values individu-culture conflict nietsche syntheses

Nietzsche's Value Conflict: Culture, Individual, Synthesis

Joe Ward

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 41, Spring 2011, pp. 4-25(Article)

Published by Penn State University PressDOI: 10.1353/nie.2011.0010

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JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 41, 2011.

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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Nietzsche’s Value Conflict: Culture, Individual, Synthesis

JOE WARD

ABSTRACT: This article poses the question of what it is that Nietzsche values, arguing that we need a generic answer that makes sense of Nietzsche’s admiration for both exceptional individuals and types of culture: what Nietzsche values are certain kinds of syntheses of the will to power, holding at diverse levels. These are syntheses endowed with a distinctive, “aristocratic” structure with a pathos of distance maintaining a separation between ruling and subjugated elements. But Nietzsche’s valuing is also oriented by extrinsic criteria such as “agonistic” rela-tions, subjugation of other syntheses, and the “exceptional” status of individuals; the determining of value must combine intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Conflict occurs within Nietzsche’s values because the conditions that produce the most exceptional individuals are at odds with the conditions needed for flourishing cultures. I contend that the tenor of Nietzsche’s late thinking suggests a way of resolving this tension through a willingness to give up on the exceptional status of individuals in favor of the advancement of flourishing cultures.

The question with which I would like to get to grips in this article is one that has been addressed many times and readdressed with particular vigor

in recent years: what does Nietzsche value? The different ways in which Nietzsche’s position on morality has been construed in the past few years give some idea of how divergently this question has been answered: Nietzsche’s mature position has been read, among other things, as that of a perfectionist, a fictionalist, and a moral noncognitivist. 1

What does Nietzsche value? What I am aiming to develop here is the most general principle according to which Nietzsche’s values operate. I will discuss later the explicit but rather bald answers Nietzsche himself gives to this question, but I will first proffer a kind of taxonomic answer, giving one or two instances of the kinds of things that are valued by Nietzsche. One possible answer comes readily to mind: Nietzsche values certain individuals , that is, individual human beings. Any first-time reader of Nietzsche’s texts will discern that Nietzsche places a high value not, emphatically, on all human beings considered as indi-viduals but on a small proportion of this whole, a small number of individu-als, sometimes named (for example, Julius Caesar, Goethe, and Napoleon) and sometimes described in more general terms. 2 The most famous statement of this viewpoint comes from one of Nietzsche’s early texts, “On the Use and

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NIETZSCHE’S VALUE CONFLICT 5

Disadvantage of History for Life”; it has become well known partly because it seems to capture a common theme in Nietzsche’s later philosophy: “[T]he goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars” ( HL 9). To see how this carries over to Nietzsche’s maturity, consider a passage from On the Genealogy of Morals : as a response to the nausea caused by the contemplation of the “failed, sickly, tired, worn-out people” ( GM I:11) who are the result of the triumph of slave morality in modern Europe, Nietzsche longs for a

glimpse of something complete, wholly successful, happy, powerful, triumphant, [. . .] a man who justifies mankind , of a compensatory, redeeming stroke of luck on the part of man, a reason to retain faith in mankind! . . .

gönnt mir Einen Blick nur auf etwas Vollkommnes, zu-Ende-Gerathenes, Glückliches, Mächtiges, Triumphirendes [. . .] einen Menschen, der den Menschen rechtfertigt [. . .]. ( GM I:12)

It is Einen Menschen , complete and perfected in him- or herself as Nietzsche doubly emphasizes, Vollkommnes and zu-Ende-Gerathenes , who can justify mankind in general, den Menschen ; the rest of mankind would appear to be valuable only insofar as it gives rise to this single individual. 3

I will not labor this aspect of Nietzsche’s valuing since it is, I take it, extremely familiar. One can see why, on the basis of such passages, some commenta-tors have taken this logic to its ultimate conclusion and claimed that Nietzsche essentially values nothing other than these individuals and that his entire ethic is aimed at procuring the flourishing of such individuals. 4 On such a view any-thing else that Nietzsche might value is valued purely instrumentally, insofar as it enables or facilitates the production of such individuals: so Nietzsche might value certain kinds of society or culture not for their own sake but solely because they promote the flourishing of great individuals, much as he values particular atmospheric conditions and diets. Such a view is indeed suggested by certain passages in the later texts. 5

This would provide us with a straightforward answer to our question: what Nietzsche values are exceptional individuals, while everything else is subor-dinated in terms of value to the attainment of this end. However, I have some sympathy with those commentators who point out that Nietzsche is not, or at least not always, interested only in the value of rare individuals or small elites but is also preoccupied with broader social units, particularly in relation to the future of humanity; a number of Nietzsche’s formulations are most naturally read as being concerned with the entirety of future humanity. Thus Herman Siemens, for example, emphasizes in several articles the interest Nietzsche has in the future of humanity as a whole, quoting extensively from the Nachlass but also drawing attention to Nietzsche’s talk of the enhancement of future humanity in texts such as Beyond Good and Evil 44: “We [. . .] have opened our eyes and our conscience to the question where the plant ‘man’ [ die Pflanze ‘Mensch’ ] has hitherto grown


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up most vigorously [. . .] everything evil, dreadful, tyrannical, beast of prey and serpent in man serves to enhance the species ‘man’ [ die Species ‘Mensch’ ] [. . .].” 6 This is one source of hope for readers seeking a possible nonindividualist political orientation to Nietzsche’s philosophy; another is the fact that Nietzsche does seem concerned with a form of human existence lying between that of the individual human being and humanity as a whole: with societies or states or, to use Nietzsche’s most favored term in this context, culture ( Kultur ). (Because they sit more easily in certain contexts, however, I will continue to use the words society and state at times.) It seems uncontroversial to suggest that Nietzsche is preoccupied throughout his philosophical career with the question of what kind of culture is valuable; one of the key motivations of his early writings is the conviction that the culture of the Greeks is of far higher value than that of modern Europe, and his writings around the time of The Birth of Tragedy often revolve around the question of whether modern Germany has the potential to revive and even surpass the magnificence of Greek culture. This conviction concerning Greek culture is one of the constants of Nietzsche’s philosophy right through his maturity, and there can be no doubt that Nietzsche continues right up to the end to pose the question: “What makes for a valuable culture?”

