Nietzsche and the Political: Tyranny, Tragedy, Cultural Revolution,

and Democracy
Tracy B. Strong

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 35/36, Spring/Autumn 2008,

pp. 48-66 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v035/35.strong.html

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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 ones hand on
the wheel of history?
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation

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 the
tensions in the Iliad.)2 That which was Greece was in need of refoundingthat
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 one
has 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 possible 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 heritage
and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 3536, 2008.
Copyright 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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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 limit
to 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 we
also know the better but cannot do it. But here and there a victory is nonetheless
achieved, and for the combatants, for those who employ critical history for the
sake of life, there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this first
nature 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 Zarathustras wish to replace fatherlands and
motherlands with his childrens land, but we might even say that Nietzsches
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 Nietzsche
argued, we are creatures of our pastwhether as fetishes, totems, or idolsthen
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 parentsand if one changes ones
parents, then one has engendered oneselfthat 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 188384, 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 teacherEmpedocles; 4/ the conqueror; 5/ the lawgiver (philosopher) (KGW VII.1, 686).4 All those named in this list have in common that
they construct, as we now say, realitythat 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 creation
and maintenance.

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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 ones own imageso much we might say is the lesson
that Nietzsche draws from Kantthe 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 metaphor, 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 iswill to power (BGE 211).
It follows from this, however, that Nietzsche does not, and cannot, simply assume
that one can at ones leisure forego this process. Why not? The most noteworthy
characteristics 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 ones 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 tyranny
was murder. Thus, the tyrants of the spirit were almost always murdered and
had only sparse lasting consequences (Nachkommenschaft) (KGW IV.1, 118;

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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 greaterso 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 lawgiver 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 ones 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 Kojve writes,
the philosophers 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 to
tyranny 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 ones 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 Nietzsches
answer is importantly political. The political system required the killing of
tyrants. Yet this solution to tyrannyone that was later to be given a central
place in Machiavellis conception of political foundationcannot 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. All
great spiritual powers exercise a suppressing effect in addition to their liberating
one (HH 262). Homer, Nietzsche concludes, tyrannizes.

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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.)13 The point of his analysis both of the pre-Socratics and of tragedy 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, 18081). 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
(ones 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 Nietzsches analysis is one of a failed opportunitya 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 Staatsmnner
(Wisdom and Science in Conflict, KGW IV.1, 17879). 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
Empedocleswhose 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 philosophers.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 effectuate this cultural revolution we have to look at several elements. They are all
present in Nietzsches 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 complexity. 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.

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II. Elements of the Project of Cultural Revolution

1. THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
The aim of SE is to establish what is necessary for it to be possible for one to
attach ones heart to that which one wishes to becomein 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
Schopenhauers work. As he planned the essay, Nietzsche entertained the possibility 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 relation 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 lovea 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 nothing 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 loveand 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
philosophyof educationis not one of self-recognition. The question is if it
is possible to find exemplars that one can recognize as ones own and with the
explicit knowledge that one is not (yet) the exemplar. Exemplars will also be different for each. It is thus not coming to know how you 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 ones 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 each
glance 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

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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 here
calls 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 principle available to everyone.) Why, however,
are such modelsthe ones that one might love, that are the principle of freedom
and findingnot available? Nietzsches answer cannot detain us here but is the
beginning of what will be a lifelong theme. He tentatively attributes this to a
double 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, 34041),
drawn toward two incompatible polesbelief and nonbeliefby 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 lovethe capacity for philosophyis rare, almost
nonexistent. Why so? Nietzsche then ties this to a tendency in modern philosophy
to 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 any
moment of ones 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 45; KGW IV.1, 2426).
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 the
case 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.

