Nietzsche's Political Skepticism
Tamsin Shaw
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0691146535
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Political theorists have long been frustrated by Nietzsche's work. Although he develops profound critiques of morality, culture, and religion, it is very difficult to spell out the precise political implications of his insights. He himself never did so in any systematic way. In this book, Tamsin Shaw claims that there is a reason for this: Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism.
Shaw argues that the modern political predicament, for Nietzsche, is shaped by two important historical phenomena. The first is secularization, or the erosion of religious belief, and the fragmentation of moral life that it entails. The second is the unparalleled ideological power of the modern state. The promotion of Nietzsche's own values, Shaw insists, requires resistance to state ideology. But Nietzsche cannot envisage how these values might themselves provide a stable basis for political authority; this is because secular societies, lacking recognized normative expertise, also lack a reliable mechanism for making moral insight politically effective.
In grappling with this predicament, Shaw claims, Nietzsche raises profound questions about political legitimacy and political authority in the modern world.
ideals. Wagner had once manned the barricades in the Dresden uprising of 1849 and was subsequently exiled to Paris. There he immersed himself in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach and began to produce his programmatic 8 Friedrich Paulsen remarks on this narrowing in The German Universities and University Study. 9 The most widely quoted statement of this aspiration occurs in Wagner’s “Religion and Art” essay of 1880, where he writes, “One might say that where religion becomes artificial [künstlich],
I have used the abbreviations below for Nietzsche’s works. I have cited the translations listed with some modifications. I have used the Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–), which, where cited, I have abbreviated to KGW followed by volume and page number. BT OTL UM The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
few others will be problematic on the antirealist model. In this chapter I will defend the view that we must take this model, on the antirealist reading, to assume the following form: free or independent valuers will be those who generate value judgments in a way that is selfconscious about any physiological and psychological determinants, that is uninhibited by ideology, and that is unconstrained by any need for rational justification.3 The model raises the following problem. If I set out to
critical force of the claim that moral values originate in ressentiment, for example, has been construed in several different ways. It has been seen as part of an internal critique of moral judgments. Cf., e.g., Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 113. Brian Leiter criticizes this view, claiming that Nietzsche’s concern is to free “higher types” from the constraints of morality in the pejorative sense. On this view the account of the origins of these value judgments
EC, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 2. GM, Preface, 6. 45 Cf. EC, “Why I am Destiny,” 1: “The truth speaks out from me. — But my truth is terrible, because lies have been called truth so far. —Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of humanity’s highest self-examination, an act that has become eflsh and genius in me.” 46 This is the view that Hussain (“Honest Illusion”) attributes to Harold Langsam. Langsam himself claims that truth and falsity do not apply to value judgments (cf. Harold