However, there is a ready response to this point available for an advocate of Nietzschean individualism. According to this response, Nietzsche’s answer to this question could be put as follows: a valuable culture is that which encourages or allows for the flourishing of exceptional individuals. Once again, this would assert that culture is only instrumentally valuable on Nietzsche’s view and that the real locus of Nietzsche’s values is the individual. But is this a plausible reading of Nietzsche’s position? Consider the phrases with which Nietzsche discusses, in The Antichrist , the Rome against which early Christianity pits itself:

That which stood aere perennius , the Imperium Romanum , the most grandiose form of organization under difficult conditions which has hitherto been achieved, in comparison with which everything before and everything since is patch-work, bungling, dilettantism[….] Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum —the tremendous deed of the Romans in clearing the ground for a great culture which could take its time was undone overnight by Christianity. . . this most admirable of all works of art in the grand style, was a beginning, its structure was calculated to prove itself by millennia—to this day there has never been such building, to build in such a manner sub specie aeterni has never been so much as dreamed of! ( A 58)

This last point of Nietzsche’s is worth noting in particular: whereas the first sentence quoted might make us think that this is an instance of Nietzsche glo-rifying a specifically political-military, indeed imperial, achievement, we see that what is really at stake here for Nietzsche is a culture for which the political empire of Rome lays the foundations. It might just be possible to force the issue by supposing that this would be a culture that generated great individuals and



thus to make the forging of the Roman Empire valuable merely instrumentally to this end. But Nietzsche certainly does not say anything here explicitly about the production of individuals, and we should not overlook the very real valorization of the Roman Empire as an achievement in its own right: “the most grandiose form of organization under difficult conditions,” “the tremendous deed of the Romans,” “the most admirable of all works of art in the grand style.” 7 Nor is there any suggestion that the forging of the empire is to be seen, and valued, as the achievement of a single individual, or even of a determinate number of individuals.

If we turn our attention to some other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, we ought not to find it surprising that cultures in themselves might be valorized as well as individual human beings. A first point to consider is that it would be strange to suppose that Nietzsche’s key concept of “will to power” should be associated solely with the “wills” of human agents. For one thing there is a well-known strain in the Nietzsche Nachlass that extends will to power to the realm of fundamental physics, so that the fundamental constituents of matter can be characterized in terms of will to power. 8 But even if we reject this as mere notebook speculation, there are plenty of passages in both the Nachlass and the published works that describe the constituent parts of the human individual, his or her “drives,” in terms of will to power; one of the most celebrated features of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the displacement of agency from the conscious, self-determining human self and relocation of it in the selfish, warring drives that come together in a kind of stable tension that constitutes the human being as such. 9 These drives can themselves be seen as “wills” in their own right: in BGE the “body” is described as a “social structure composed of many souls [ ein Gesellschaftsbau vieler Seelen ]”; these subservient souls are also described as “‘under-wills’ or under-souls [ ‘Unterwillen’ oder Unter-Seelen ]” ( BGE 19). Accordingly John Richardson speaks of “the drive [ Trieb ] or force [ Kraft ] as the typical unit” of the will to power. 10 On Richardson’s view individual human beings are to be seen as “synthetic wills,” syntheses of these more basic units of will to power. 11 But if there can be a synthesis at this level, and if the only fundamental unit of power is the drive, then there is no reason to suppose that there cannot be further, more complex syntheses at higher levels, syntheses of the lower-level syntheses that are human beings. 12 It is in the spirit of such an insight that Raymond Geuss observes that when one speaks of “agency” in Nietzsche,

it need not be a particular human individual (i.e., a biologically singular animal) who is the agent. [. . .] In fact in this context Nietzsche doesn’t speak of “agen-cies” as I have, but of “wills.” Nietzsche uses the term “will” in a very flexible and expansive way to refer to both smaller and to larger entities than the will of a biologically individual human being. One can, according to Nietzsche, look at what we would normally call “my will” as a kind of resultant of the struggle within me of various drives, impulses and desires, and each of these can in some


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sense be called a “will.” Similarly one can attribute a “will” to various entities that are larger than me: The University of Cambridge can have a will, so can the UK, the European Union, etc. 13

Of course Geuss is not talking about loci of value for Nietzsche here but, rather, about the proper scope of Nietzsche’s term will , much as does Richardson in the passages mentioned. So far I have suggested on exegetical grounds that Nietzsche values societies or, rather, “cultures” as a whole as well as individuals and that the concept “will to power” applies equally well to basic constituent units (drives), to individual human beings, and to higher-level syntheses such as societies. But I have yet to assign an underlying pattern to Nietzsche’s val-ues, any rationale as to why he should value both cultures and individuals. To provide some orientation here it is time to turn to Nietzsche’s own answers to the question of what possesses value.

Famously, Nietzsche opens the second section of A by posing this very ques-tion and giving an immediate reply: “What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man” [Was ist gut?—Alles, was das Gefühl der Macht, den Willen zur Macht, die Macht selbst im Menschen erhöht] ( A 2). 14 One thing we can note is that by bringing these three things, the increase of which is said to be “good,” together (there is no suggestion in the German, or in Hollingdale’s translation, that this is an either/or formulation), certain possibilities are eliminated: what Nietzsche values cannot be just an illusory feeling of power where one in fact has no power, nor can it be power that is exercised but not felt, experienced as power. The consequences of this are far-reaching, but a full discussion of them does not belong here; instead I want to latch on to what I take to be one of the more readily apparent implica-tions: according to this formulation, what Nietzsche values is the will to power and power itself in man. Of course “will to power” may according to some of Nietzsche’s statements seem to mean “everything,” the entirety of being; 15 in a reading many interpreters will find more acceptable, “will to power” would seem to represent the most fundamental force in the world of biological nature or, still more narrowly, in human psychology. It is the latter with which Nietzsche seems here to be primarily concerned, as the final part of the answer and the remainder of this section show, with their discussion of “virtue in the Renaissance style” as opposed to Christian virtues. So if Nietzsche values will to power, that could simply mean, according to different readings of “will to power,” that Nietzsche values existence as a whole or that he values nature or humanity as a whole. We should not forget that Nietzsche does see himself in a number of places as an affirmer of existence as a whole, not least in the eternal recurrence “test” and the concept of amor fati . But such a global affirmation seems at odds with the talk here of “raising” or “heightening” (Erhöhung), and there can be little doubt that Nietzsche also holds more definite discriminative values; why else would this section go on to specify a principle of negative



evaluation? “What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.” Nietzsche is a philosopher who in one sense affirms the whole and yet in another sense clearly values certain things over others. 16

By stating that not just the will to power but “power itself in man” is good, Nietzsche shifts the reader’s focus beyond the force that, on the most plausible interpretations of Nietzsche, constitutes all human beings as a universal drive and toward the actual attaining of power. All humans are motivated by the will to power; but only some attain, as it were, real power, substantial levels of power in the world, and this is where Nietzsche situates value. So accord-ing to this passage it is, in human affairs, in the attaining of high levels of power that value is to be located. 17 What I have already said should point the way to the particular conclusion I want to draw from this: that Nietzsche thus values neither just powerful individuals nor only powerful societies as such but, rather, certain powerful structures of the will to power at whatever level they hold . 18 One might speak of these, with Richardson, as syntheses of will to power, or one might use a similarly generalizing term such as that used by Ciano Aydin in an essay to which my approach is sympathetic: formation . 19 I will continue for the most part to employ the term synthesis , since I feel it captures best the level of unity attained by these “formations”: a synthetic unity. What Nietzsche values, then, are the most powerful syntheses of will to power.