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Nietzsche writes:
As soon as men come to an understanding with one another, and to unite for a
common 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 communicate, 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 hollowness
of 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 words
and 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 feeling. 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 to
nature 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 thousands 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 Wagners music all that is visible in the world wants to become more profound 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 with
ones eyes. Indeed, and in consequence, the beginning of the philosophical
mind, writes Nietzsche, comes in the amazement that becoming is the actuality 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 philosophical drive. At the end of RWB, he indicates that it is the glory of Wagners
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

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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, 7576).25 Wagner was to be for everyone, at least
in Nietzsches understanding.
Here we have an insight into the nature of Nietzsches 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 outand 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 (RE)FOUNDING: THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

As I noted at the outset, BT is about how, through the sociopolitical cultural practice of the tragic festivals, the Greeks managed to remain themselves, that is,
Greek. One of the key points of Nietzsches book is (as Wilamowitz-Moellendorf
noticed in a footnote to the lengthy review in which he excoriated Nietzsche)
a quiet questioning of Aristotles 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 paradigmatic
moment for Aristotle comes when Oedipuss insight into who he is leads him
to blind himself. It is as an attack on Aristotles 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 ones 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 BTAristotle having held, in Nietzsches understanding,
that who one is would be revealed at home and that ones 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, when
you go there, they have to let you inwhich Robert Frost noted as a tepid
consolation of necessity in an absence of freedom.27
The presumption in Nietzsches 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 renewedit is
the 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

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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 from
Homers mighty dinners.28 Along these lines, I note that Nietzsches 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 developments 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 (transformation) 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 constitutes
for Nietzsche the sealing of a change not so much in what one is but in the naturalness by which one is able to deal with the historically evolving conditions that
affect a culture (see PTAG 1; KGW III.2, 3023).
How might one achieve this? Such an ability first requires, paradoxically, the
sense of an involved distance or objectivity from ones 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 the
tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see oneself [as embodied
in the chorus] transformed before ones 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 transformation 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 possible?31 Part of the answer is to be found in Nietzsches claim that only in Greece
during the immense period between Thales and Socrates has the philosopher
been at home and not a chance random wanderer (PTAG 1; KGW III.2, 30333),
conspiring against his fatherland (KGW III.2, 30435). 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

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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 tragedy
are close to being coterminousor 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 reformation of the Greeks: but not that of Socrates . One set of occurrences
carried all of the reforming spirits along: the development of tragedy (KGW IV.1,
18081). 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 human
willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction,
thus of humanness itself, then Nietzsches 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 Heideggers analysis of
the great choral ode in Antigone on the human.33 Heidegger calls attention to
he who is hupsipoliswhich he translates as hochberragend: 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.34 To be above thisas a tyrantis to be apolis. This is why philosophy
tempered 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 projectthe
joining of philosophy and politics in tragedyfailed in Greece, and we are, for

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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 tyrannizethere 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 SpiritIn our time we speak of each who would forcibly be the
expression of a moral discipline, such as the characters in Theophrastus and
Molire, as ill and speak of a fixed idea in that relation. The Athenians of the
third century would appear to us as deluded madmen, if we could make a visit to
them. Now the democracy of concepts rules in every head:the leader is many
taken together: a single idea that wishes to become master is now called, as was
said, a fixed idea. This is our way of killing tyrantswe 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 there
will always have to be a mastery, to be surebut this mastery will hereafter lie
in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Despite their territorial and political
divisions, they constitute a close-knit society whose members know and recognize
one 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 spiritual
superiority which formerly divided and created hostility now tends to unite: how
could the individual keep himself aloft and, against every current, swim along his
own course through life if he did not see here and there others of his own kind living
under the same conditions and take them by the hand, in struggle against both the
ochlocratic character of the half-spirited and half-educated and the attempts that
occasionally occur to erect a tyranny with the aid of the masses? The oligarchs
have need of one another, they have joy in one another, they understand their
emblemsbut each of them is nonetheless free, he fights and conquers in his
own 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 Charismathe

