Was Nietzsche a socialist? No. Was Nietzsche wrong about the implications of his own critique of morality? Is a socialist politics the correct consequence of reading Nietzsche's moral and political thought? In his two-volume set of books on Nietzsche's politics from Palgrave Macmillan, Donovan Miyasaki argues that it is. The first book, Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy, provides an argument that Nietzsche's postmoral philosophy offers a metapolitics that does not rely on moral persuasion. In the second, Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left, Miyasaki issues a critique of Nietzsche's aristocratic politics and a case for a Nietzschean left.
Miyasaki presents the two volumes as a case for a socialist politics as the proper mode of breeding a type with the capacity for amor fati. He is committed to the consequences of radical fatalism as the result of Nietzsche's critique of morality. His argument maintains that we are left with no moral philosophy in Nietzsche's thought, and so no moral means for pursuing our individual, social, or political ends. A proper understanding of Nietzsche's immoralism, Miyasaki argues, leaves us with a view in which politics is more fundamental than any kind of moral claims, best understood as “first philosophy.” Politics, for Miyasaki, can become, through a proper Nietzschean understanding, a conscious effort to fulfill the function it has always performed, the breeding or manufacture of subjects. Such conscious manufacture, Miyasaki further argues, will sheer Nietzsche's “meta-politics” from his “aristocratism” and put his thought in service to a truly postmoral radical left politics of making new subjects for the future.
The interpretative aims and those of political theory are a bit tangled in Miyasaki's presentation. Assessment of these books is complicated by his announcement in their opening pages that we should not be concerned with what Nietzsche really intended or thought (NI, 5). Miyasaki, however, offers another account of his method of interpretation when he announces that Nietzsche offers “two opposed political philosophies” (NI, 9). For Miyasaki, this opposition consists of a “metapolitics” of fatalism, on the one hand, and a “political program” of an “aristocratism” that fails to uphold the former, on the other. Insofar as he argues that there is a contradiction, he is undertaking an interpretative task. Yet, he also includes an “unapologetic use of his work for my own ends” (NI, 9). As he pursues the latter, Miyasaki leaves serious questions about whether the political program he attributes to Nietzsche is in fact Nietzsche's. In exploring the contradiction and its implications there are precedents not always fully acknowledged in either volume. Mark Warren presented this method as reading Nietzsche against himself several decades ago, setting the stage for other interventions in the political use of Nietzsche's thought.Footnote 1 David Owen and Lawrence Hatab argue for the use of Nietzsche's agonistic political thought in service of democratic politics, radical and republican respectively.Footnote 2 William Connolly has made use of Nietzsche's thought for a politics of radical democracy rooted in “agonistic respect,” and Bonnie Honig expands on the way in which Nietzsche can be used for such a recovery of political contestation.Footnote 3 While Miyasaki does cite Connolly and Honig in the context of his own rejection of agonistic radical democracy, there is less engagement with the precedents for the sort of project he undertakes.
At this point, it makes sense to raise questions about Miyasaki's methodology, especially about his account of his methodology as one of reading Nietzsche “backwards.” It is not clear that this is fundamentally different from an older approach to reading Nietzsche that lends greater credence to his “mature” work (i.e., after the concepts of will to power and eternal recurrence are articulated) than work before that time. The claim that Nietzsche's earlier works are marred by an aestheticism he entirely eschews along with the vestiges of Schopenhauerian metaphysics in favor of scientific fatalism is controversial in Nietzsche scholarship and challenged by some of Nietzsche's own remarks in the later works (e.g., GM 3.25; TI “Ancients,” 5; EH “BT,” 1). When Miyasaki claims that “the dominant mode of interpretation” is “chronological,” gives priority to the early and middle period writings, and “endlessly champion[s] Nietzsche's ideal of geniuses and higher types” (NI, 24), it is not clear whom he has in mind. Jeffrey Church does focus on the early work and Nietzsche's consideration of culture and the genius, arguing for a distinctively liberal politics of Nietzsche's work, separated from the foundational claims on which liberalism is generally based,Footnote 4 but Miyasaki never cites it with regard to his focus on the early works or the matter of liberalism. Others have drawn on Nietzsche's early work for an interpretation of his agonism in ways that might have served to advance Miyasaki's argument.Footnote 5 A good deal of work on Nietzsche's political thought does pay attention to the later works and wrestles with the extent to which the middle or free spirit period represents a departure.Footnote 6
Miyasaki offers a critique of several prominent interpretations of Nietzsche's political thought in order to set up his claims about a legitimacy to be found in the psychological effects of egalitarian politics. By contrast with Tamsin Shaw's argumentFootnote 7 that Nietzsche does not provide grounds for political legitimacy, Miyasaki argues that the absence of the need for normative foundations eliminates any tension between practical and principled legitimacy (NI, 180, 182), and he argues for a legitimacy secured not by principles but by consequences, measured by its capacity to produce subjects capable of amor fati (NI, 259). Miyasaki uses this understanding of Nietzsche's political aim to contrast his understanding the “manifold soul” as the desirable political aim (NI, 191) with Hugo Drochon's (2016) presentation of a noble type.Footnote 8