Schemata of Power: Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Composite Value

It remains to specify exactly what it is that makes these high levels of power possible and thus to specify where they occur; the highest levels of power for Nietzsche will not necessarily coincide with what we would identify as excep-tional degrees of power. Let us start with the case of the individual human being: what kinds of human beings are to be regarded as powerful? I have already discussed the fact that Nietzsche sees human beings essentially as synthetic composites of drives. Does the way in which these drives are then disposed or distributed matter for their value? This does indeed seem to be the case: for one thing the passages I have cited imply that a healthy, powerful human psyche has certain necessary features, such as unity and an organization of ruling and subservient parts. For lack of space here I will not cite further passages in order to pick out all of these features but will instead borrow quite heavily from an account I believe tracks the relevant features faithfully and to which I have already alluded: that of John Richardson in Nietzsche’s System . Richardson gives certain criteria concerning how persons as synthetic wills can be distinguished: although this is not Richardson’s direct concern at this point, these will turn out to be crucial when it comes to ascertaining the value of individuals. I will simplify


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these criteria a little, to give what I feel are their essential elements, and add to them a fourth criterion that Richardson introduces at a later stage:

Complexity: The greater the number of diverse drives a person is capa-1. ble of combining in him- or herself, the greater and more powerful the synthesis they constitute. Distribution of relative levels of power: Nietzsche favors a situation in 2. which there are one or a small number of particularly dominant drives and a large number of vastly inferior drives, separated by a gulf: the “pathos of distance” (a “maximax” distribution). Degree of unity: “How thoroughly have a person’s drives been synthe-3. sized with one another? Nietzsche thinks the unity of a person is never complete [. . .] but a matter of varying degree.” 20 Character and mode of ruling of the dominant drives: Nietzsche’s valu-4. ation is also bound up with whether the ruling drives in an individual are those best suited to the task of ruling and rule in the best way: that is, by incorporating lesser drives rather than eliminating or repressing them. 21

It should now be possible to draw up a similar list of value criteria for soci-eties. 22 I propose that the following analogous points give the crucial distinc-tions to be made in determining value with regard to societies (or cultures) in general:

Complexity: Nietzsche admires societies that have the power to 1. bind together, in some sense, a diversity of peoples and races, as the Roman Empire extended its power over a great swathe of different peoples. Distribution of relative levels of power: Nietzsche’s admiration for 2. societies in which a small elite holds sway over a lowly, plebeian mass is well known. Degree of unity: How successfully has a society been unified into a 3. single synthetic whole? Character and mode of ruling of the dominant classes: Again, Nietzsche 4. reserves his highest admiration for those societies ruled by the appro-priate persons or classes, that is, those who are naturally fitted to rule. Such a criterion demands a mode of ruling that operates not by repress-ing, excluding, or eliminating individuals but by incorporating them. 23 As, in the case of the individual, the valorized mode of ruling allows drives, such as the sex drive, to remain what they are in some sense, so the analogous manner of ruling a political synthesis is that which allows individual subjects to be who they are.



This two-level analogy immediately brings to mind Plato’s Republic . For both Plato and Nietzsche, the implication is that the individuals who will be most fit to act as the rulers of the kind of society or culture structured in the requisite way will also be those who are characterized by a similar internal structure. 24 Indeed this is a direct implication of the Nietzschean schema I have developed here: those individuals who fulfill the first set of criteria are, let us not forget, the most powerful individuals from the perspective of this internal schema and therefore the most apt for ruling in the way prescribed by the second set of cri-teria, which is, by definition, the most powerful way of ruling. 25

Nietzsche’s underlying schema of values, then, tracks high levels of power by way of the particular shape and character given to syntheses of will to power by the criteria listed: thus, for example, with regard to the second criterion of each set, Nietzsche consistently locates value wherever he identifies a “pathos of distance,” be that in a society as a whole or within the psyche of an indi-vidual. However, these criteria do not give us a complete picture because they specify only the intrinsic criteria of Nietzsche’s valuing, while Nietzsche is also interested in various kinds of extrinsic or relational value of which these same syntheses can partake. 26 Interpretations have tended to emphasize either internal or relational aspects of value exclusively; what I am arguing here is that Nietzsche holds, in effect, a composite theory of value, although of course he never explicitly fleshes it out in these terms. Two kinds of extrinsic value at least are already at issue in what has gone before, since they concern the relations between individuals and societies. If it is the value of a society that is Nietzsche’s primary focus, then individuals acquire an extrinsic (relational) value insofar as they contribute to and thus partake of the value of the culture to which they belong. Thus the Roman citizen acquires value not just by virtue of his intrinsic qualities but by virtue of his participation in that great project, the ongoing evolution of the Roman Empire, which Nietzsche describes (cited above) as “the most grandiose form of organization under difficult conditions which has hitherto been achieved.” And conversely, as was discussed directly earlier, a culture or state is seen as extrinsically valuable if it is conducive to producing individuals who are themselves intrinsically valuable.

One particular strain in the literature that emphasizes relational value at the expense of intrinsic value focuses on the concept of the agon or struggle. This emphasis takes its initial orientation from Nietzsche’s early interest in the Greek agon and in particular from his early essay “Homer’s Contest”; 27 the agon is conceived of as a struggle in which each participant both competes with and yet respects the integrity of his or her opponent. Nietzsche scholars have convinc-ingly argued that this agonistic model persists into Nietzsche’s later works and that it relates there to a thematic of identity being inextricably bound up with that of the opponent or that of many opponents (i.e., relational in this sense); 28 Herman Siemens in particular is concerned to extend the consequences of this


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relational identity to a conception of relational value and persuasively makes the case for this in relation to some late notes of Nietzsche’s. 29 I do not have space here for an extended discussion of the agon ; all I will say at this juncture is that I am persuaded that this agonistic model of value is indeed a significant strain in Nietzsche’s mature writings and that it therefore must belong on the list of extrinsic modes of value. 30 And there is another element of value that ought not to be overlooked in this context and which it is natural to think of as extrinsic: it is clearly part of what Nietzsche values about individuals and societies not only that they possess a certain internal structure but also that they achieve great things , so an extrinsic value derives from achievements. We should further supplement this with the value of what might be called “activeness,” the ongo-ing effort to encounter new resistances, surpass them, and achieve ever greater goals; this, too, must be thought of as at least partly extrinsic, since it concerns relations to these external goals. 31

