[Note: the following has been abstracted from the Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers by John Lechte, Routledge, 1994.]
Nietzsche's philosophy has been seminal for contemporary thought, and especially for that thought - exemplified in the work of Michel Foucault - which has taken an anti-humanist stance. That so singular and opaque a thinker could have such an impact becomes all the more surprising when we recall that Nietzsche's biography and supposed influence on Nazism have further complicated the task of interpreting his texts. Despite this, Nietzsche has been the focal point in recent times of a new departure in thought, one which refuses to accept the necessity of a relatively stable subject-object relation.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Saxony, Prussia. He was the son of a Lutheran minister, Ludwig, who died in 1849 at the young age of 36, after having gone insane a year earlier. The son, who always suffered from poor health, thought that he too was destined to die at 36. As Walter Kaufmann's classic study tells us, from the age of 6 years, following the death of his younger brother in 1850, Nietzsche was brought up by his mother in an entirely female household. From 1858, he attended the old boarding school of Pforta, and excelled in religion, German literature, and the classics, but was poor in maths and drawing.' It was at this time that the young scholar first suffered from the migraine headaches that were to be with him for most of his adult life.
After graduating from Pforta in 1864, Nietzsche went to the University of Bonn and studied theology and classical philology. In 1865, he gave up theology and went to Leipzig where he came under the influence of the Schopenhauer of The World as Will and Idea. As he was thought to be a brilliant student, the University of Basel called him to the chair of classical philology at the age of 24, even though he had not received his doctorate. Arrangements were hastily made for the doctorate to be awarded after his appointment, and Nietzsche taught at Basel from 1869 to 1879 when he was forced to retire due to ill-health. His productive life continued until January 1889, when he collapsed in Turin with his arms around the neck of a horse that had been cruelly whipped by its coachman. He never regained his sanity, and died in 1900.
Between 1872 and 1888, Nietzsche published nine books, and prepared four others for publication. His magnum opus, The Will to Power, based on notes from his notebooks of the 1880s, and first published posthumously in 1901, provides the strongest confirmation of Nietzsche's radically anti-idealist stance. It is this stance in particular which has attracted the attention of postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers alike. Such a thorough-going anti-idealism is what allows us to designate Nietzsche as a radically horizontal thinker. Before proceeding further it is necessary to explain Nietzsche's relation to what we have designated as 'horizontal' thought.
Intuitively, one might think that to invoke the horizontal axis is to place thought on a single level, and that therefore Nietzsche is perhaps proposing a certain equality of thought. Might not horizontal thought be precisely democratic thought? The answer is that horizontal thought has nothing to do with the notion of equality or of democracy. Indeed horizontality does not refer at all to any kind of isomorphism, but to the exact opposite. Horizontal thought, in effect, is incomparable; it cannot be put on a scale; for horizontal thought is the thought of difference, not of identity. On many occasions throughout his work, Nietzsche refers to the conventional idea of equality as the exemplar of the order of the Same. For example, Nietzsche argues that the ideal equality of democracy or Christianity is a fundamentally homogenising equality of a 'herd-animal morality'. Similarly, Nietzsche claims that the idealist' principle, often put forward (as he says) by 'physiologists', that all human life is ultimately reducible to the 'drive to self-preservation' is an unwarranted, homogenising teleology. Human life, rather, is a venting of life, which is at the same time a 'will to power'. What undermines the credibility of the principle of self-preservation are all the facts (violence, sacrifice, unhealthy living, etc.) which contradict it. Any essentialism or teleology, as versions of idealism, have to deny one or more aspects of life in order to be coherent. This is why Nietzsche says that idealism is life-denying - to the point, in the modern era, of producing pathological consequences. Life is always irreducible; it is a totality of differences, not an identity. An identity can be represented and put on a scale with a common measure. Horizontality, by contrast, refers to the impossibility of ever finding a scale that is adequate to difference. Horizontality opens up the 'ideolectal' (private language) end of the communicative process. And this raises issues regarding Nietzsche's whole project that we shall return to.