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gift of graceis of course the belief in oneself and in the universality (at least
for a people) of ones voice. Paradoxically, the absence of those who take their
own vision to be universally valid generates both stability and a masselite
division. The present situation is one in which there is, as Nietzsche remarks
in 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, tragedy 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 persists
in the pursuit of such explanations. The belief that there is a final and onceand-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 unattainablethe consequences of which form the basis for
Nietzsches 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 customsa task both frightening and of a mortal
peril (D 9).
It is important to realize that Nietzsche does not think that any pronouncement 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
Webers 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 Fords 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 gunslinger and enforces the will of the cartel. Both are men of skill and ability with
the 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

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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 film 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 pricethe valenceof 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
Fords 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 was
getting 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
hupsipolishe 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 that
This airy charm is for, Ill break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

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And deeper than did ever plummet sound
Ill 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 the
accidental 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 with
this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted
contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything
in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was
also accommodated to a human timespan. To solve everything at a stroke, with
a single wordthat was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image
of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in
the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach ones goal in the manner of
Alexander or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. There
is a riddle to be solved: thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; 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 exultation
of being the unriddler of the world constituted the thinkers dreams: nothing
seemed 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 tyrannical rule of the spiritthat some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and
mighty man was in reserveone only!was doubted by none, and several, most
recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one.From this it follows
that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness 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 ones own words. I note with political distress that

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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 is
our 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
Nietzsches 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 well
as 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): 31136.
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)/berall ist erst der Typus noch zu
finden, auer auf den niedrigsten Stufen: es ist noch nicht die Leidens- und Freudensgeschichte
nachgewiesen. Die falschen Stellungen z.B. der Philosoph, sich auerhalb stellendaber das ist
nur ein zeitweiliger Zustand und nthig fr 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-jenny
Out of his side.
6. See KGW VI.2, 390: Halt, Widerstand, Sttze, 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).

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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), 3638, 24850.
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 15658, 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 Kojve in Leo Strauss,
On Tyranny: Including the StraussKojve Debate, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth
(New York: Free Press, 1991), 16566. 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), ixxxvii; and my The Sovereign and the Exception, introduction to Carl Schmitt,
Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), vixxv.
12. This is the basis of the analysis in Jacques Derrida, Force of Law, Cardozo Law Review
11, nos. 56 (JulyAugust 1990): 9191045; and John P. McCormick, Derrida on Law: Or
Poststructuralism Gets Serious, Political Theory, June 2001: 395423.
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 Odysseybut 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), 4954; and the essay by James
Conant, Nietzsches Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator, in Nietzsches
Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181201.
See also Steven Mulhall, Perfectionism, Politics, and the Social Contract, Journal of Political
Philosophy 2, no. 3 (September 1994): 22239; as well as my Nietzsche and the Song in the
Self, New Nietzsche Studies 1, nos. 12 (1996): 115.
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), 32538; the essay Experience in Essays:
Second Series in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 46092; 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 Emersons Experience: Where
do we find ourselves?
18. Pulled out here calls to mind Emersons 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 Wagners 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 unablssig und
lsst durchaus nicht zu, dass sie sich selber ihr Elend eingestehen drfen; wollen sie sprechen,

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so flstert ihnen die Convention Etwas ins Ohr, worber sie vergessen, was sie eigentlich sagen
wollten; wollen sie sich mit einander verstndigen, so ist ihr Verstand wie durch Zaubersprche
gelhmt, so dass sie Glck nennen, was ihr Unglck 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, Mousik techn:
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 Nietzsches 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 12122, 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. 12 (2000): 3376; 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,
16182.
31. A modern attempt to make possible such a remarriage can be found in Cavell, The Claim
of 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 Heideggers understanding of the human as the being for whom being is in question.
33. See Martin Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1976),
11226, especially 11617.
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, KremerMarietti 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 wrde man Jeden,
der so streng der Ausdruck Eines moralischen Zuges wre, wie die Personen Theophrasts und
Molires es sind, fr krank halten, und von fixer Idee bei ihm reden. Das Athen des dritten
Jahrhunderts wrde uns, wenn wir dort einen Besuch machen drften, wie von Narren bevlkert
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 Sphren der hheren Cultur
wird es freilich immer eine Herrschaft geben mssen, aber diese Herrschaft liegt von
jetzt ab in den Hnden der Oligarchen des Geistes. Sie bilden, trotz aller rumlichen
und politischen Trennung, eine zusammengehrige Gesellschaft, deren Mitglieder sich
erkennen und anerkennen, was auch die ffentliche Meinung und die Urtheile der auf