I will not claim that the inventory of relational values I have drawn up so far is exhaustive; indeed, some further types of extrinsic value will emerge below. The important thing for my concerns is that all of these different modes of extrinsic value belong to the general sphere of the relation holding between one synthesis of will to power (in the paradigm case an individual) and other syntheses of a different order . These include not only the agonistic relation (which might hold between the members of a ruling elite, thus in relation to the synthesis that is an aristocracy) but also relations of domination and con-trol, which, as Richardson has shown, remain an ineliminable element in how Nietzsche thinks of power as power over others. 32 These relations are seen as valuable because they set up that “pathos of distance” within a broader synthetic structure that is conducive to the powerful internal dynamic of that structure. All of these modes of extrinsic value apply not only at the level of the individual but also at the level of the larger synthesis, the culture, society, or state: thus a state also will be considered powerful by Nietzsche if it masters other states or peoples, if it exists in an agonistic relationship with other powerful states, if it continues to push itself toward ever greater achievements, and so on. One can immediately see from the complexities involved how difficult any calculus of a total composite value of any given state or individual must now become. For one thing Nietzsche essentially gives us no means of determining the relative importance of the internal and external criteria of value, of the proportions in which they might contribute to an overall value. So I am not attempting here to suggest that there really could be a workable calculus of value for Nietzsche; on the contrary, I am more inclined to think that the consequence of Nietzsche’s view is that there can be no such calculus. But that one cannot calculate values in this way does not necessarily seem to me to be a weakness of any system of values or any ethics at all; it does not preclude that Nietzsche’s schema could provide normative guidance . There are of course many reasons why we might



not want to accept this guidance or take our measure of value from Nietzsche’s power-orientated schema. 33 But be that as it may, I think that the very idea of a composite value system that recognizes both intrinsic and extrinsic values is a striking one and something that could be experimented with on the basis of quite different underlying ethical convictions. And I also think that it is the best explanation for the seemingly conflicting kinds of valuations Nietzsche exhibits in his later texts.

Nietzsche’s Composite Values: Emerging Tensions

Let me now explore a little further some of the consequences of this composite view. First, the implication is that despite Nietzsche’s increasing emphasis on relational value, according to the schema I have drawn up value is never wholly relational in the case of any given synthesis, since one element of that synthe-sis’s value, even were it to be a relatively small proportion of the total value, is intrinsic, involving the Rangordnung of its internal components. 34

To test this conclusion let us turn to one of the figures Nietzsche most admires: Goethe. The famous passage in which Nietzsche discusses Goethe in Twilight of the Idols is extremely complex and serves to remind us, among other things, that the drives that are the basic units of will to power are not purely biological “urges” but can be historically specific, since Nietzsche describes Goethe as “a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century, —He bore within him its strongest instincts [. . .].” But nevertheless, the chief source of Nietzsche’s admiration for Goethe is given in the following extract (the panegyric that follows in this section seems to be more concerned with Napoleon than with Goethe): “What he aspired to was totality ; he strove against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (preached in the most horrible scholasticism by Kant, the antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself to a whole, he created himself . . .” ( TI “Expeditions” 49). It is this unifying of self that Nietzsche predominantly admires in Goethe. The passage therefore provides a strong support for my general thesis, that it is the ordering of certain kinds of synthesis that is the chief locus of Nietzsche’s valuing. But the point I want to make here is that Nietzsche does not value Goethe as someone who created his identity in any agonistic relations with equals or near-equals (Goethe’s striving against Kant is not itself seen as what provides unity, only as that which provided Goethe with an additional spur in his cultivation of unity in the guise of something to kick against); nor are any of the other kinds of relational value I have described in play. Instead it is the entirely internal structuring of drives—even if these drives are themselves social and cultural in origin—that Nietzsche admires and surely would admire regardless of what effect they had


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on the society in which he lived or even on future societies: even if no one else had come to know there was a man Goethe possessed with such a soul.

Furthermore, strange as it may seem, Nietzsche’s admiration in this passage does not seem to have anything to do with Goethe’s achievements as an artist , along the lines that what would be valuable about such disciplining of the psyche was that it enabled Goethe to create great art; on the contrary, the fact that Goethe was an artist could only be of any relevance insofar as Goethe’s art, his writing, gives us a perspicuous access to his psyche. Goethe’s being an artist is therefore so much the better for us; but it is not that which is admirable about Goethe for Nietzsche. None of this is to deny that Goethe could also be, for Nietzsche, the bearer of all these different kinds of value, qua artist, qua influence, and so forth. But at least one component of what Nietzsche values in Goethe, and that which he here focuses on, is intrinsic and nonrelational.

This, then, is what represents the highest value for Nietzsche in terms of this internal, nonrelational element of the synthesis “individual” (and, in par-allel terms, any other synthesis such as a culture): a hierarchical structure of the drives, in which the highest drives rule over lowlier drives while allowing them to continue to express themselves as the drives that they are. In what circumstances, then, are the relational values to which this individual is also a party maximized? Once again, I am not attempting to give a precise means of calculating this value, which I think would be a fruitless undertaking; rather I am following the main thrust of Nietzsche’s valuing in order to pick up some clues as to the relative importance of different factors. I have suggested above that an individual bears a relational value for Nietzsche simply by partaking in and being a contributory part of a greater synthesis, such as a rich and magnificent culture. Thus to have played any part in the ancient, fifth- and sixth-century pre-Socratic Athenian culture will be seen by Nietzsche as a fortunate (i.e., valuable) thing. 35 Nevertheless it is hard to think that this element of relational value can be a particularly significant one in considering the value of an individual, since the individuals Nietzsche admires are clearly not those who simply formed a constituent part of a valuable culture without anything further to distinguish them. 36 The same goes to some extent for participation in the agon : even if this agonistic community is also a ruling elite, merely to take part in this competitive but respectful community of peers, although it may be of more worth than being a Roman citizen of a lowly order, for example, cannot procure particularly high degrees of power (and thus value), since once again Nietzsche does not admire individuals on these grounds; although he does indeed admire the agon as a synthesis in its own right. Rather, the individuals Nietzsche admires are those who very conspicuously “stand out” from any such community: indeed, as they have many times been called in the Nietzsche literature, “exceptional” individu-als. One major contributory factor in Nietzsche’s admiration for figures such as Goethe and Napoleon (and indeed “Nietzsche”) is that they are exceptions in



their age, they “tower over” it; in other words they are powerful figures in the sense that they “dominate” their age, whether that be intellectually, artistically, or politically. Paradoxical as it may seem, the greatest individuals appear for Nietzsche to come to fruition only in the most decadent ages; they appear “in spite of” their ages. So in terms of relational value, when assessing specifically the value of an individual, the most significant contributory factors in terms of relational value are not those I have listed above but, on the contrary, a quite dif-ferent element: this “in spite of” aspect, “exceptionality” as we might call it.

Conversely, when Nietzsche considers cultures he really does esteem there is much less evidence of an extreme valorization for individuals within that culture. Which ancient Greek individuals does Nietzsche really admire? Of course he admires the pre-Socratics, admires Aeschylus and Sophocles, but really he admires them either for their ideas (in the former instance), which are particularly pertinent and important for us to reacquaint ourselves with, or, in the latter case, for artistic achievements, which might just as much be seen as the products of a superabundant culture as of an individual. If there are figures Nietzsche really does esteem in ancient Greece, they are those who buck the trend and go against their culture: think of Nietzsche’s ambivalent admiration for Socrates, the man who ushered in the final collapse of the more ancient Greek culture. Although Nietzsche of course finds a great deal to worry about in the legacy of Socrates, the latter’s opposition to contemporary Greek culture makes him “stand out” in Nietzsche’s writings in a way in which no other figure from ancient Greece does.