What has just been explained regarding idealism and the will to power, is closer to the point of arrival of Nietzsche's thought than to its point of departure. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872 when he was 28, Nietzsche introduces two principles which would be present in his writing to the end: the Dionysian principle the principle of chaos, dream and intoxication - and the Apollonian principle - the principle of order and form-giving. Both these principles are associated with an aesthetic disposition - of life as a work of art, in effect. Thus, in the first Preface to the work written in 1871, Nietzsche says: 'art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life'. Within this perspective, the Greeks showed how art - as a kind of will to illusion composed of the principles of form-giving and intoxication - could function as the true vantage point of life. Art thus becomes equivalent to a recognition that life is unknowable in terms of any ultimate truth, as implied by an idealist metaphysics This is life seen as tragedy. Art becomes then a way of not having to deny life. Life as tragic is played out in particular in the spirit of music as the embodiment of the Dionysian principle (the first edition of Nietzsche's book was in fact called, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music). For this reason, Nietzsche focuses on the strategic role of the Chorus in pre-Socratic, Greek drama. Far from being equivalent to the audience (who could hardly mistake the drama for life) as Schlegel had proposed, the Chorus sees the action on the stage as real, and responds to life through rhythmic intoxication. As such, the Chorus gives form to the Dionysian impulse. Apollo, as god of plastic powers and soothsaying, gives rise to the visual, objectifying aspect of the drama. Nietzsche notices, however, that the rise of Platonism destroyed Greek tragic drama from within: Platonism, as high idealism, led to a denial of the tragic tenor of life, and so to a denial of the need for an intoxicating element. Modern philosophy - and certain aspects of modern science - as the heir of Platonism, thus denies life: it blots out the spirit of music - the recognition of the tragic element. So much is knowledge dominant in modern culture, that people have ceased to be able to act. 'Knowledge kills action', Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, 'action requires the veils of illusion.'
While philosophy has become life-denying in the sphere of knowledge, Christianity is so in the sphere of morality. Here Nietzsche relentlessly homes in on the role of Christian guilt. This theme will allow us to touch on another: the relationship between active and reactive dispositions. Christian morality proposes a fundamental principle of equality between human individuals. The difficulty is, Nietzsche points out, that life shows that there are differences - differences between: the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the gifted and the mediocre, man and woman; in fact there is in life every variety of difference imaginable. However, to maintain the illusion of (i.e. the ideal of) equality, Christianity invented guilt, or 'bad conscience' which those who judged themselves to be different in a positive sense would be obliged to turn upon themselves. For with their difference (especially as a sense of superiority) they would be found to be responsible for the suffering of others.
Within the Nietzschean schema, guilt is the mark of reactive thought - the thought of the weak, not necessarily the weak in a strictly physical sense, but in the sense of those who cannot accept life as it is, who are governed by ressentiment, and who have to invent ideals in order to cover up their weakness. Guilt, in sum, is the weapon the less endowed use against free and original spirits who often reach new heights. Rather than attempting to raise themselves up to new heights in order to maintain equality, they deny that these heights exist. In his most poetic and famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has Zarathustra - the exemplar of the 'higher man' - come down from the mountain to speak to the people in the market-place. Because the people in the market-place only understand the language of utility (the language of exchange value, and calculability), they fail to understand Zarathustra, and take him for a madman. Dominated by the ethic of equality and the attachment to utility which goes with it, the people of the marketplace all want the same thing. ‘No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the mad-house.’ As inexorably reactive, the herd cannot think of any other end than to be happy. This is the happiness deemed to come with equality and utility. The crowd calls on Zarathustra to bring them the Ultimate Man who invented happiness. Zarathustra stands for the higher man, who, as the overcoming of all idealism in favour of life, is the overcoming of man as well; for man, too, is an ideal that does not correspond to anything in reality. Reactive thought, however, wants happiness, not the risks and suffering which often accompany creativeness and originality. The Ultimate Man (equivalent to man in general) is reactive man; the higher man, or Superman, is the active individual with the determination to be creative and to avoid his life being submerged in the calculating ethic of equality. As an exemplar of the higher man, Zarathustra cannot - almost by definition - be understood; for he embodies horizontal thought; as a result, his language can only rarely be translated into common parlance. The thought of the higher man, is, in short, poetic.
