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  • Nietzsche and the PoliticalTyranny, Tragedy, Cultural Revolution, and Democracy
  • Tracy B. Strong

What kind of man must one be in order to set one’s hand on the wheel of history?

—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

The 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 refounding–that 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 [End Page 48] 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 Zarathustra’s wish to replace fatherlands and motherlands with his “children’s’ land,” but we might even say that Nietzsche’s 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 past—whether as fetishes, totems, or idols—then 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 parents—and if one changes one’s parents, then one has engendered oneself—that 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...

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