None of this should really be a surprise, since it simply follows the pattern of valuing I have laid out above: the most powerful and, therefore, most highly valued individuals are those who attain the greatest “pathos of distance” with respect to others, thus those individuals who tower over the lesser mortals who surround them most conspicuously; and an individual can only really tower over his or her age if that age is a relatively weak one, in which most individuals are of extremely minor, even quasi null significance. In one quite common image of Nietzsche’s, however, it can be observed that such individuals are perhaps not so extremely isolated as it might first appear: I am thinking of Nietzsche’s evocation of the chain of great men (the figures Nietzsche evokes are all male) who communicate with one another across the ages: 37 so these exceptional individuals might at least find some peers if they look across the spans of past time, even if they find none in their own age. But Nietzsche’s most extreme evocations of the exceptional individual, Zarathustra and, to an even greater extent, the Übermensch , would appear to have no peers even in previous ages: here the “maximax” distribution is taken to its logical extreme. In this way the relational value of the individual is maximized, since this criterion of “excep-tionality” is the most important criterion of relational value for Nietzsche when focusing on the value of an individual: the maximax distribution discussed


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earlier combines with a high intrinsic value (the structuring of the drives) to produce an exceptionally high reading in terms of the value of an individual. The surprising consequence of this is that the kinds of cultures Nietzsche most admires are simply not conducive to or even capable of producing the kind of individuals Nietzsche most admires.

Bearing in mind the parallels I have drawn above, there are some further com-parisons that can be made with Plato at this point. As I have suggested above, there is for Plato as for Nietzsche an isomorphism between the well-formed soul and the well-formed polis, with the small, higher part ruling over the baser ele-ments. One consequence of this for Plato is that, in order for the polis to take its proper shape, only a small number of people will be able to achieve the ordering of the soul that results in highest virtue: the vast majority of the populace are to be those in whom the appetitive or spirited part dominates, so that they will be in a sense misshapen souls. 38 This seems to build an aristocratic elitism into Plato’s polis , which will systematically deny the highest good to the greater number. Nietzsche, as is well known, is quite comfortable with various kinds of elitism, but it is interesting to observe the particular way in which this elitism is built into Nietzsche’s conception of the highest kind of society, according to my model, in a precise parallel with Plato: the majority of people must be similarly malformed in order that the aristocratic structure of society, which Nietzsche so values, can take shape, with a small elite of powerful individuals at the top and a “pathos of distance” between them and the masses; it would be a disaster, from the point of view of this structure, if all the members of a society turned out to be Übermenschen of more or less equal intrinsic rank. But there is a further ten-sion in the Nietzschean model, as I have argued above: the very highest type of individual in relational terms, the most “exceptional,” is by definition excluded from Nietzsche’s highest society—although I should also make it clear that this is because the mature Nietzsche favors an aristocratic model to an autocratic one, in which the single monarch would clearly be an exceptional figure. 39

Conclusion: Value Conflict in Nietzsche’s Late Notes and the Possibility of a Resolution

The particular tension I have just described is symptomatic of what I see as the more general “conflict” in Nietzsche’s values I have in mind in the title of this article: a conflict deriving from the fact that, as I explored in the first section above, Nietzsche has no way of assessing the full evaluative implications of the relationships between syntheses of will to power at different levels, paradigmati-cally between individuals and societies. I can think of no more appropriate way of describing Nietzsche’s approach to such questions than simply saying that he has his eye sometimes on the value of the individual and sometimes on the value



of a larger cultural whole. This is why it has been quite possible, by privileging certain passages and themes, for interpreters to emphasize Nietzsche’s valuing of individuals, chiefly by focusing on the intrinsic qualities Nietzsche admires, or, conversely, his interest in larger syntheses, where relational values are at stake. The kind of equivocation in which one might expect this to result, the clash between these differing perspectives, is generally masked in Nietzsche’s published works by an alternately exclusive focus on one or the other kind of synthesis, individual or society/culture, but it comes to the fore in particular in some of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, where Nietzsche is very frequently preoc-cupied with the question of what shape future societies should ideally take. At times Nietzsche focuses on a particular form of society in which both nobler and baser peoples derive a relational value through partaking in a powerfully structured society and maintaining the necessary “pathos of distance” at the heart of it; at times he is focused on the value of individuals, and according to this perspective the vast majority of people have an effectively null value in contrast to the high value of the few. 40 But to demonstrate that this conflict really is inher-ent in Nietzsche’s published philosophy as well one need only pose the ques-tion, based on whichever texts the interlocutor thinks best represent Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, just the published texts from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onward: What is more valuable for Nietzsche, a healthy society that not only will achieve great things in its own right but will also allow a certain amount of leeway for healthy human beings to flourish; or a number (how many?) of really exceptional individuals who discipline themselves into well-structured wholes entirely autonomously and against all the odds, in spite of the deleterious influ-ence of the decadent societies in which they live? This is the kind of question to which, I believe, Nietzsche can give us no definitive answer, but in order to see how these tensions play themselves out and to give us some indications of possible paths to pursue, let us now turn to some of the late notes.

Herman Siemens, in a series of articles to which I have already referred, explores some of the very questions I have been posing in studies that meticu-lously plot the evolution of Nietzsche’s approaches to the question of politics and the relations among democracy, higher castes, and the futural “great politics” through his mature thinking. 41 Siemens notes a number of tensions that arise between passages, often closely contemporaneous, that respectively suggest, for example, a purely instrumental attitude to democracy (and to the “mass” in general) and a more symbiotic relation, which Siemens describes in the follow-ing terms: “At the extreme, Nietzsche argues for the reciprocal necessity and antagonism between democracy and the community of legislators.” 42 This latter position suggests that the higher caste of legislators (in my terms, the powerful ruling caste within a society structured by the “pathos of distance”—Nietzsche nevertheless often conceives of these legislators as “solitary”) needs the exis-tence of democracy and the democratic mass as an integral part of its own identity


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and activity, and Siemens is not slow to draw the evaluative consequences of such a position: this position of “deep compatibility” represents “a fundamen-tal reflection on the questions of value and evaluation that issues in a double affirmation of democratic conditions and the conditions for enhancement.” 43 It is along these lines that one will find a curious affirmation of democracy pervading Nietzsche’s late notebooks. The important consequence in terms of value is that such a position must attribute to the “lower” human being more than merely instrumental value, since that human being participates in the synthesis Nietzsche values and thus partakes of one variety of relational value. But before pursuing this any further let us look at the relevant sections from the passage that is Siemens’s paradigm example of this “deep compatibility” between the ruling legislators and the democratic “mass”:

First question with regard to hierarchy :

how solitary or how herd-like someone is

(in the latter case his value lies in the qualities which secure the existence of his herd, his type, in the former case, what separates, isolates, defends and makes it possible to be solitary .)

