Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.
Lecture 5: “Nietzsche Becomes Nietzsche.”
Lecture 6: “Nietzsche’s Philosophic Poetry.”
In the spirit of full disclosure, Lampert writes, “My Nietzsche lectures reflect my debt to Nietzsche and my alignment with Nietzsche, and the way that both Strauss and Plato further that alignment.”
Like Plato and Plato’s Socrates, Nietzsche “laid claim to an ontology, an understanding of the being of beings,” and crafted an exoteric philosophic poetry. Nietzsche became Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche as it were, in consultation with eight previous philosophers: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. “Whatever I decide,” he wrote at the end of Human, All Too Human, “think through for myself and others, upon these eight I fix my eyes and find theirs fixed on me.” Lampert cautions that Nietzsche “does not mean that he takes his thinking from them”; his thinking “through” them, before coming to his own philosophic decisions, for “Nietzsche’s thinking is wholly his own.” Nietzsche (and Lampert) count themselves among those rare thinkers “who want to know exactly how they differ from everyone else in their thinking: they ‘go down’ to examine others and they ‘go inside’ to know themselves”—that is, “they do what Socrates did.” For example, the philosopher does “not feel the standard effects of tragedy, which are pity and fear” and, while understanding that “tragedy remains tragedy,” that life itself remains tragic, tragedy strikes the soul of the philosopher differently than it does in the souls of others, causing a different sound in him.
As to the philosopher’s public response to the tragic character of life, Nietzsche judges that modern men need a new teaching, a new philosophic poetry. This teaching “will not lie about suffering by inventing or endorsing some comedy of a purpose to existence that gives suffering meaning,” as Plato did. “The philosophic tradition of exoteric noble lying comes to a self-conscious end with Nietzsche,” even or perhaps because “the eyes of his underworld judges,” his eight philosophic companions remained fixed upon him.
The first step of Nietzsche’s “turn to the philosophic life” occurred in 1876, and consisted of freeing his mind from conventional opinions, including opinions that had become conventions by the art of philosophers. Five years later, in the fourth chapter of The Gay Science, he took the next step, which consisted no longer so much of a critique of human culture, the history of philosophy, and modern science as an effort to show “what the free mind can come to know,” what it can bind itself to, rightly. In his 1881 notebook, and indeed in his earlier book, Daybreak, he had rejected the moral claim that egoistic actions are bad, altruistic actions good. Rather, he claimed that “all human actions, including moral actions, are based on drives or passions that are in principle egoistic or self-serving.” Love (for example) amounts to “a passion to possess and to possess all of the desired object”; this suggests that the agapic love of the Christians and the erotic love of the pagans are at root identical. But all drives are not equal, as “the highest of the drives is the passion for knowledge,” the passion that Nietzsche “recognized as his own most powerful passion,” the most intellectual one. Further, “within the individual soul the drives exist in a constant war with one another for supremacy, or for rule.” As in Plato, what holds for the individual soul holds for “the actions of all things”; psychology (at its best, self-knowledge) “expands” to biology (to “all aliveness”) and to physics, since “the same common property is the ultimate explanation of what is at work” in everything. This common property is the will to power. The will to power encompasses not only the desire to have but the desire to overcome; in Socratic-Platonic terms it is both appetitive and thumotic or spirited—rational, too, but only at the highest level, in some human souls. “What is ultimately at work in all things is force that always exists within a field of forces.” Nietzsche calls this force the will to power “because what it is is its need to discharge the excess of force against resistance which is itself force.”
Nietzsche compares the will to power to sea-waves. “The waves are an image for what we are.” But how so? What is the “secret” that we share with the waves? Nietzsche highlights two words he did not publish: Habsüchtigen, German for “possession addicts,” and Wissensgierigen, those who are “greedy to know.” The waves are “greedy” for the shore; if sufficiently powerful, they devour it, overcome it, causing a new shoreline to appear. This is the waves’ “way of being.” Even knowing is a kind of overcoming, an overcoming of ignorance, “the highest or supreme drive of the human way of being.” “The two words name the drive of all beings and of the highest being.”
