Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter 6: Nietzsche on the Redemptive Individual

In the previous chapter, I articulated and defended Nietzsche’s view of individuality, while also bringing out how much Nietzsche’s view shares in common with Hegel’s. Though this self-narrating individual may seem to be a radically solitary character, emerging out of his own effort and discipline, Nietzsche claims that there are certain historical and political conditions that produce individuals. Nietzsche speaks again and again of various communities providing the right or wrong kinds of conditions for the cultivation of higher forms of humanity (see, e.g., BGE 211–12). We will explore several of these conditions in this chapter and the next. The more important and deeper case I want to make, however, is that Nietzsche defended an ethical connection between individuality and community. That is, for Nietzsche, leading an individual life requires that one “redeem” a community, that one incorporate and transform its experiences and traditions into a meaningful narrative . My view hence challenges two competing ethical views: that of the liberal Nietzsche, in which one’s self-fashioning can occur in “private” separate from the community; and that of the radically aristocratic Nietzsche, in which individuals strive to remake community in their own image from the ground up.1 In order to make this case, I argue that first, for Nietzsche, community or what Nietzsche calls “culture” plays a crucial function for human beings in providing meaning for human life and hence avoiding the paralyzing terror of “Silenus’ truth.” Human beings become individuals by enlivening and transforming this communal store of meaning, especially during times of crisis. Alternatively, we may become individuals by critiquing the communal tradition when it is overly narrow or repres6 Nietzsche on the Redemptive Individual Nietzsche on the Redemptive Individual 141 sive, and then by appealing to the wider fellowship of humanity as such.2 In either case, individuals “become who they are” by making a community “their own,” a process that is reciprocal—community is shaped by individuality, individuality is shaped by community. In this way, then, individuals cannot retreat from community (as the liberals assume), but must always already engage in it. However, individuals are rare and play an aristocratic role in society (as the aristocrats claim), but Nietzsche’s “aristocracy” is one of “spirit,” the transformation of culture through the activity of human excellence, not political, physical, brutish coercion.3 6.1 The Tension in the Bow and Human Community In the preface to BGE, Nietzsche claims that the “struggle against Plato” and the subsequent struggle against Christianity, or dogmatic “Platonism for the people,” by modern skepticism has “created a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known: with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals” (BGE.P). This tension is, as we will see, a particularly powerful example of the universal tension that pervades all human societies . Nietzsche speaks of this broader tension in different forms—in UM 2.1, he speaks of the tension between justice and love, and in BGE 230, he discusses what Clark and Dudrick (2006) have called the “will to truth” and the “will to value.” I will employ later the rather more colorful tension between eris and eros, Greek concepts that Nietzsche draws on heavily in his social theory. This tension lies at the center of Nietzsche’s view of human community and is rooted in the basic internal division, incompleteness, or “sickness” of the distinctively human. Let us examine this tension to understand its nature and why it is rooted in the general condition of being human. We will begin with the first part of the tension, with the side Nietzsche speaks about in various terms as “love,” the will to “simplification, falsification,” the “dogmatism ” of philosophers. Nietzsche argues that human beings are living beings, similar to all other organic beings in that we desire to extend and consolidate our subjectivity (we discussed this activity of the subject as the “will to power” in the previous chapter). Human beings achieve mastery over nature and over ourselves most prominently in our social existence. We constitute communities by collectively “esteeming ” the world in a certain way, by “assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited” in relationship to nature and the other communities 142 Infinite Autonomy around us (BGE 9). We transform the world in our own image according to our “table of goods” such that we can...