Nietzsche and the Political (review)

This brief but stimulating work is a vigorous effort to defend the importance of Nietzsche as a “political” thinker. In order to make this case, Conway has to fight on two fronts: simultaneously rebutting the views of the many contemporary interpreters who argue that Nietzsche is either an anti-political philosopher or else a distinctively inferior political thinker, while also reclaiming Nietzsche’s political thought from the race-theorists and Nazis who so successfully appropriated it earlier in this century. Conway is victorious on both fronts, and makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the broad topics of “culture” and “education.” This, of course, by no means exhausts the realm of the “political,” and Conway has little or nothing to say about Nietzsche’s views on such topics as the state, justice, legality, etc. Instead, he is concerned with what Nietzsche himself called “great politics.” For this reason, the book is concerned almost exclusively with Nietzsche’s later writings, focusing primarily upon the writings of 1886–88, while generally ignoring the Nachlass altogether.

Chapter 1 (“Political Perfectionism”) deals with Nietzsche’s conception of the fundamental task of politics: namely, to facilitate humankind’s endless quest for “perfection,” a quest that alone justifies human existence. Since Nietzsche associated the perfection of the species with the appearance of the rarest and most exotic individual specimens, it follows that the specific task of political activity is “to legislate the conditions under which such exemplars will most likely emerge.” It is within the context of this “political” ideal that Conway offers his own, ingenious and controversial interpretation of Zarathustra’s teaching concerning the Übermensch.

The relationship between Nietzsche’s perfectionism and his moral pluralism is the subject of Chapter 2 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Morality for Life”). Here Conway offers a thoughtful comparison between Nietzsche himself and some of his “models,” such as Caesar, Napoleon, and the Laws of Manu, and takes advantage of this comparison in order to introduce Nietzsche’s crucial—albeit extremely problematic—notions of the “order of rank” and “pathos of distance.” Chapter 3 (“Perfectionism in the Twilight of the Idols”) is devoted to Nietzsche’s “critique of modernity.” Here Conway offers his own “political” interpretation of Nietzsche’s withdrawal from the “political macrosphere” of his own age and retreat into the “political microsphere” of his personal life and literary/cultural projects, including his various “educational” schemes. A certain ambiguity in the overall conception of this book becomes apparent at this point, however, inasmuch as Conway finds himself simultaneously distinguishing between Nietzsche’s “moral” and “political” perfectionism, while continuing to insist upon the larger “political” significance of the former—even while conceding that, for Nietzsche himself, political perfection was a mere means for moral perfection. Chapter 4 (“Regimens of Self-Overcoming”) contains a detailed account of the necessary antagonism between the (“untimely”) Nietzschean philosopher and his own age and an insightful discussion of what Conway calls “the aversive mechanism of self-overcoming” (69). Conway’s discussion of the link between Nietzschean perfectionism and the adoption of multiple perspectives (“experimentalism”) is one the clearest and best in the literature. Nietzsche’s own self-experiments and his understanding of the same as “signs” for others are discussed in Chapter 5 (“The Philosopher’s Versucherkunst”). Like other recent interpreters, Conway calls attention to the essential role of erotic love in Nietzsche’s conception of the process of experimental self-education and to the way in which eros links purely individual goals to larger cultural and educational ones. The chapter concludes with an admirable account of how Nietzsche was able to harness and to employ his own resentment as an instrument of self-overcoming. This theme is continued in Chapter 6 (“Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal”), which tries to show how Nietzsche sought to safeguard the crippled will in an unpropitious era, not by rejecting the ascetic ideal, but by employing it in a new way. This is perhaps Conway’s most original...