Conclusion: one ought not to evaluate the solitary type according to the herd-like, nor the herd-like type according to the solitary

Seen from a height: both are necessary; and equally, their antagonism is necessary [. . .]. ( KSA 12:10[59]) 44

We can see how Siemens comes to his conclusions on the basis of such a passage. Here the value of the herd type and of the solitary type is referred not to some external, independent measure but to how successfully they fulfill this type; as Siemens puts it: “[O]ur standard of evaluation should be relativised to the condi-tions needed by each type.” 45 So it seems that here we reach a view according to which value is purely relational. We cannot say that the solitary type is worth more than the herd type, since each type has its own independent criteria of suc-cess and therefore of value. Thus Siemens identifies a passage that exemplifies the purely relational form of value he feels is Nietzsche’s most valuable legacy in this context: “a relational-antagonistic concept of value.” 46

I want now to reconsider this passage on the basis of the kinds of structures of value I have outlined above. What I have to say is really in no way a refutation of Siemens’s reading, since Siemens makes no claim that the view expressed in this passage represents Nietzsche’s final, resolved position on these matters; his claim is merely that the passage represents one strain in Nietzsche’s late notes, a strain that is for Siemens one of the most amenable to being adapted to the demands of contemporary political philosophy. Siemens makes it very clear that there are plenty of passages in the late notes that represent much less attractive positions, such as abolition or sheer instrumentalization (i.e., exploitation) of the lower classes. 47 But what I want to suggest is that all of



these seemingly (and not just seemingly) contradictory approaches to ques-tions of the relations between different strata of society have their underlying rationale in the complex structures of valuing that are at work in the heart of Nietzsche’s value thinking.

Nietzsche, then, says in this passage that “seen from a height, both [types] are necessary,” and the implication of the rest of the passage is that they are in some sense equally necessary or, rather, that this necessity is incommensurable, since neither can properly be assessed by the criteria that apply to the other. But what is this “height” from which their reciprocal necessity can be discerned? Surely it is that of the “higher” synthesis to which they both belong, the broader cultural whole in which they participate and, more to the point, from which they both derive a relational value. (It is not as if the criteria of value are relativized to, for example, what each human being holds to be valuable, which would be a different kind of relativization altogether.) Without this higher synthesis, they obviously could not possess the kinds of relational value Nietzsche is evoking here, since it is only the higher synthesis that brings them into a relation that confers value. So the particular value perspective Nietzsche adopts in this note is that of the value of a higher-level social or cultural synthesis. In terms of the relational value of which the solitary type and the herd type can partake by virtue of participating in this synthesis, there is indeed, as Siemens points out, no legitimate way of assessing them or drawing hierarchies between them: they both belong with an equal necessity to this synthesis, since the participation of both, in distinctive ways differently evaluable, is required for its operation. But, as I have been arguing, relational value is only one component of the total value of a synthesis, including that of an individual. So if one were to pose the ques-tion of Nietzsche with regard to this note, “Does this mean that both types are equally valuable?” it would be perfectly legitimate (and surely extremely likely) for Nietzsche to answer: “No, for the solitary type, as a powerful, internally dis-ciplined type, possesses a further intrinsic value which the herd type does not.” So the implication of this passage is not that without this antagonistic relation neither type would be valuable. Nietzsche, as we know, is not inclined to be so evenhanded in the final analysis as we might suppose from this particular late note. (And we also ought not to forget that the synthesis to which the herd type and the solitary type are co-necessary is also licensed by Nietzsche to behave toward other states in an entirely undemocratic way, to dominate them, etc.) By switching the value perspective to that which measures the intrinsic value of the individual we get a different component of value that makes a telling distinction in considering overall value. So even at this extreme relational end of Nietzsche’s value thinking the resources are readily available for Nietzsche to make distinctions by way of a system of valuing that is, in its fundamental structure, not wholly relational.

By way of conclusion I want to consider, just briefly, whether this tension in Nietzsche’s late thought is intractable or whether a possible resolution can


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be discerned. Perhaps the most apposite thing to consider in answering this is that despite all his talk of rare individuals, it is reasonable to claim that what Nietzsche is most interested in throughout his later writings is the possibility of a valuable culture as such, rather than in producing the most extraordinary single individual possible. This does not mean that Nietzsche is not interested in great new individuals arising, but they would be great individuals belonging to and in some sense produced by a culture; such individuals can be healthy and powerful with well-ordered internal syntheses of drives, and they can both distinguish themselves from one another and secure a kind of respect for one another through their participation in agonistic relations or contests. They also benefit from the pathos of distance, which separates them from the mass of the lower classes in the hierarchically structured societies Nietzsche always envis-ages. But they cannot at the same time access the highest relational measures of value, since they cannot also, as well as all this, be exceptional individuals. So Nietzsche might ultimately be inclined simply to give up on this particular criterion of relational value in order to secure both a valuable culture and valuable individuals existing within that culture: the characteristics he always identified with what he considered the highest era of ancient Greece. I have suggested that Nietzsche does not provide a workable calculus for overall value, and he is in any case not by and large the kind of thinker to work by means of a calculus, but what Nietzsche’s instincts seem to tell him is that the greatest value accrues where what we aim for is the highest culture we can achieve rather than simply the highest individuals. And in that at least we might be inclined to think there is something worth pursuing in Nietzsche’s late nexus of value thinking.

University College Dublin [email protected]

NOTES I have in mind here essays by Thomas Hurka, Nadeem Hussain, and Maudemarie Clarke 1.

and David Dudrick, respectively, in Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu, eds., Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). In making my own contribution to addressing this question I take myself to be responding to some of the as yet unanswered questions concerning Nietzsche’s ethics and his metaethics posed by Simon Robertson in a recent article, “Nietzsche’s Ethical Revaluation” ( Journal of Nietzsche Studies 37 [2009]: 66–90). In particular what I am exploring relates closely to the question given by Robertson as a section heading: “What are the ultimate bearers of the highest value? Excellent individuals or achievements?” See ibid., 77–80. As will emerge, I develop what I think is a distinctive approach to this question of what it is that bears the highest value for Nietzsche. For the purposes of the current article I will leave some of the metaethical questions to one side, although I agree with Robertson that these, too, are urgent. I should also note that two of the approaches mentioned here have in common with a number of readings of Nietzsche a concern less with what Nietzsche values than with how it is that Nietzsche values. Thus for a fictionalist reading the focus is on the status of the values that Nietzsche holds: as simulacra of value in which one chooses to believe in order to give life meaning and purpose



but which have no further justification. For a noncognitive reading, values are justified just insofar as an agent has his or her reasons for believing in them; the agent is not committed to any belief in the objective validity of these values. But being a noncognitivist or a perfectionist does not mean that the question of what Nietzsche values should not also be of interest: my claim is that the scheme of valuing I will outline here gives the basis of Nietzsche’s values even if one insists that Nietzsche upholds these values “arbitrarily” or entertains them as a “fiction.”