The figure of the higher man reaches its apogee in the posthumously published The Will to Power. Interestingly, Nietzsche characterised himself as being a quintessentially posthumous thinker - a thinker out of tune with the times. Despite its posthumous status, The Will to Power is the most sustained articulation of a number of key aspects of Nietzsche's thought. These include: the will to power; the eternal recurrence; nihilism; anti-idealism; and a revaluation of all values. We will elaborate here on the first two aspects in particular, as they have recently assumed enormous importance in contemporary thought.
As explained earlier, the will to power is to be understood as the basis of Nietzsche's anti-idealist stance. It is the embodiment of the principle of the affirmation of life. The will to power is, in a sense, equivalent to everything that actually happens in life, making Nietzsche, in the eyes of some, a radically realist thinker. The will to power is the 'world', as our author says; and he continues: 'This world is the will to power - and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power - and nothing besides!' There is no willing subject behind power, no reality behind the play of forces, no division into will and its other, or into being and nothingness, or into subject and object - for the division itself is part of the will to power. The will to power is a plurality of forces, from which identities have to be constructed, not an underlying unity behind appearance. The revaluation of values is equivalent to the making of values within the play of forces of the will to power. Values always have to be affirmed; they do not exist 'in themselves', as Kant thought.
Again, the will to power has no origin or purpose, no beginning or end - for these, too, are idealist and hence metaphysical categories. Or at least, the world has no origin other than the one given to it by a genealogy. Under these circumstances, Nietzsche forges his controversial notion of the 'eternal recurrence', the doctrine of the play of difference and uncertainty. In other words the form taken by the will to power is essentially unpredictable. It is: 'the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the 'will'; abolition of 'knowledge-in-itself'. As the world has no goal, it is in continual, ,aimless' flux of transformation. Everything recurs; the world is not, Nietzsche says, a world of infinite novelty. The system is not in equilibrium, but nor is it infinitely open. It is rather like a game (of dice) played an infinite number of times, so that eventually the outcomes are repeated. The principle of the eternal recurrence is the most enigmatic of this entire philosophy. At times Nietzsche seems to want to link it to the nineteenth-century theory of thermodynamics (hence references to a constant amount of energy, and to the disequilibrium of the system); at other times, the issue seems to be centred on the will to power and a preparedness not to deny any aspect of life - even its most horrific events - such as occurs, Nietzsche says, when life is divided into an acknowledged good side, and a denied evil side; here, the will to power is the will of the eternal return of every event, whatever it might be. Amor fati - love of fate - is the phrase used which best evokes this approach.
Clearly, Nietzsche's project is nothing if not exorbitant. But it is not mad, or irrational; it has its own very definite and coherent logic, and this makes it communicable and amenable to being pressed into serving the ends of a fin-de-siÈcle anti-idealism. What then are its difficulties?
To begin with, if the will to power is all there is why is Nietzsche moved to explain it? Perhaps he might have responded by claiming that he is not explaining it, but, through the style of his philosophising, is providing an instance of it. However, no one reading his work can fail to see that there is a message accompanying the style. Nietzsche is unique as a thinker, of this there can be no doubt; but he also says as much himself. He does not write pure poetry. His theories therefore have to be seen as moves in the game of philosophy; to deny this is to deny an important dimension of Nietzsche's thought. To admit it, on the other hand, is to render suspect the possibility of a radically heterogeneous thinker.
Second, Nietzsche's anti-idealism would appear to stand or fall on the possibility that an event can be reduced to a description of it; such a claim is clearly questionable if metaphor is at the very heart of language, as thinkers like Kristeva have argued.
Finally, if Nietzsche is to avoid being a 'denier' of life himself, does he not have to accept that life partly entails the denial of life? - that a will to illusion may not only take the form of art, but might also take the form of a will to happiness?