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche publishes his discovery of the will to power and adds his second discovery, the eternal return. In introducing a new instance of philosophic poetry, Nietzsche “knew that he faced the founder’s abstract problem of introducing novelty into a culture that had already incorporated a different view,” a different poem. By “incorporating” Nietzsche means “taking in” to the corpus, the body. He extends the scope of the word to include geistig, which means “spiritual and intellectual.” “To be a mature human being is always already to be formed or stamped by the inescapable processes of incorporation that have made us,” body and soul. Nietzsche’s first step in the philosophic life, freeing his mind from conventional opinions, was precisely the arduous act of freeing himself from “the necessary errors of cultural incorporation”—necessary because they culture is for all those who live within its sway, most of whom are not philosophers, and none of whom begins as a philosopher. These errors “can be changed because they have all been taught, and it is possible to teach different ideals and values.” The eternal return consists of thinking a new moral principle, one that “says to the world now known: that’s what I want, I want that world, the world as it is, and I want it again, and I want it all an infinite number of times again exactly as it is—because I want my life just as it is again.” The eternal return reorients human desire, redirecting it from resentment of the evils of this world, its ineluctable tragedy, and longing for a different world, whether the Bible’s Heaven, Plato’s City in Speech, or any of the moderns’ utopias, toward the most intense “Yes to life”—to life as it is. The steadfast, impassioned longing for life, which is at its core the will to power, provides a moral/poetic, exoteric doctrine that will affirm the philosopher’s more fundamental discovery and the way of life that enabled him to discover it. The exoteric, poetic account thus may be said to register the esoteric, philosophic insight, protect the philosopher and his insight from censorious eyes by fitting non-philosophers with opinions that are not the same as, but do not contradict, the insight.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche shows the transition that he wants the free spirits, the contemporary atheists to make when he has his prophet sing “The Dance Song,” “abandon[ing] his skeptical ‘Wild Wisdom,'” his belief that “life or being is unfathomable,” for the conviction that life is indeed fathomable as will to power. Having learned this, Zarathustra calls upon the free spirits to join him, armed with the exoteric doctrine of the eternal return, to build “the house yet to be built,” the one that will “house future human beings, or be incorporated into future human beings.” The will to power is the insight for the few, “those with the most powerful passion to know”; the eternal return is the teaching for all. Will to power is philosophy, eternal return philosophic poetry.
Both doctrines “assert the sovereignty of becoming,” not timeless Ideas or the eternal God. “Both assert that there is direction “in ever-self-renewing activity“—that the will to power is not random or aimless. And both assert that the “discharging of energy or force” of each individual, each particular part of nature, encounters similar discharges of energy from all other parts, which strive to overcome one another in the “total field of such relations,” which is “all that is.” This means that the striving to overcome honest human souls, requires self-overcoming, a grinding-off of weaknesses.
Whereas “Plato’s language of eros is attractive and affirmative,” Nietzsche’s “language of will to power is less attractive,” harsher because he would overcome Platonic-Christian “word-tinsel,” which has by now covered over the reality of the world, softening human souls, rotting them with sentimentality. Lampert says that this difference obscures “the fundamental kinship of understanding shared by Plato and Nietszche,” since “genuine philosophers are genuine kin.” At this, the end of Lampert’s first lecture on Nietzsche, an auditor might think of Platonic dialectic—driven by love, a passion for truth but hardly soft or sentimental—as this possible underlying understanding.
Lampert then turns, however, not to Nietzsche’s philosophy but to his philosophic poetry as the basis of this kinship. “Genuine philosophy generates philosophic poetry, a teaching that can be lived.” Plato and Nietzsche, genuine philosophers, each generated philosophic poetry is intended to enable human beings to live under the circumstances of the times and places in which those philosophers lived. In Nietzsche’s time, the “free mind” had arrived at “epistemological skepticism,” the Kantian skepticism concerning the conviction “that anything can really be known.” Nietzsche charges that the “hidden motive” behind that skepticism is moralism, Voltaire’s “seek[ing] the true only to do the good” or perhaps, to stay with Kant, to live by the “categorical imperative.” But this assumes that “the true and the good must coincide,” an assumption that “curbs” those philosophers’ “search for the true, making skepticism about knowledge an appealing fallback position protecting their view of the good,” which now consists, in their mind, with equal rights and the end of suffering. You may not know the true, but “you can keep on believing in the good, the modern good”; “skepticism gives permission to place morality above knowing.”