Drochon gives substantial attention to Nietzsche's contemporary political circumstances and plans for a new Europe, providing substantial evidence for Nietzsche's engagement with practical politics. While Miyasaki draws from this supporting evidence, he appears to conflate a philosophical capacity for finding the beautiful in what is necessary (GS 276) with the question of nobility. This connection leaves Miyasaki to maintain that Nietzsche's own (mistaken) political views are those of “radical aristocracy,” and Miyasaki follows the error introduced by Detwiler that sees an “essential continuity” between his concerns with spiritual authority and those of practical political arrangements.Footnote 9 Even as Miyasaki argues that Nietzsche is wrong to hold such aristocratic radicalism, he maintains that Nietzsche has such views, and he does not distinguish between Nietzsche's preference for “aristocratic republics” and vast hierarchical chains of authority. The tension between practical authority and philosophical achievement introduces another complexity in considering the sort of politics Nietzsche would support.
Resistance
The arguments for an egalitarianism on the ground of Nietzschean immoralism and fatalism relies on claims about resistance. Miyasaki connects the matter of contest to an interpretation of will to power as resistance, a view presented as resistance ontology by Siemens.Footnote 10 For Miyasaki, what matters about will to power is the feeling of power, and this is greatest in the face of resistance, especially nearly equal opposing resistance. Miyasaki describes this as an effort to preserve the game, which he contrasts with the desire to dominate (NI, 153), setting up the analogy of athlete who “cares only about conquest” and only about “winning the game” (NI, 112). It is surely correct that embracing contestation has within it the desire to continue facing opponents, not simply to defeat them. Yet, there is something that seems phenomenologically incorrect about separating the desire to preserve a game from trying to win a game. Playing a game to the best of one's ability and thereby producing the maximum of resistance would seem to involve an effort to win that game. It takes a genuine opponent to preserve the game, one who resists by also trying to win the game. Playing a game, even to win, is not quite the same as the aim of conquest. A game already operates within constraints that makes playing it a matter of contest rather than conquest or domination. Rules both limit a game and allow for success within it. The aim to win at all costs can be differentiated from the aim to win a game. One who simply wanted domination or destruction of an opponent might cheat at the game because one cared more about winning than about the game. But that would not involve playing the game to the best of one's ability, and it does not involve really winning the game. Operating within a game can be understood as play only insofar as it has this regard for the game itself. Running the best play, throwing the best pitch, hitting the best return, even running the best race exhibit respecting the game and playing as well as one can, offering resistance to an opponent. Where these activities are contained within some defined contest, a game, they increase the level of resistance and the quality of that game while remaining separate from anything that looks like conquest. Conquest would be oriented toward the desire to destroy or subjugate an enemy, eliminating the conflict or contest.
In Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man (from which Miyasaki quotes extensively in the epigrams he includes throughout the book), the distinction between combat and contest sets up his connection between the Greek invention of Olympic games and the play-drive (Spieltrieb) of aesthetic activity. This insight has significant political implications if we look to carve out a political arena as a similar site for bloodless contest and thereby connect the opportunity for demonstrating excellence to the preservation of such an arena. Nietzsche describes the spirit of contest (agon) as distinct from a destructive form of Eris in “Homer's Contest.” An agonisic reorientation of a destructive impulse might yield the effort to grow greater in strength, excellence, and a subjective feeling of power. Acampora accordingly builds her view of contestation on the distinction between two forms of Eris and finds the striving for excellence as a key element of Nietzsche's agonism. Miyasaki, by contrast, rejects the view that such a process involves “overcoming increasing resistance”Footnote 11 in favor of a view in which resistance is directed at equal opposition. Miyasaki's claim that “human life's true end” entails “engaging equal opponents” (NI, 160) tries to have it both ways with regard to a teleological view of will to power. Conflating the ways in which such equality of opposition might emerge, this claim removes motivations that would drive the production of resistance. The effort and ambition to find true equals by doing the best one can might produce relative equality of opposition, but it is not the same as trying to produce equality by doing less than one's best in order to sustain a contest. Prioritizing sustaining the game may be an act of generosity for the sake of sustaining play or serving another's training, but it does not maximize resistance, and thus does not maximize what Miyasaki takes to be the aim of facing resistance, the feeling of power.
