Nietzsche on War (revised thoughts on themes, rhetoric and strategies of violence) V

Already in 1872, the same year as the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, the posthumously published ‘Homer’s on Competition’ suggests some horror at the cruelty of Alexander, compared even with the characteristic violence of Achilles in The Illiad, that could be taken as a distancing from Macedonian-Prussian military spirit. The Prussian army of Moltke the Elder, was not free of ugly incidents, but did not have the brutal reputation of the First World War German army in occupied Belgium, never mind the horrors that unfolded from 1939 to 1945.

Nevertheless Moltke was the agent of the transformation  of 1870, so marked an identification of Prussia, and to some dare Germany as a whole, with war as main form of politics. The Franco-Prussian war did feature a siege of Paris, followed by bombardment, part of the background to the Paris Commune, so there was a beginning to the systematic suffering of civilians who encountered Prussian and German forces, and an end to the idea that Prussian militarism was essentially part of a defensive security guarantee against larger European powers.

The role of the Franco-Prussian war in provoking a plebeian and radical intellectual revolt in Paris was not at all desirable for Nietzsche, and with this convergence of events, it is not surprising that he was to end up thinking of plebeian socialism and militarist nationalism dominating his era, with both threatening culture as Nietzsche understood it. Even The Birth of Tragedy is not suggestive of great enthusiasm for nationalism and militarism. It has an anti-political element to it in resisting the idea that the tragic chorus can be taken as the voice of the people (The Birth of Tragedy 7/Nietzsche 1999, 7), and though this is directed at democracy rather than nationalism, it seems to indicate Nietzsche’s general attitude towards politics in literature, since he resists symbolism of prince or people in tragedy at this point.

The Apolline is linked with the Doric state and the Dionysian has suggestions of plebeian chaos, with no validation of either in Nietzsche’s account. The Birth of Tragedy suggests more a combination of aesthetic tension and aesthetic harmony than a political program. ‘The Greek State’ written in parallel, but only published in Nietzsche’s lifetime as part of a presentation to Cosima Wagner, does add a political perspective which is one of enthusiasm both for slavery and war as necessary to the state and to culture. Strictly speaking slavery is necessary to society, which includes the possibility of a cultured elite, and war is necessary to the state. The most pure Doric state, Sparta, is placed as a model over Plato’s ideal state despite Plato’s enthusiasm for Sparta and his placing of soldiers as part of the guardian class in the best imaginable polity.

The fact that he [Plato] did not place genius, in its most general sense, at the head of his perfect state, but only the genius of wisdom and knowledge, excluding the inspired artist entirely from state, was a rigid consequence of the Socratic judgment on art, which Plato, struggling against himself, adopted as his own.

For Nietzsche, what Plato’s state lacks is art because he only accepts the genius of wisdom and knowledge, not of the artist. Though in one perspective Nietzsche is less militarily oriented than Plato at this point, in the same essay can also be positive about the militarist state. While the solider class has a guardian role in Plato’s Republic, it is of course subordinate to the overall guardianship of philosophers.

Nietzsche does mention just before the passage above, the archetypal military nature of the state and the importance of creating military geniuses, as in the constitution of Lycurgus, the legendary legislator of Sparta. So at this point it looks as if Nietzsche advocates some necessity for military genius in the state, but not on the same level as artistic genius.   Nietzsche builds on an idea common to Greek and Roman political thinkers, such as Plato, Polybius, and Cicero, which is that  of the military structure as central to the form of the state, as well as the basic role of the state in providing security from foreign invasion. He is extending on that thought in associating the military spirit directly with legislative genius and in a less direct way with artistic genius.

Both artistic and military genius are necessary to Nietzsche’s own ideal state at this point, with the first lacking in Plato and the second subordinated. At this point it seems reasonable to suppose that Nietzsche considered Prussian military genius in Moltke, political genius in Bismarck, and Saxon artistic genius removed to Bavaria, in Wagner, as part of the same elite culture for which the less cultured masses were mere instruments. Though given the overriding importance of artistic genius it is not surprising that Nietzsche later regards culture, so art as part of culture, as constrained and under threat from the state in plebeian socialist and militarist nationalist forms.

(to be continued)

Nietzsche on War (revised thoughts on themes, rhetoric and strategies of violence) IV

That Nietzsche in the end rejected the Prussian-German state and restricted his admiration of the warrior to historical models rather than the German officer corps of his time, says something both about the  limits of the German military as a sphere of individuality and and the destablising nature of Nietzsche’s though which always undermines institutions and customs, while in some moments appearing to demand the intensification of their authority.  This historical and political context gives ‘On War and Warriors’ in Zarathustra a location beyond that of Nietzsche simply reflecting on the nature of the warrior as such.