Free minds should become skeptical about their skepticism, re-open the quest for the true. Modern men do in fact claim to have some knowledge of the true, however tentative; this is the truth gained by the scientific method, which begins with hypothesis, tests the hypothesis with experiment, then arrives at a provisional conclusion, the proviso being that further experimentation may disprove the conclusion. Nietzsche challenges free minds with his own hypothesis, namely, that mechanistic physics (Newton, Descartes) are “effects of will.” That is, the “mechanics of cause and effect” upheld by modern physics may exist within an overall field of force. To test his hypothesis, he further challenges free minds to an act of Cartesian introspection, a sure Cartesian method will not offend the modern free minds, supplemented by close observation of other persons and things, again a method that modern science endorses. Can the “instinctual life” of human beings, be explained, first, “as different forms of Habsuch, the addiction for having?” Can this addiction or drive then explain all life forms, or “organic functions”? If, then, the will to power does indeed explain the whole realm of living things, “then” [Nietzsche writes] one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power.” The investigator will find that the hypothesis of the will to power offers him the most comprehensive explanation of all living phenomena. Without undertaking these experiments of introspection and observation, free mind will remain unfree, stuck in modern moralism. If they do undertake these experiments, they will recognize that “their good of perpetual peace at the end of history in a paradise of equality of rights and the end of suffering is neither attainable nor true.”
This will leave them directionless, and therefore incapable of directing the permanently unfree minds of ‘the many.’ They will become nihilists, free minds who think “that nothing is truly of worth.” But such a “world-denying” mindset only reprises the world-denying mindset of Plato and of Christianity; it is the last vestige of moralism. Nietzsche counters (to use the language of Christian morality) that what you thought of as God is evil, anti-life, and what you thought of as the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of this world, symbolizes the divine, the life-force, the will to power that animates everyone and everything. Nietzsche “makes his free-minded atheist friends ask, What is a god?” More, why speak in Biblical terms, “in the popular way,” at all? Aren’t you free thinkers, free minds? As Lampert puts it, Nietzsche “stays with religion while suggesting that, no, his philosophic view does not refute God but vindicates God, properly understood”—God understood as will to power. A religion based upon a doctrine consistent with the will to power is necessary because “religions are good for, necessary for, any social order,” incorporating into the young “guidance to what is good and bad, noble and base, what is worth living for and what is necessary to reject.” “The problem is not gods as such, the problem is the god of revelation,” the eternal changeless ‘Platonic’ God of the Bible. The doctrine consistent with the will to power Nietzsche offers is the eternal return, a “transvaluation of values,” the values of the older morality. In so offering, Nietzsche “is not driven by a need for a new morality or a new religion.” As a philosopher, he is driven by “the need to understand,” not the drives of the moralist or the prophet. But the comprehensive affirmation of ‘this world’ by human beings “makes the philosopher possible, because the world generated a spectator who is rational, self-conscious, knowing fragment of the knowable whole.”
To replace Jesus, the God of the Bible, Nietzsche recommends Dionysus, the “tempter-god,” the “philosophizing god” of antiquity, and his mate, Ariadne, “the god of femaleness or womanliness,” who “does not philosophize” because “in some more fundamental sense she already knows,” possessing “the thread that leads out of the mystery at the heart of the labyrinth,” and being the one who actually gives birth. Dionysus and Ariadne are “the universal gods of earthly reproduction given local or Greek names.” This mated pair generate life, “belong[ing] together in their difference” as both “the war between the sexes and the love between the sexes.” If Dionysus is the tempter-god, he resembles Satan more than Adam; it is as if Eve rejected that dull fellow the God of the Bible matched her with and preferred the bad boy (as women are sometimes known to do).
So, you freethinking atheists, see “the necessity of religion,” a necessity that your Voltaire completely misses, and which his epigoni tried to meet with their inane ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’; instead of that niaiserie, see “the universal naturalness of Dionysus and Ariadne as gods of life,” then build your religious institutions for ‘the many’ upon them. One way to do that, Lampert argues, is to embrace what’s now called ‘ecology.’ “Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to teach a comprehensive ecological philosophy; his is a comprehensive moral and political teaching based fundamentally on love of the earth.” As we now notice, an ethics of ecology ‘goes down’ more easily into modern throats, digests better in their stomachs, and can be incorporated readily into their bodies and minds. Ecology also teaches something of the limits that of the modern scientific project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, a conquest for which modern science can set no limits. Modern science’s inability to set limits for its own activity threatens the nature it seeks to understand in order to ‘conquer’ or manipulate. Leo Strauss “warns against the conquest of nature as the conquest of human nature through the modern ideals of equality of rights and the end of suffering,” and (Nietzsche would add) the unreality of both those ideals. Nietzsche sees that “modern conquest of nature would mean the end of philosophy on earth, because philosophy depends upon the recognition and encouragement of an order of rank and the continuation of suffering properly understood, understood as the human struggle to attain the high, most especially knowledge; that known suffering from a lack can be remedied only through sacrificial struggle—subordination of every drive to the drive for knowledge.” The “ministerial” character of Nietzsche’s philosophic poetry “assigns limits to the modern conquest of nature out of the love of nature, a love expressed in the highest ideal that the whole of nature return just as it is an infinite number of times.”
