Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration
Tracy B. Strong
Language: English
Pages: 357
ISBN: 0520028104
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Provides a comprehensive analysis of the politics that are implicit and explicit in Nietzsche's work. This book examines both the personal and the political sides of Nietzsche's writings to show how his writings can expand notions of democratic politics and democratic understanding.
and approve:d David Strauss. That he: had had such a hope: as a teacher is interesting about him as a person ; that he: came to perceive: his hope as impossible and left the University is significant. What Nietzsche: comes to see: in the course of his investigations is that illness he diagnosed - the development and triumph of nihilism in We:stem culture - goc=s far beyond a temporary aberration. It will not be possible to simply tell people what is wrong. for the very manner in whicb they
understanding of the nature of Greek culture? To assert, as one is tempted to, whether friendly or hostile to Nietzsche, that his results were flashes of poetic insight , or brilliant intuition , misses, I think, the real thrust and importance of his position . The fundamental intention of Nietzsche's work must be to recover and make manifest these underlying presuppositions which were the foundations of the coherence of Greek culture . It is apparent, for instance, that he does not intend a
that word and thing do not necessarily coincide with one another, but that the word is a symbol. But what does the word symbolize? Most certainly only conceptions, be they now conscious ones, or, as in the greater number of cases, unconscious ; for how could a word symbol correspond to that innermost nature of which we and the world are images? Only as conceptions do we know that kernel. .. .'>9 The language and imagery are still those of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche soon abandons the notion of the "
have established working circles of events. Hence the problem will .not simply be to expose the fact that men " alone have devised cause, sequences, for each other, relativity [!l) , constraint, number, law, freedom. motive, and purpose," and mixed and projected this symbol-world into things as if it existed in itself. Men have to do this. or something like it. But the particular language seems to be the-problem , now, and for these men. "Suppose," writes Nietzsche, "we have finally reached the
the contradiction : the ego must be independent to make moral choices, but the only choices that it can makc= to ~ moral are ones that deny its independence. For Nietzsche, any moral choice thereby leads to the destruction of that which makes it possible. Any given morality is characterized by the particular form this contradiction takes in it; in all cases, the moral system must stamp 98 I THE PSYCHOSOCIOLOGY OF ETHICS: THE BASIC TREND OF MORALITY out the drives toward individuality, even