You may have only those enemies whom you can hate, but not enemies to despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the successes of your enemy are your successes too. Rebellion—that is the nobility of slaves. Let your nobility be obedience! Your commanding itself shall be obeying! To a good warrior “thous shalt” sounds nice than “I will.” And everything you hold dear you should have commanded to you. Let your love for life be love for your highest hope, and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life! But you shall have your highest thought commanded by me—and it says: human being is something that shall be overcome. So live your life of obedience and war! What matters living long! Which warrior wants to be spared! I spare you not, I love you thoroughly, my brothers in war!—

Part of the background to this is the account Nietzsche gives of what is deficient in the culture of Germany at the time of the defeat of France and the formation of the Hohenzollern Empire in ‘David Strauss, the confessor and the writer’ (the first of the Untimely Meditations) in relation to his slightly preceding thought on the matter since The Birth of Tragedy and ‘The Greek State’, though it is still some years before he makes an explicit break with the earlier Wagner mania. In the meditation on Strauss, Prussia is in the role of Macedonia in relation to the smaller German states, that is it is a military imperial power lacking in the cultural achievements of Athens as a product of the independent Greek city states. Military political power is situated as the opposite of cultural greatness, with acknowledgement of Prussian-German greatness in war serving as more of an accusation than a tribute.

‘David Strauss, the confessor and the writer’ [1873] 1 Of all the evil consequences, however, which have followed the recent war with France perhaps the worst is a widespread, indeed universal, error: the error committed by public opinion and by all who express their opinions publicly, that German culture too was victorious in that struggle and must now therefore be loaded with garlands appropriate to such an extraordinary achievement. This delusion is in the highest degree destructive: not because it is a delusion—for there exist very salutary and productive errors—but because it is capable of turning our victory into a defeat: into the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the ‘German Reich’. Even supposing that a war of this kind were in fact a war between two cultures, the value of the victor would still be a very relative one and could certainly not justify choruses of victory or acts of self-glorification. For one would have to know what the defeated culture had been worth: perhaps it was worth very little: in which case the victory of the victorious culture, even if attended by the most magnificent success in arms, would constitute no invitation to ecstatic triumphs. On the other hand, in the present case there can be no question of a victory of German culture, for the simple reason that French culture continues to exist as heretofore, and we are dependent upon it as heretofore. Our culture played no part even in our success in arms. Stern discipline, natural bravery and endurance, superior generalship, unity and obedience in the ranks, in short, elements that have nothing to do with culture, procured for us the victory over opponents in whom the most important of these elements were lacking: the wonder is that that which at present calls itself ‘culture’ in Germany proved so small an obstacle to the military demands which had to met for the achievement of a great success—perhaps it was only because that which calls itself culture saw a greater advantage in subordinating itself this time.

So Prussia-Germany presumably occupies the cultural space of Hellenism, the supposed decline of Greek thought and culture, criticised by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy in the area that formed the empire of Alexander the Great, and in which the great centre of Greek culture was now Alexandria rather than Greece. Questions might arise about whether Berlin was the modern equivalent of Pella or Alexandria, or both, but we do not need to pursue the parallels further except to note that Nietzsche moved towards a view of Wagner which in the end might make Bayreuth a failed attempt at a modern Athens.

(to be continued)

Nietzsche on War (revised thoughts on themes, rhetoric and strategies of violence) III

Previous prominent Prussian thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt saw moral value and the enhancement of individual capacities in war, even if their overall political vision was liberal, pacific and cosmopolitan.

Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage; whereas a long peace causes the spirit of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice and weakness, and usually debases the mentality of the populace. (Critique of the Power of Judgment Prussian Academy Edition 5.63.)

[W]ar seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene. It is the fearful extremity through which all that active courage—all that endurance and fortitude—are steeled and tested, which afterward achieve such varied results in the ordinary conduct of life, and which alone give it that strength and diversity, without which facility is weakness, and unity is inanity. (The Limits of State Action, Chapter V. Humboldt)

We can see both in Kant, the academic philosopher, and Humboldt the state servant as well as a writer on politics and language, that war, culture, and ethical goals are interactive and mutually reinforcing. The related way of thinking of Prussia, or Prussian led Germany, as possessing both cultural and heroic virtues precedes them and goes up to the disintegration of that legacy in the total defeat of Germany in 1945 and forms a large part of the context of Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche was not himself from the Prussian lands of Frederick the Great’s time, but his home town of Röcken, along with the rest of northern Saxony, was absorbed into Prussia at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. Apparently, Nietzsche had an early inclination towards the Prussian military tradition, welcoming the chance to perform his military service as a cavalry man and we can presume thinking of himself as spiritually descended from the Greek warrior heroes of antiquity.