The Cartesian-introspective dimension of the Nietzschean challenges works through a characteristic feature of modern philosophy, individualism, while “mov[ing] out beyond the exclusiveness of egoism and out beyond the feeling of altruism and to broader fields beyond the I and the other.” Only this can bring “progress in morality by aligning it with the true,” being a “better reorganization of the drives,” one that “fosters stronger and more noble specimens of the human species,” more alive, and therefore more consistent with all of nature. Human beings strive; they have drives. “Drives always strive for something.” “Incorporation” or enculturation “train[s] us to strive in this direction and not that direction.” Nietzsche’s “new process of incorporation” aims to “redirect striving in order to foster the new I-feeling, leading to the new feeling for the you and for the all.” It redirects us away from mere possessiveness (British-all-too-British), away from the prestige found in commanding others (will-to-power in the vulgar sense), toward (in Nietzsche’s words) “Letting us be possessed by the things (not by persons) and by the largest possible range of true things,” “to let the true things be the things they are” in us, “in their continuous becoming and decaying, in their natural order of rank, and in all the other facets of their naturalness.” The conquest of nature can be limited by nature, if human beings incorporate as much of it as they can into themselves—ultimately, possessed neither by God or Satan and his demons. If possessed by things, not persons, Nietzsche writes, “we become farmland for the things”—fertile, generative, fulfilling the Biblical God’s command to be fruitful not by obeying a command ‘from above’ but by integrating nature, the ‘ecosystem’ into ourselves. From this fertility, human beings, by nature “the making beings,” will forge the “images of existence” of philosophic poetry, “within which human beings will dwell on the earth.” “Philosophers rule by legislating the images”—Nietzsche’s version of one activity of Plato’s philosopher-kings, but evidently intended without the irony Plato deploys. In Nietzsche’s judgment, it was Christianity that overlooked the irony of Platonism, attempting to enforce otherworldliness. Continuing to block any return of Platonic irony while sweeping a weakened Christian civilization aside, Nietzsche rejects any image of “eternal fixity” or of monotheism or of Christian virtues or of the virtues of secularized Christianity. In their place he puts change, the cyclical change of the eternal return and a “transvaluation” of Platonic, Christian, and ‘christian’-Kantian virtues.
Thus, Nietzsche’s “story ends in the human love of the earth as it naturally is and a love of the human as it naturally is, or as it can be, beyond the rule of images of existence that teach unnatural ideals wreaking vengeance on life as it is. His whole story ends in ecology, in knowledge of the interconnectedness of life on earth that generates the human imperative to be true to the earth.” Lampert happily predicts that “seeing” Nietzsche as “the founding thinker of an already popular movement that appeals to late modern people,” the ecology movement that “is bound to get stronger as the evidence becomes ever more undeniable that environmental disasters are caused by human-initiated climate change” will be good for politics and good for philosophy.
Leaving aside the claim that humans have initiated climate change and considering Lampert’s more important observations, it is noteworthy that he has replaced the will to power, with which Nietzsche replaced both Platonic and Christian love, with love—this time, love of the world, love of the earth. Nietzsche’s ‘realism’ has been softened. Why? It might be that, looking back on the catastrophic political consequences of the will to power, which was not so nearly esoteric a doctrine as he has said it is, Lampert considers it judicious to push it into the background more thoroughly than Nietzsche did. A doctrine that was so easily discerned, and so readily vulgarized, by the German military officers in the run-up to the First World War, by Benito Mussolini, and by throngs of warrior-spirits, Right and Left—a supposedly esoteric doctrine that has achieved far more ‘popularity’ than its intended exoteric cover, the eternal return—bespeaks a massive failure of philosophic poetry. Nor does the ‘ecological’ interpretation or application of the doctrine impress; yes, ecology sets limits on the conquest of nature, but in reality, Nietzsche’s predicted ruling class, his “global aristocracy” (unmentioned by Lampert), which would run the ecological show will never be aristocratic in any Nietzschean sense. It will be administrative, bureaucratic, which is to say dull and graceless. Not very Nietzschean.
More generally, Lampert’s approach to philosophy—that political philosophy is ‘politic,’ only, a form of poetry, that political regimes may teach citizens ‘out of’ philosophic discoveries but have nothing to teach philosophers—may be questioned. If human beings are political animals, political in their nature, then political life does not simply impede philosophic noēsis. It provides a window, if a far from transparent window, through which a philosopher might approach the truth.
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