend—aber das istnur ein zeitweiliger Zustand und nöthig für das Schwangersein.”

5. Yeats writes in The Tower (“Fragments,” http://www.bibliomania.com/0/2/332/2431/

frameset.html) that the effect of Locke was to undermine or eliminate the possibility of Eden and

to initiate the Industrial Revolution:

Locke sank into a swoon;The Garden died;God took the spinning-jennyOut of his side.

6. See KGW VI.2, 390: “Halt, Widerstand, Stütze, Zwang, Zuchtmeister [the term he uses for

Schopenhauer], Tyrann, Gott.”7. I have explored this in the context of an analysis of the will to power in chapter 8 of my

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration , 3rd ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois

Press, 2001).




8. See the important discussion of the affinities between philosophy and tyranny in J. Peter

Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory. The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1990), 36–38, 248–50.

9. Montesquieu gives a version of this when in the Persian Letters (Paris: Gallimard “Folio,”

1973) he understands tyranny as the unwillingness to allow anyone an existence other than that

you permit them (see letters 156–58, for example).

10. Nietzsche associates Solon with philosophers (e.g., KGW III.3, 407). He also says that

Solon wanted “moderation” ( KSA 8:109) and that without Peisistratus the tyrant there would have

been no tragedy.

11. The quote is from an exchange between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève in Leo Strauss,

On Tyranny: Including the Strauss – Kojève Debate , ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth

(New York: Free Press, 1991), 165–66. See also my “Dimensions of the New Debate Around

Carl Schmitt,” in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1996), ix–xxvii; and my “The Sovereign and the Exception,” introduction to Carl Schmitt,

Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), vi–xxv.12. This is the basis of the analysis in Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” Cardozo Law Review

11, nos. 5–6 (July–August 1990): 919–1045; and John P. McCormick, “Derrida on Law: Or

Poststructuralism Gets Serious,” Political Theory , June 2001: 395–423.

13. This was the subject of his inaugural lecture at Basel, “Homer and Classical Philology”:

“We believe in a great poet as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey — but not that Homer was

this poet ” ( KGW II.1, 266).

14. Mitleid is a term associated with Schopenhauer. See Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis

of Morality (Providence: Berghahn, 1995).

15. For discussion of this question in Nietzsche, see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome

and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 49–54; and the essay by James

Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator ,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism , ed. Richard Schacht (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–201.

See also Steven Mulhall, “Perfectionism, Politics, and the Social Contract,” Journal of Political

Philosophy 2, no. 3 (September 1994): 222–39; as well as my “Nietzsche and the Song in the

Self,” New Nietzsche Studies 1, nos. 1–2 (1996): 1–15.

16. The term is ubiquitous in Emerson and plays much the same role as it does in the

Schopenhauer essay. See the essay “Love” in Essays, First Series in R. W. Emerson, Essays and

Lectures (New York: New American Library, 1983), 325–38; the essay “Experience” in Essays:

Second Series in Emerson, Essays and Lectures , 460–92; and the poem “Give All to Love” in The

Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

17. Nietzsche here is probably echoing the opening line of Emerson’s “Experience”: “Where

do we find ourselves?”18. “Pulled out” here calls to mind Emerson’s discussion of “provocation” in “The Divinity

School Address,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures , 79.

19. In TI “Skirmishes” 38, Nietzsche gives examples of how freedom has been attained in the

past and instantiates Rome and Venice.

20. To moralize morality means to attribute the quality of being good to morality itself.

Nietzsche is constantly concerned with the costs of the moral stance. See, e.g., Stanley Cavell,

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1999), 269.

21. “Feeling” ( Empfindung ) is the central theme of Wagner’s Opera and Drama (http://users.

belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0063.htm#d0e1920).