The idea that a Hohenzollern German officer had such a spiritual ancestry can be found as late as Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg, 1924], and indeed even later in a real life character such as Claus von Stauffenburg. That is the World War Two colonel famous for his attempted assassination of Hitler. He was a man of considerable literary and cultural sensibility, part of the ‘Secret Germany’ circle round Stefan George, influenced by Nietzsche amongst other German writers of an ‘aristocratic’ spirit.

Stauffenberg was also a man of considerable classical learning and historical conciseness of Medieval Germany warrior Emperors, following on from the connections of his ancestors at that time. Stauffenberg was Swabian rather than Prussian, but given his life and military career took place some time after Prussia absorbed the whole of Germany, we can reasonably place him in connection with Prussian tradition.

Leaving aside the discredited attempts of National Socialist ideologues and hangers on to appropriate Nietzsche, he was one point of reference for aristocratic officers of the thirties and forties, who placed themselves within a tradition of aesthetic and intellectual excellence, merging martial and intellectual virtues. Stauffenberg was clearly something of an exception in his high cultural level, but he is recognisably a product of a military-aristocratic tradition which at all times was exceptional in its adherence to the initiative of officers. It provided a sphere of educated individuality at times when the Prussian-German state was autocratic and promoted social conformity.

Another example of the last years of this tradition is the great grand nephew of Moltke the Elder, Helmuth James von Moltke. He was a member of Kreisau Circle, opposed to Hitler, some of whose members were associated with the Stauffenberg conspiracy, and Moltke himself was executed in 1945. While it it true that the Stauffenberg and Kreisau circles were aristocratic and conservative (though Stauffenberg himself had relations with the leftwing parts of the Widerstand), and were late in attempting assassination, anyone who studies these movements and the leading members will see that there is more to them than just cliques of nationalist aristocrats opportunistically breaking with Hitler when it became clear the war was lost, though there was certainly an element of that.

The Prussian (in association with other German regions) aristocrat-officer class was certainly culpable for at least co-operating with the National Socialists and even supporting Nazi ideology in many cases, and having an anti-democratic attitude in the Weimar republic, but people like Moltke and Stauffenberg showed something else within that tradition, paying the highest price for doing so. This takes us beyond Nietzsche in time and beyond philosophical discussion, but it does give useful indications of what it was exactly that Nietzsche was initially sympathising with and then criticising.

(to be continued)

Nietzsche on War (revised thoughts on themes, rhetoric and strategies of violence) II

In The Birth of Tragedy, Attic tragedy is a temporary resolution of the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apolline. In a more radical analysis Zarathustra is seen to overthrow his own  teachings. In his attacks on the mediocrity of the state and the neighbour, there is always the hope of the return of the superior art, the superior individual, and the superior rulers. Superiority rests on conflict, on the undermining of hierarchy, and on new acts of violence on institutionalised orders.

The strategies of writing are formed by the physical and ideational aspects of the conflicting forces at work in the growth of life and the transformation of hierarchies. So conflicts which have some aspect of war about them and require references to war to explain them. The above suggests that in some ways, then, Nietzsche must be committed to a philosophy of war, a phrase that itself can refer to a philosophical commendation of war and a philosophical analysis of war. Both can be found in Nietzsche, but not in a sense that should allow us to think of Nietzsche as simply justifying the ‘blonde beast’ conqueror of the Genealogy or the Homeric warriors discussed with regard to master morality in Genealogy I. Zarathustra admires the warrior, but is not a warrior, his goal is to become like the child, not the lion, of the three metamorphoses. In some moments,

Nietzsche can be very critical of the military spirit, as can be seem in his lofty dismissal of the militarism of Bismarckian Prussia-Germany. That reaction to the high value of the military in the Hohenzollern state, first Brandenburg, then Prussia and then finally the German Empire (half of which was the Kingdom of Prussia) is particularly significant since war, and the qualities of the warrior (in practice of the aristocratic officer) had a particularly elevated role in the Hohenzollern state.