Nietzsche describes aspiration to excellence, incited by opponents, in “Homer's Contest,” as beneficial to the political community, a potential attachment to its order. Such contestation is crucial to resisting hierarchical politics that runs toward tyranny and “solitary mastery.”Footnote 12 The presence of opposing strengths induces increasing capacity for resistance and increasing strength. For Nietzsche, the striving of contestation with a worthy opponent is an aspect of nobility (not necessarily of an aristocratic class), and it stands at odds with both tyrannical politics and rigid hierarchies. Nietzsche attributes the capacity for reverence for a worthy enemy to nobility (GM 1.10). In this noble combination of respect and opposition, Nietzsche locates a source for plurality and the rejection of a politics grounded in universalism. Such admiration of political contestation bears with it due acknowledgment by Nietzsche of its tragic character. There is some tension between striving to win and the preservation of the arena in which such victories are possible. Nietzsche's introduction of ostracism in “Homer's Contest” reminds us that such a threat of one who is greater than opponents to a degree that would eliminate genuine contest calls attention to the precarious character of such political contestation. The noble striving Nietzsche envisions is just the sort that also threatens to undo the fabric of agonistic republican regimes as it did among the Greeks. This potential is surely among the reasons that Nietzsche does not offer utopian political visions and remains circumspect about offering programs for maximizing the enhancement of citizens or subjects.
If distance in the soul, a quality Nietzsche connects with nobility, is the criterion for healthy human life, political questions turn on what serves such distances. Miyasaki repeatedly insists that the manifold soul is the political desideratum (e.g., NI, 196; PM, 167, 168, 189, 250), and this point raises the question of the conditions that make the most fertile ground for healthy, manifold souls. His work appears to presume a democratic view of the manifold soul, one in which all drives have their part and all psychic resistances are equal. Nietzsche, however, challenges this assumption. His use of terms links democratic assumptions with homogeneityFootnote 13 while aristocracy and nobility are linked with plurality. For Nietzsche, homogeneity more than inequality bears the seeds of tyranny. Distinctive aspirations already bear marks of aristocracy or nobility in Nietzsche's language. Even if we define regimes and use terms in other ways, Nietzsche's thinking enriches our appreciation of the tension between egalitarianism and pluralism, posing serious question for political theorists interested in merging democratic and pluralistic goals.
Political Philosophy or Political Manufacture
Miyasaki argues that On the Genealogy of Morals is a hidden work of political philosophy, presented as a work of moral philosophy. On its face, the Genealogy announces a political change to be the most fundamental in the history of humanity, and it takes on questions in the mainstream of the history political philosophy, directly addressing claims at the core of the arguments of much of modern political philosophy (GM 2.17). Others have treated it as primarily political philosophy, including Jeffrey Metzger and Lawrence Hatab.Footnote 14 It is also not clear that one would need the radical redefinition of political philosophy as political manufacture that Miyasaki proffers to read On the Genealogy of Morals as political philosophy. Nietzsche is of course explicit about the way in which the beginning of a “state” is antecedent to anything like the possibility of contract and thereby rejects the notion of a state formed as a social contract (GM 2.17). He argues this directly and thereby challenges a tradition that runs from Hobbes through Rousseau and beyond. Understood in one way, Nietzsche goes much further than any of the modern political theorists of social contract by connecting the matter of political authority to questions of soul. Of course, this connection is nearly as old as political philosophy and is a major theme in Plato's Republic. Miyasaki duly acknowledges ways in which Nietzsche takes up a city-soul analogy from Plato's Republic, and he uses it to connect his call for a manifold society that yields a manifold soul. In light of these connections, Nietzsche rather openly engages in a mode of political philosophy that engages both ancient and modern works of political philosophy.