For a paradigmatic example of Nietzsche’s esteem for Goethe as an individual (with 2. reference also to Napoleon), see TI “Expeditions” 49. Nietzsche’s regard for Napoleon, as in this passage, is almost always ambivalent but nevertheless clearly genuine in part: see GM I:1. See also, for example, KSA 12:5[108], 10:24[33]. For citations of Nietzsche’s works, I rely on the following translations: R. J. Hollingdale’s translations of Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (London: Penguin, 1990); D. Smith’s translation of On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Hollingdale’s translation of “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations , ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Hollingdale’s translation of Beyond Good and Evil (London: Penguin, 1990). For translations of unpublished material I have made extensive use of W. Kaufmann’s translations in The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). I make it explicit where I have made use of the translations of K. Sturge in R. Bittner, ed., Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

On the value of the individual, cf. 3. KSA 11:27[16], 12:5[108]. In the former Nietzsche claims that he teaches “that a single human being can under certain circumstances justify the existence of whole millennia.”

This is, famously, the view presented by Brian Leiter in his 4. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), see in particular 73–112.

Thus in 5. Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche praises “the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice” as “great forcing-houses for strong human beings” ( TI “Expeditions” 49). Cf. KSA 11:25[178] on how Greek and French culture confer “the power to give form to oneself.”

Siemens sees Nietzsche’s mature position as equivocal: at times he will indeed sympathize 6. with exceptional individuals, but at times he is concerned with man as “species,” “plant,” or “type”; I will return later to this equivocation in Nietzsche. But with the latter strain in mind, for Siemens, “it is wrong to see Nietzsche as investing exclusive or absolute value in the One or the Few against the Many[….] Exceptional or singular individuals figure not as the exclusive beneficiaries but as the great experimenters, as the key to realizing a perfectionist demand that has a generic or general orientation toward humankind” (H. W. Siemens, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy [1870–1886],” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38 [2009]: 30). See also H. W. Siemens, “Yes, No, Maybe So. . . Nietzsche’s Equivocations on the Relation Between Democracy and ‘Grosse Politik,’” in Nietzsche, Power, and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought , ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 231–68. Siemens’s contribution in this area is particularly pertinent in the present context since his general approach emphasizes aspects of Nietzsche’s thought in which the value of the individual is relativized to his participation in an “agonal” social structure. Other commentators approach the question of the possibility of a Nietzschean politics differently. For example, David Owen’s general strategy in this respect involves, it seems to me, besides emphasizing the Nietzschean critique of liberalism, conceding that Nietzsche’s basic interest is in individuals but arguing that the qualities in individuals that Nietzsche seeks are best provided not by the aristocratic societies Nietzsche sometimes espouses but by democratic conditions rethought in certain ways. See David Owen’s Nietzsche, Politics, and Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1995); “Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Agonal Perfectionism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002): 113–31; and “Pluralism and the Pathos of Distance (Or: How to Relax with Style): Connolly, Agonistic Respect, and the Limits of Political Theory,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10, no. 2 (2008): 210–26.


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One might also consider in this context what Nietzsche professes to like about the Old 7. Testament as compared to the New in GM III:22. It is not just that he finds there “great men, a heroic landscape, and something of that rarest quality on earth, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart”; as he adds: “ what is more [ mehr noch ], I find a people [ ein Volk ]” (my emphasis). This mehr noch clearly implies that Nietzsche must affirm this Volk not just as producing “great men” but as a further locus of value in itself.

See, for example, 8. KSA 11:36[31], 12:9[98], 13:14[79], 13:14[95]. On the hypothesis of the “soul as social structure of drives and emotions,” see 9. BGE 12;

cf. BGE 36 and the notebook extract KSA 12:2[76]. Many notebook passages suggest something similar with regard to biological life in general: see, for example, KSA 10:24[14].

John Richardson, 10. Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21. See ibid., 44–52. 11. As Richardson also points out in the same section (ibid.). 12. Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” in 13. Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on

German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. Cf. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy , trans. David J. Parent (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 181: “that all beings have the character of organization, and thus of a domination structure with basically similar structuring, remains beyond question for [Nietzsche] until the end of his creative life.”

There are some particularly strong statements of the link between value and degree of 14. power in the Nachlass , such as KSA 13:11[83]: “Where will we find an objective measure of value? Only in the quantum of enhanced and organised power, only what happens in everything that happens, only a will to more . . .” (Sturge’s translation, modified). See also KSA 13:14[105]: “The attempt should be made to see whether a scientific order of values could be constructed simply on a numerical and mensural scale of force—All other ‘values’ are prejudices, naiveties, misunderstandings.”

Most famously in 15. KSA 11:38[12]: “ This world is will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”

This may sound paradoxical, but it is as well to remember that it represents something 16. Nietzsche has in common as a philosopher with a great deal of the Western tradition, including theological traditions that had to reconcile a conception of the world as God’s perfect creation and yet make normative discriminations within that world. Although Nietzsche sets himself against this tradition in so many ways, it seems to me that he is nevertheless left with a version of the famous “problem of evil.”

See also note 14. 17. Richardson, having drawn up these criteria, goes on to remark that Nietzsche seemingly 18.

ought to value the larger-scale synthesis that is a society more highly than the smaller-scale one represented by an individual and yet acknowledges that in fact Nietzsche’s main focus of valorization remains the exceptional individual ( Nietzsche’s System , 51–52). In a number of places in Nietzsche’s System he then explores reasons why this might be so, focusing initially on the idea that Nietzsche is uncertain about the real status of the social synthesis and whether it represents a proper synthesis at all (51–52). While I think that this is a legitimate worry to identify, I think that the focus on the individual in Nietzsche is far less exclusive than Richardson represents it to be. In fact Richardson ultimately gives a rather more complex reason why societies cannot bear the highest values for Nietzsche: “Any society must be held together by values it can’t see beyond. So none can be that open-ended synthesis, always pressing to overcome itself, which is the Dionysian overman” (141; the entire discussion is highly pertinent to my themes: 122–41). But I am not convinced that a certain kind of ideal society could not also be considered as an “open-ended synthesis” or that Nietzsche always thought of societies in this more limited, static way. More generally, I do not necessarily agree with Richardson’s feeling that Nietzsche really



ought to value societies more highly than individuals, even if the former were taken to be unified and open syntheses to just the same extent as the latter. To explore the reasons behind this second disagreement would require a considerable detour, but the pertinent questions to ask are: Why should the societal syntheses be valued more highly than the synthesis in which an individual consists? Because they are “bigger” or “higher” in some relevant sense? This relevance remains to be demonstrated.

See Ciano Aydin, “Nietzsche on Reality as Will to Power: Toward an ‘Organization–19. Struggle’ Model,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 33 (2007): 25–48.

Richardson, 20. Nietzsche’s System , 48. Richardson also has a criterion of the “compatibility” of drives. To explain why I think this is superfluous, at least for my purposes, would take me beyond the scope of this article.