22. I read “die in Liebe verwandelte Natur” not as “nature transformed into love.”

23. The entire passage is: “Denn die unrichtige Empfindung reitet und drillt sie unablässig und

lässt durchaus nicht zu, dass sie sich selber ihr Elend eingestehen dürfen; wollen sie sprechen,



TRACY B. STRONG 65

so flüstert ihnen die Convention Etwas in’s Ohr, worüber sie vergessen, was sie eigentlich sagen

wollten; wollen sie sich mit einander verständigen, so ist ihr Verstand wie durch Zaubersprüche

gelähmt, so dass sie Glück nennen, was ihr Unglück ist, und sich zum eigenen Unsegen noch recht

geflissentlich mit einander verbinden. So sind sie ganz und gar verwandelt und zu willenlosen

Sclaven der unrichtigen Empfindung herabgesetzt” ( KGW IV.1, 33).

24. For a discussion of seeing and hearing in Nietzsche, see Babette Babich, “ Mousiké techné :

The Philosophical Praxis of Music in Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger,” in Gesture and Word: Thinking

Between Philosophy and Poetry , ed. Robert Burch and Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum,

2002), 171ff.

25. See my “Nietzsche and the Song in the Self.”

26. See U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, “Future Philology,” trans. and ed. Babette Babich,

New Nietzsche Studies 4, nos. 1-2 (2000): 32n52, though he focuses on Nietzsche’s downplaying

of hamartia . See also GS 80: “Aristotle … certainly did not hit the nail on the head when he

discussed the ultimate end of Greek tragedy.”

27. Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man,” III, lines 121–22, http://www.bartleby.com/118/3.html.

28. Quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists , Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1994), VIII 347E.

29. See James Porter, “After Philology,” New Nietzsche Studies 4, nos. 1–2 (2000): 33–76; my

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration , chap. 6; the beginning of Euripides’ The

Bacchae , trans. Michael Valaerie, http://euripidesofathens.blogspot.com/2008/01/introduction.

html; and J. Peter Euben, “Membership, Dis-memberment and Remembering,” in The Tragedy of

Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

30. For a full discussion, see my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration ,

161–82.

31. A modern attempt to make possible such a remarriage can be found in Cavell, The Claimof Reason . See more directly his Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

32. Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 9.

Compare Heidegger’s understanding of the human as the being for whom being is in question.

33. See Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976),

112–26, especially 116–17.

34. Ibid., 117.

35. Nietzsche to Rohde, March 1873, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Briefe , vol. 4

(Berlin: Gruyter, 1979), 136. The full texts from which, following the Kroner edition, Kremer-

Marietti and Breazeale select for their respective French- and English-language editions of “The

Book of the Philosopher” may be found in KGW III.4, 136ff.36. See WS 230; KGW IV.3, 295: “Tyrannen des Geistes.—In unserer Zeit würde man Jeden,

der so streng der Ausdruck Eines moralischen Zuges wäre, wie die Personen Theophrast’s und

Molière’s es sind, für krank halten, und von ‘fixer Idee’ bei ihm reden. Das Athen des dritten

Jahrhunderts würde uns, wenn wir dort einen Besuch machen dürften, wie von Narren bevölkert

erscheinen. Jetzt herrscht die Demokratie der Begriffe in jedem Kopfe,—viele zusammen sind

der Herr: ein einzelner Begriff, der Herr sein wollte, heisst jetzt, wie gesagt, ‘fixe Idee.’ Diess ist

unsere Art, die Tyrannen zu morden,—wir winken nach dem Irrenhause hin.”