While Miyasaki takes most of the first volume to argue that Nietzsche's immoralism leads to looking at politics as first philosophy because “the substance of every morality is already a politics” (NI, 236), Nietzsche is rather explicit about the connection. The initial question of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals raises the question behind the agreements that allow for the contract of consensus of liberal and democratic political theory when he asks what it means to “breed an animal with the right to make promises” (GM 2.1). As other interpretations of Nietzsche's politics have addressed,Footnote 15 Nietzsche frames such breeding in a sense that involves generations of change in what is human. Nietzsche is quite open about the role of political authority in the origin of the “bad conscience” and the “internalization of man,” the source of anything we might call “soul” (GM 2.16). He describes the development of the oldest “state” to bring about the “most fundamental change [humanity] ever experienced” (GM 2.17). Here Nietzsche offers a genealogy of political societies. Even as he describes this first development as bringing about “the most fearful tyranny,” he also describes it as the stage in which humans became “enclosed within the walls of society and peace” (GM 2.16). It is not the specific character of political rule that Nietzsche argues fundamentally reshapes the soul, but rather the very existence of any such authority. What Nietzsche offers here is not regime analysis, and it does not yet concern itself with the character of any desirable aristocracy or any other arrangement. In his reversal of contract theorists, this depth of soul interestingly allows for the sense of responsibility. The internalization of man is brought about by the existence of authority and society. When Nietzsche writes in this context about masters who come to dominate (GM 2.17), he is not addressing the matter of a desirable spiritual authority or offering nostalgia about the domination of a master class or race. He instead shows the connection between the use of brutal force and the development of spiritual depth. As Nietzsche famously writes, “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man” (GM 2.16). It is not the content of valuing or morality that is decisive. Nietzsche suggests that almost all instincts, above all an instinct for freedom, turn inward, and begin the process not only of a soul that admonishes itself, but also of the full complexity of the human soul and its many competing drives.
The deepened soul, the development of political authority, and the conditions of morality are sources of a vast creative force, one that allows an “instinct of freedom,” or “will to power” in Nietzsche's terms, to develop. The initially negating drive becomes the source of a “strange new beauty” (GM 2.18) and the possibility of an enriched affirmation. Only a soul that can turn against itself in the way Nietzsche describes can also gain the capacity for knowing itself or affirming itself. Complex modern human beings shaped by the bad conscience prepare the way for a reversal of the bad conscience that turns it against everything that is hostile to life. This path toward healthier souls provides a means toward redemption both from the reigning ideals hostile to life and from the nihilism that follows in its wake (GM 2.24). Manifold souls capable of containing these oppositions and making double moves are not entirely the result of conscious construction. A complex dynamic of affirmation and negation allows for the development of a self that includes the full reality of affirming and negating inclinations. In the continual play between these Nietzsche describes the “great health” that constantly wants to acquire more and repeatedly gain health through resistance (GS 382). Such goals are very far from anything that would simply translate human being back into the renewed innocence of species being.
Nietzschean Socialism
In Politics after Morality, Miyasaki takes up the political aims he extrapolates from Nietzschean fatalism. After a long argument against Nietzsche's aristocratic claims and other hierarchical structures, it turns to the specifics of a new Nietzschean left. In its final chapter, the study outlines the distinctive character of a Nietzschean socialism. While Miyasaki spends quite a bit of space rehearsing the arguments between left and liberal positions as they appear in public debates on such matters and digs into some policy matters that are bit beyond the scope of his project, he also clarifies the key distinction. He classifies the requirements of a distinctive Nietzschean socialism as those of tragic realism, immoralism, and anti-utopianism (PM, 268). Eschewing moralism and shaming and avoiding a vanguard leadership model are key elements. As Miyasaki writes about the lingering moralism of the left, he calls attention to the enduring effects of moralism diagnosed by Nietzsche and sheds light on similarities between left and right moralism in public life.
More broadly, Miyasaki's new Nietzschean socialism points to consideration of core Nietzschean claims about amor fati and resistance. In treating what he calls tragic realism as an aspect of Nietzschean socialism that would distinguish it from others, Miyasaki provides the thread that connects his treatments of egalitarianism, immoralism, and resistance.
Because it requires the shaping of new peoples, a Nietzschean socialism would have a healthy realism about its capacity to fulfill any of its goals through anything immediate, but it would nonetheless maintain its struggle and find value in resistance. He thereby distinguishes it from utopian socialism or from a Marxism that he asserts remains committed to idealism, suggesting that it must become pessimistic. Yet rather than leaving us with leftist melancholy of the sort associated with figures like Walter Benjamin, Miyasaki's claims about joy in struggle suggest another alternative. Unlike the melancholy of disappointment, one might undertake struggle for greater equality and human enhancement with joyful affirmation of the sort presented in Nietzsche's phrase, amor fati. For Miyasaki, such joy becomes possible when we can find inherent value in suffering because the feeling of power is most fully experienced in the presence of resistance, and struggle allows suffering to have inherent value and enables human beings to affirm suffering.