This comes across most clearly through Nietzsche’s uses of such terms as 21. appropriation , incorporation ( Einverleibung ), and inpsychation ( Einverseelung ); see BGE 230, 259. Richardson’s account of this kind of “mastery,” which it seems to me is not fully incorporated into his more general discussions of syntheses and value, is given in Nietzsche’s System , 33–35: “To help to the more important sort of power or growth, the forces subjected must keep their own characters and not be utterly made over into mere facilitating tools; they must add their own telic patterns and viewpoints to its fabric” (34). For the Church’s strategy of “castration,” see TI “Morality as Anti-nature” 1: “extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness).—But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life ….”

As does Richardson ( 22. Nietzsche’s System , 51). Viewing Nietzsche’s thought in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual debates in Germany, Gregory Moore demonstrates the prevalence of the analogy between individual and state in Nietzsche’s era, particularly in the biologically inspired guise of the “cell-state” of Rudolf Virchow: Nietzsche is responding to and participating in an ongoing debate. See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35–41.

In the current context the metaphor of “incorporation” is at once disturbingly violent, 23. implying the consumption of individuals, and at the same time more neutrally suggestive of something like “assimilation”: I think that this ambivalence reflects well Nietzsche’s approach to such matters, as will emerge.

This becomes clear in the 24. Republic when, having identified that in the tripartite structure of the soul of the just man, the “rational part” must rule (Plato, Republic , trans. G. M. A. Grube, ed. John M. Cooper [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 441e), the famous revelation comes that it is the very man in whom that rational part rules, the philosopher, who is alone fit to rule the polis (487e).

This will also mean that some of the peculiarities and paradoxes of the Platonic account 25. will also be at stake in the Nietzschean model, as I will explore further on. For a discussion of some of the parallels between Nietzsche’s conception of the body politic and Plato’s soul modeled on the ideal polis , see Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 346–52.

26. Extrinsic value and relational value should not be conceived as interchangeable terms. Extrinsic value means value that an agent or object bears by virtue of its contribution to something else intrinsically valuable, whether or not it then becomes a part of, participates in, this other intrinsically valuable thing; it therefore includes instrumental value. Relational value, on the other hand, posits value in no readily identifiable bearer (or synthesis in the terms I am using here) but, rather, in the interstices of a network of relations, such that no single agent or object can bear any value in and of itself but acquires value in its relations to other agents or objects. (It therefore does not include instrumental value.) In the course of this article I will use relational value in its proper sense, but for convenience I will use extrinsic value as an umbrella term to cover all


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instances of value that are not strictly intrinsic: so that relational value will be seen as a kind of “special case” of extrinsic value.

An English translation of this text appears in 27. On the Genealogy of Morality , trans. Carol Diethe, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

See, for example, Christa Davis Acampora, “Of Dangerous Games and Dastardly Deeds: 28. A Typology of Nietzsche’s Contests,” International Studies in Philosophy 34, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 135–51. Cf. the accounts in Lawrence Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1995); and Owen, Nietzsche, Politics, and Modernity .

See H. W. Siemens, “Agonal Communities of Taste: Law and Community in Nietzsche’s 29. Philosophy of Transvaluation,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002): 83–112. This article is not directly concerned with value, but I think that a conception of relational value is implied in statements such as these: “[T]he superlative human achievements made possible by agonal interaction are a function of agonal regimes of human nature; such regimes, in turn, are a function of agonal interrelationships among social beings”; “[e]ach antagonist only becomes what it is in ‘impulses, works and deeds’ through antagonistic relations with the other, through which each is continuously transformed. Thus a Greek poet only composed in order to win [. . .]; the significance and authority of his achievement shaped, and was itself shaped by, the deeds of others (past, present and future)” (100–101). Value is very definitely at stake in a later essay by Siemens to which I will come shortly.

See note 26. 30. This is an aspect of Nietzsche’s values given particular attention in recent years by Bernard 31.

Reginster, both in The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) and in “The Will to Power and the Ethics of Creativity,” in Leiter and Sinhababu, Nietzsche and Morality , 32–56.

Richardson, 32. Nietzsche’s System , 28–35. I am the first to concede that the aspect of Nietzsche’s valuing that I am presenting here 33.

is far from attractive to contemporary sensibilities. But I think that it is at the core of much of Nietzsche’s value thinking and is therefore an aspect of his thought we need to face up to. Further, as my conclusions to this and the final section will propose, elements of it may be adaptable for wholly different approaches to the question of value.

I say that the proportion may be relatively small in order to accommodate interpreters who 34. prefer to stress the relational value of the individual, but in fact I do not think that this intrinsic element is a minor component; what is perhaps most to be stressed is that the intrinsic element seems to be a necessary condition for high levels of value for Nietzsche: none of the relational components of value have any weight unless the individual in question is also psychically well formed.

I am speaking basically of Athenian 35. citizens : Athenian slaves also contributed to this culture in a most fundamental sense since it could not have existed without them; but because it is hard to see any sense in which they partook in this culture, the value they bear with respect to this culture remains purely instrumental. The status of ancient Greek women in this respect, even if it tends in some respects toward that of the slave, is somewhat ambivalent.

It is perfectly 36. possible and quite common to value in this way: to say, for example, that those who should really be admired are those who just peacefully exist within a culture and allow it to subsist, without becoming individually conspicuous or outstandingly “virtuous” in any way.

See the quotation from 37. HL in the first section above. See Plato, 38. Republic 428d–e: the “governing or ruling” class is “by nature the smallest”

(428e7–8). Why does Nietzsche so favor aristocratic models? Perhaps because he has a sense of the 39.

reality of the demands of political leadership similar to that of Plato. If the autocrat could also be a “philosopher,” one in whom the appropriate, ruling part of the soul dominates the others, then it



is hard to see what would be unsatisfactory for either thinker about this form of government: the autocrat would be, in Plato’s terms, the single “ruling part” of the polis and would single-handedly dominate the spirited and appetitive parts. But Plato does not consider this possibility, presumably because he finds it utterly implausible that anyone who came to be an autocrat could also have come to be a philosopher. I take it that this is a tacit implication of the discussion of the various types of rulers and their upbringing in books 7 and 9 of the Republic .

For the latter, see, for example, 40. KSA 12:5[108], to which I have already referred above. For the former, see in particular KSA 12:10[59].

See notes 6 and 29 above. Siemens describes his project as “an effort to assess the critical 41. and constructive potential of Nietzsche’s thought for contemporary democracy and democratic theory” (“Nietzsche on Democracy and ‘Grosse Politik,’” 232).

Ibid., 238. 42. Ibid., 243. 43. Translated by Siemens in ibid., 259–60. Siemens renders the double spacing in 44. KSA by

underlining rather than, as is generally the method of Nietzsche translators, by italics. Ibid., 259. 45. Ibid., 261. 46. For an example of this, see 47. KSA 12:9[153], quoted in ibid., 254.


values individu-culture conflict nietsche syntheses

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