Steven Schroeder | genealogy: notes on Nietzsche
1. From the middle (where we are), it is a mistake to project the supposed purpose of a moral/political/religious/social framework or institution back to an earlier time marked as a beginning (where we are not) as the reason the framework or institution came to be.
2. This is important because the supposed purpose of the framework or institution has likely evolved from an earlier (supposed) purpose that lingers but is unstated.
3. More generally, any framework or institution (and, more generally still, any agent -- social or individual) is likely to have multiple purposes (some stated, some not) and multiple effects (some intended, some not).
4. Intended and unintended effects are most likely to benefit those who occupy positions of power (which is not necessarily equivalent to those who are powerful).
5. Purposes that benefit those in power at least in part by helping them stay in power are often concealed under purposes that are supposed to serve the common good.
6. This raises the question of what actually constitues power and whether those who wield it do so legitimately. It calls for continual critical examination of all moral/political/religious/social frameworks and institutions, no matter how benevolent or harmless they appear to be.
7. To read Nietzsche in the 21st century, we have to make our way back through the 20th. Even if we sleepwalk, if we pass through that century we will not be able to avoid brushing up against the entanglement of power with violence. If we begin with our eyes open where we are now, we can stretch out our hands in any direction and point to an instance of ressentiment. We can put our hands on our hearts and touch it even if we can't define it.
8. What was done with Nietzsche's work in the 20th century -- its nazification -- is a cautionary tale that reminds us what is at stake if we do not disentangle violence and power. Nietzsche equated the will to freedom with the will to power and blamed "slave morality" (created by powerless people who are in positions of power fearful of powerful people who are not) for the sorry state of the world at the end of the 19th century. But the questions then as now (as often unasked now as then) are who is slave and who is free and what and where is power?
9. Violence is routinely confused with power -- as when a popular uprising turns to violence after "trying everything." This is routinely read as escalation, raising the struggle to a higher level, rather than as a downward spiral into powerlessness. But even when one embraces violence as the only alternative in a given context (as, for example when Dietrich Bonhoeffer supported a plot to assassinate Hitler or when Nelson Mandela became a leader in the armed resistance to apartheid), the only way to break the downward spiral is to see the embrace not as a seizure of power but as a sign of powerlessness in a moment of history defined by what Vaclav Havel called "the power of the powerless."
10. Powerless people who are in positions of power fearful of powerful people who are not create frameworks and institutions intended to keep themselves in positions of power -- and to keep powerful people who are not in their place. The banishment of the poets in Plato's Republic is a classic example that has played a significant role in "the West." How interesting it is that many readers fail to ask why the guardians (who have all the power and privilege of the city) would need to be protected from, of all people, poets. And how depressingly easy it is to imagine the poets organizing to get political, storm the wall, and replace the guardians.
11. That would leave the city intact, as has been demonstrated time and time again -- and another expulsion of poets (by the new guardians) would be, again and again, a matter of time.
12. When Virginia Woolf spoke of ending war, she called for new words and new methods. Ruminating on Nietzsche again two decades into the 21st century, as the lies and weakness that underlie endless war flicker for a moment into public consciousness in failing light (as they so often have, when they have flickered into public consciousness at all), I think this would be a good time to take her up on that.
17 December 2019