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die Masse wirkenden Tages- und Zeitschriftsteller fr Schtzungen der Gunst oder
Abgunst in Umlauf bringen mgen. Die geistige Ueberlegenheit, welche frher trennte
und verfeindete, pflegt jetzt zu binden: wie knnten die Einzelnen sich selbst behaupten
und auf eigener Bahn, allen Strmungen entgegen, durch das Leben schwimmen, wenn
sie nicht ihres Gleichen hier und dort unter gleichen Bedingungen leben shen und
deren Hand ergriffen, im Kampfe eben so sehr gegen den ochlokratischen Charakter des
Halbgeistes und der Halbbildung, als gegen die gelegentlichen Versuche, mit Hlfe der
Massenwirkung eine Tyrannei aufzurichten? Die Oligarchen sind einander nthig, sie
haben an einander ihre beste Freude, sie verstehen ihre Abzeichen,aber trotzdem ist ein
Jeder von ihnen frei, er kmpft und siegt an seiner Stelle und geht lieber unter, als sich
zu 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, Nietzsches 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, ixlxxv.
41. I am indebted here to the analysis of this film 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: 53547.
43. See D 547; KGW V.1, 321:
Die Tyrannen des Geistes.Der Gang der Wissenschaft wird jetzt nicht mehr durch die
zufllige Thatsache, dass der Mensch ungefhr siebenzig Jahre alt wird, gekreuzt, wie es
allzulange der Fall war. Ehemals wollte Einer whrend dieses Zeitraumes ans Ende der
Erkenntnis kommen und nach diesem allgemeinen Gelste schtzte man die Methoden
der Erkenntniss ab. Die kleinen einzelnen Fragen und Versuche galten als verchtlich,
man wollte den krzesten Weg, man glaubte, weil Alles in der Welt auf den Menschen
hin eingerichtet schien, dass auch die Erkennbarkeit der Dinge auf ein menschliches
Zeitmaass eingerichtet sei. Alles mit Einem Schlage, mit Einem Worte zu lsen,das
war der geheime Wunsch: unter dem Bilde des gordischen Knotens oder unter dem des
Eies des Columbus dachte man sich die Aufgabe; man zweifelte nicht, dass es mglich
sei, auch in der Erkenntniss nach Art des Alexander oder des Columbus zum Ziele zu
kommen und alle Fragen mit Einer Antwort zu erledigen. Ein Rthsel ist zu lsen: so
trat das Lebensziel vor das Auge des Philosophen; zunchst war das Rthsel zu finden und
das Problem der Welt in die einfachste Rthselform zusammenzudrngen. Der grnzenlose
Ehrgeiz und Jubel, der Entrthsler der Welt zu sein, machte die Trume des Denkers aus:
Nichts schien ihm der Mhe werth, wenn es nicht das Mittel war, Alles fr ihn zu Ende
zu bringen! So war Philosophie eine Art hchsten Ringens um die Tyrannenherrschaft des
Geistes,dass eine solche irgend einem Sehr-Glcklichen, Feinen, Erfindsamen, Khnen,
Gewaltigen vorbehalten und aufgespart sei,einem Einzigen!daran zweifelte Keiner,
und Mehrere haben gewhnt, zuletzt noch Schopenhauer, dieser Einzige zu sein.Daraus
ergiebt sich, dass im Grossen und Ganzen die Wissenschaft bisher durch die moralische
Beschrnktheit ihrer Jnger zurckgeblieben ist und dass sie mit einer hheren und
grossmthigeren Grundempfindung frderhin getrieben werden muss. Was liegt an
mir!steht ber der Thr des knftigen Denkers.
44. See Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005).

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