The Prussian-German state was not unique in emerging from a series of successful wars and sovereignty maintained through the monopoly of organised violence, but it was distinctive in how far its existence and growth rested on dramatic military triumphs, particularly in the wars of Frederick the Great (War of Austrian Succession and Seven Years War) and of Helmuth Moltke the Elder (wars with Denmark, Austria and France), which led to the formation of the Empire.

The Napoleonic Wars, which greatly extended Prussian territories in the end, were maybe not so characterised by great Prussian victories against apparently stronger powers, but did give a special role to the military in the centrality of commanders like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the reforms of Prussia after early losses to Napoleon; and the writing of Carl von Clausewitz, often taken as the greatest contribution to the theory of war in the whole history of the subject, and which itself emphasises an idea of the commander as ‘genius’, that is possessing an exceptional capacity to unify the perspective of overall strategy and the quickly changing localised tactical perspectives of the battle itself.

The Prussian system, in its classical form under Frederick the Great, offered the aristocracy and those who rose in social status through an army career, an opportunity for individuality and autonomy on the battlefield within an autocratic system. Von Moltke’s had three famous victories from 1864 to 1870, particularly against the apparently greater power of Austria (1866) and France (1870), following on victory against a minor power Denmark, nevertheless remarkable because  achieved with great strategic skill in taking the war to the island parts of Denmark. These  confirmed the image of a state with a strength that rested on military success against the odds because of superior discipline, innovative aristocratic officers, and a touch of creative genius amongst its highest commanders.

(to be continued)

Why Republican Libertarianism? III

Me at the group blog Notes On Liberty

Notes On Liberty

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

There is a gap between ancient Athens and classical liberalism, and covering that gap will explain more about the development from antique republics to modern liberty. The trio of major antique republican thinkers mentioned above, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, sets up the tradition. They establish the idea of the best state – polity/politea in Greek, republic/res publica in Latin – as one of hearing political power between groups in the context of shared citizenship and decision making.

For Aristotle, that is the sharing of power between oligarchs (the rich, in practice…

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Schmitt Not So Decisionist

Me at the group blog New APPS on Carl Schmitt. Opening two paragraphs below.

Nothing new to say about Schmitt here, but I think there is something to be said for clarifying in what ways Schmitt is not ‘Schmittian’ in some senses that influence some people. This issue came up in a teaching context recently and I think refers to a widespread tendency, which I believe can be tackled without hopefully falling into assault and battery on a straw man in order to clarify what is distinctive about Schmitt’s contribution.

The issue is of defining Carl Schmitt as a ‘decisionist’ who regards the question of who exercises sovereignty as arbitrary, as a question which begins and ends with the question who has the force to exercise sovereignty, with no regard for the legitimation of that sovereignty. This is severely one- sided, but does have some basis in some things Schmitt said, particularly in Political Theology, The Concept of the Political, and Crisis in Parliamentary Democracy. The opening of Political Theology and a slightly later in the text quotation from Kierkegaard, with related discussion, is where decisionistic Schmitt seems most apparent.

Now read on

Nietzsche on War (revised thoughts on themes, rhetoric and strategies of violence)

The Birth of Tragedy, ‘An Attempt at Self Criticism’ 4

And as far as the origin of the tragic chorus is concerned — did perhaps endemic fits exist during those centuries when the Greek body was in its prime and the Greek soul brimmed over with life?  (Nietzsche 1999, 7)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On Reading and Writing’

Of all that is written I love only which is written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit. (Nietzsche 2006, 27)

On the Genealogy of Morality , II. 17

[…] the oldest ‘state’ emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until until the raw material of people and semi-animals had finally not just been kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. (Nietzsche 1994, 62-63)

In The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche suggests a liaison between the violent actions of the body, in the uncontrolled ways of illness, and the maximisation of life force, taking place in the tragic chorus. Here violence is at the origin of art in the sense that the highest form of art comes from a physical excess where the abundance of health becomes the collapse of the body in the growth of natural forces within it.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, writing —which we can take to be writing of philosophical or literary significance — where it has great value is a product of blood taken as spirit. There is a metaphorical move from writing to blood and then another metaphorical move from blood to spirit. The metaphors combine in the idea of physical violence in the philosophical-literary writing that we are reading. Not only is blood a product of the body, it is the aspect of the body which is most associated with attack on the body, with external violence in war or other conflictual situations. It is also suggestive of acts of violence on the self including suicide, so in this context of asceticism and sacrifice for communication, and for art, of the highest value.