Nietzsche's tragic realism would distinguish his thought from any optimism about socialism, and of course it might also temper the hopes and expectations or any conscious breeding scheme or political design. Rather than applying a tragic realist perspective only to socialist desideratum, one might see that it calls into question the sense in which Nietzsche's thinking is as fully committed to any political program at all. My accounts of Nietzsche's tragic realism point to limitations of political design as such.Footnote 16 At least some of Nietzsche's aristocratic claims might be understood to serve what Miyasaki calls “noble egalitarianism” (PM, 232). Instead of setting inegalitarian political programs against egalitarian political programs, a tragic realism might raise doubts about the extent to which any political program could in fact achieve the goals of producing widespread manifold souls, a general affirmation of resistance, and amor fati. Yet, even to hope for such restraint is rather optimistic and eschews the tragic sense that excessive ambitions might always destroy the precarious balance required for a manifold soul that loves necessity. The hope to bring about such balance by a political program seems in the end to eschew the very tragic realism that Miyasaki uses to distinguish Nietzsche's politics from other forms of egalitarian politics.
While resisting expectations of a fully realized resolution, utopian hopes, or the wisdom of a vanguard, Miyasaki makes clear his view of the end goal of the socialism he envisions: “to universally maximize amor fati” (PM, 278). A utilitarianism of joy in becoming is suspect as a defensible criterion, and certainly the hope for universalism is imported, far more optimistic than a tragic realism would expect, and at odds with the underlying immoralism. The greatest amor fati for the greatest number is a shaky measure for legitimacy. Miyasaki's Nietzschean measure of success, amor fati, appears to be an odd candidate for social maximization, as it is a rare capacity Nietzsche hopes to gain, not a characteristic of aristocrats that might be better distributed under egalitarian conditions.
Amor fati complicates not only hopes for social maximization but the picture of fatalism behind Miyasaki's hopes. Miyasaki's account of Nietzsche's fatalism, whatever else its merits, alone is not enough to account for amor fati. To love fate, or find what is beautiful in the necessary, also must include the possibility of love. Loving what is necessary is not simply acceptance, resignation, or immoralism, but something akin to a philosophical love for what is. When Nietzsche introduces the notion, he treats amor fati as a desideratum, one he hopes to learn, and one that will ultimately require learning to love (GS 276, 334). Accounting for the possibility of love in a world of fate involves some difficulty, and Miyasaki's books do not give any space to a Nietzschean account of love, even though love of fate is the crucial measure of political success. This reliance exposes the need for examining in unpacking the meaning of amor fati in Nietzsche's thought. If Nietzsche can account for love without abandoning fatalism it would be a significant philosophical development warranting more attention than Miyasaki provides.
The presentation of Miyasaki's argument in two volumes leaves me some questions. Miyasaki distinguishes between the interpretative and reconstructive aims of the first volume and the extrapolation of the second. Yet, the second volume continues to spend significant time interpreting Nietzsche's claims. A more concise version of the argument could have been presented in a single volume more engaged with other Nietzsche interpretations, and eliminating some repetition could have enhanced its contribution. If, on the other hand, Miyasaki had two completely different projects in mind, a fuller separation would have allowed the second volume to offer a more thoroughly stand-alone contribution to political theory.
As it stands Miyasaki's books offer some valuable contributions that could advance questions pursued in political theory and Nietzsche studies. The books push a view of Nietzschean fatalism to its limits and raise some important questions. First, they bring questions about political pluralism into relationship with those of the manifold soul. The question of what sort of politics serves such distances within the soul could helpfully guide future consideration of Nietzsche's political thought. Second, the books call additional attention to the matter of the tragic in Nietzsche's political thought and invite further consideration of the implications of Nietzsche's tragic philosophy for politics and for his view of political designs. Highlighting amor fati as a human aim for Nietzsche raises the question of the place of love in his thought. Further research on Nietzsche's political thought might more fully address the question of the extent to which the fatalism of Nietzsche's antimoralism leaves a place for the possibility of love and the extent to which this makes love of necessity and affirmation of life possible. By inviting us to think about pluralism, manifold souls, love, and fate, the books highlight key matters for further consideration in Nietzsche's political thought.