37. See HH 261:

Die Periode der Tyrannen des Geistes ist vorbei. In den Sphären der höheren Cultur wird es freilich immer eine Herrschaft geben müssen, aber diese Herrschaft liegt von jetzt ab in den Händen der Oligarchen des Geistes. Sie bilden, trotz aller räumlichenund politischen Trennung, eine zusammengehörige Gesellschaft, deren Mitglieder sicherkennen und anerkennen, was auch die öffentliche Meinung und die Urtheile der auf




die Masse wirkenden Tages- und Zeitschriftsteller für Schätzungen der Gunst oder Abgunst in Umlauf bringen mögen. Die geistige Ueberlegenheit, welche früher trennteund verfeindete, pflegt jetzt zu binden: wie könnten die Einzelnen sich selbst behauptenund auf eigener Bahn, allen Strömungen entgegen, durch das Leben schwimmen, wenn

sie nicht ihres Gleichen hier und dort unter gleichen Bedingungen leben sähen und deren Hand ergriffen, im Kampfe eben so sehr gegen den ochlokratischen Charakter desHalbgeistes und der Halbbildung, als gegen die gelegentlichen Versuche, mit Hülfe der Massenwirkung eine Tyrannei aufzurichten? Die Oligarchen sind einander nöthig, siehaben an einander ihre beste Freude, sie verstehen ihre Abzeichen,—aber trotzdem ist einJeder von ihnen frei, er kämpft und siegt an seiner Stelle und geht lieber unter, als sichzu unterwerfen.

38. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures , ed. David Owen and Tracy

B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 75.

39. See Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1994).

40. See the analysis in David Owen and Tracy Strong, introduction to Weber, The Vocation Lectures , ix–lxxv.

41. I am indebted here to the analysis of this f ilm in Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 57-59.

42. I have developed this theme more extensively in “Where Are We When We Are Beyond

Good and Evil: Nietzsche and the Law,” Cardozo Law Review , January 2003: 535–47.

43. See D 547; KGW V.1, 321:

Die Tyrannen des Geistes.—Der Gang der Wissenschaft wird jetzt nicht mehr durch diezufällige Thatsache, dass der Mensch ungefähr siebenzig Jahre alt wird, gekreuzt, wie esallzulange der Fall war. Ehemals wollte Einer während dieses Zeitraumes an’s Ende der Erkenntnis kommen und nach diesem allgemeinen Gelüste schätzte man die Methoden

der Erkenntniss ab. Die kleinen einzelnen Fragen und Versuche galten als verächtlich,man wollte den kürzesten Weg, man glaubte, weil Alles in der Welt auf den Menschenhin eingerichtet schien, dass auch die Erkennbarkeit der Dinge auf ein menschlichesZeitmaass eingerichtet sei. Alles mit Einem Schlage, mit Einem Worte zu lösen,—daswar der geheime Wunsch: unter dem Bilde des gordischen Knotens oder unter dem desEies des Columbus dachte man sich die Aufgabe; man zweifelte nicht, dass es möglichsei, auch in der Erkenntniss nach Art des Alexander oder des Columbus zum Ziele zukommen und alle Fragen mit Einer Antwort zu erledigen. “Ein Räthsel ist zu lösen”: sotrat das Lebensziel vor das Auge des Philosophen; zunächst war das Räthsel zu f inden und das Problem der Welt in die einfachste Räthselform zusammenzudrängen. Der gränzenloseEhrgeiz und Jubel, der “Enträthsler der Welt” zu sein, machte die Träume des Denkers aus: Nichts schien ihm der Mühe werth, wenn es nicht das Mittel war, Alles für ihn zu Ende

zu bringen! So war Philosophie eine Art höchsten Ringens um die Tyrannenherrschaft desGeistes,—dass eine solche irgend einem Sehr-Glücklichen, Feinen, Erfindsamen, Kühnen,Gewaltigen vorbehalten und aufgespart sei,—einem Einzigen!—daran zweifelte Keiner,und Mehrere haben gewähnt, zuletzt noch Schopenhauer, dieser Einzige zu sein.—Darausergiebt sich, dass im Grossen und Ganzen die Wissenschaft bisher durch die moralischeBeschränktheit ihrer Jünger zurückgeblieben ist und dass sie mit einer höheren und grossmüthigeren Grundempfindung fürderhin getrieben werden muss. “Was liegt an

mir!”—steht über der Thür des künftigen Denkers.

44. See Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2005).

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