In the Genealogy, the suggestion is of a purely external kind of violence in the formation of the state, that is external in that this must be the violence of an elite on the masses, thought of as half-animals, which is rather suggestive of antique aristocratic attitudes towards the ‘people’. It could be an even more external form of violence, in that other passages of the Genealogy refer to the state as the product of conquests, and to the formation of European nations in the first place through violent conquest imposed on the earliest inhabitants of Europe. It is apparently a  more political reference than the quotations from the two earlier books, and though this paper looks at how Nietzsche moves from the political to the cultural, it is not an argument for a complete displacement of the political by the cultural, but rather for the questioning of any priority for a military state in the creation of cultural value over a more generalised sense of force and conflict producing cultural excellence.

Going back to the beginning of this evolution, The Birth of Tragedy tends to allow political aspects of tragedy and its culture indirectly, while denying them directly.  Attic tragedy has highly political aspects, including the association of the ‘Doric state’ (presumably Sparta, but possibly the Greek states in general after invasions from the north) with the Apolline half of tragedy and the chaotic populist overtones of the Dionysian

The Birth of Tragedy 4

[W]herever the Dionysiac broke through, the Apolline was suspended and annulled. But it is equally certain that, wherever the first onslaught was resisted, the reputation and majesty of the Delphic god was expressed in more rigid and menacing forms than ever before; for the only explanation I can find for the Doric state and Doric art is that it was a permanent military encampment of the Apolline: only in a state of unremitting resistance to the Titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian could such a cruel and ruthless polity, such a war-like and austere form of education, such a defiantly aloof art, surrounded by battlements exists for long. (Nietzsche 1999, 27-28)

The political side of tragedy is then expressed with regard to the internally embattled nature of Greek state, so war is central to the existence of a relation between politics and culture. The ‘writing’ in Zarathustra  is that of someone above the ethical relationship with the neighbour and of ressentiment or political ambition with regard to the state. The metaphors and associations of war, conquest, the state, artistic creativity, sacrifice, the abundantly healthy body, the disintegrating sick body all flow into each other. It is not, however, a random set of associations, but an organised if never completely stable, set of judgements, which are guided by attempts to integrate an organising principle of hierarchy with a disruptive principle of conflict.

(To be continued)

Why Republican Libertarianism? II

More of an essay I’m posting at the group blog Notes On Liberty.

Notes On Liberty

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

We can confirm Arendt’s sense that ancient Athenian democracy was not concerned with collective confiscation of private economic goods, by looking at the most famous political speech of ancient Greece. That is the funeral oration delivered by Pericles in the midst of the Peloponnesian War between democratic Athens and oligarchic-militaristic Sparta. Pericles states that in Athens there is no shame in poverty, only in not struggling with poverty (clearly referring to an individual struggle), and that poverty is no barrier to a place in political life. Pericles also refers to the greater tolerance of the…

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Why Republican Libertarianism? I

Me at the group blog Notes On Liberty

Notes On Liberty

(This text was written for the European Students for Liberty Regional Conference in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. I did not deliver the paper, but used it to gather thoughts which I then presented in an improvised speech. As it was quite a long text, I am breaking it up for the purposes of blog presentation)

Republicanism has been on the rise as a term in political theory debates since the late 1990s, where it has joined egalitarian liberalism (that is a version of liberalism in which the state decides on income and wealth distribution, markedly more flat than the distribution achieved by the market,at least in intention), communitarianism, and libertarianism in the main recognised streams of political theory along with radical democracy, deliberative democracy, and Marxism.

The egalitarian liberal position emphasis rights, justice, and rational political procedures claiming that constituently employed they lead to a morally based economic pattern of…

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Two Types of Ethics in Kierkegaard (me at New APPS)

My latest post at the group blog New APPS

There are some ways in which Kierkegaard might appear to be diminishing the impotence of ethics. At least such is  the impression some take away from Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s most read text, and the one most readily found in relatively popular editions. Fear and Trembling features the well known idea of the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, though that is an aspect of Kierkegaard that looms larger in general discussions of Kierkegaard from a distance rather than detailed up front engagement with his work as a whole.

The ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ evidently leaves some with the impression that Kierkegaard is downgrading the importance of ethics, and at the extreme some suggest that Kierkegaard is recommending religiously inspired violence, though I do not think that any who can be described as a competent reader of Kierkegaard has ever reached such a conclusion.

For the rest read on here