Wisdom about the challenge of learning from a great genius and then finding one’s own path. Here is Zarathustra:
“Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must be able to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a student. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You have not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The image is Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” [circa 1818].)
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Philosophically and politically, the Nazis stood for five major principles: They stood for collectivism, for instinct and passion, for war and conflict, for authoritarianism, and for socialism.
National Socialist Principles:
Collectivism
Instinct, passion, “blood”
War and zero-sum conflict
Authoritarianism
Socialism
That means we can identify the principles that, in each case, are the direct opposite of what the Nazis stood for:
The Nazis stood for collectivism. The opposite of that is a philosophy of individualism that recognizes each individual’s right to live for his or her own sake.
The Nazis stood for instinct and passion as one’s basic guides in life. The opposite of that is a philosophy of reason that has a healthy confidence in the power of evidence, logic, and judgment to guide one’s life.
The Nazis stood for war and conflict as the best way to achieve one’s goals. The opposite of that is a philosophy that encourages productiveness and trade and the best way to achieve one’s goals in life.
The Nazis stood for political authoritarianism and top-down leadership. The opposite of that is a philosophy that leaves individuals maximum freedom to live their lives by their own choice and direction, respecting the equal right of other individuals to do the same.
The Nazis stood for socialism and the principle of central direction of the economy for the common good. The opposite of that is the system of free-market capitalism, with individual producers and consumers deciding for themselves what they will produce and what they will spend their money on.
As a start, the principles in the right-hand column are the best antidote to National Socialism we have going. Each of those principles is controversial in our time, and I expect they will continue to be so for generations to come. But they represent the starkest philosophical contrast to National Socialism possible, and they form the first line of defense against future incarnations of Nazism. There is no better place to start than understanding them thoroughly.
I will end on a provocative note: The Nazis knew what they stood for. Do we?
A fifth and final set of themes link Nietzsche with the Nazis. Both were anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-liberal.
The Nazis were not friends of democracy, but they were extremely effective players of democracy. They announced from the beginning, in their 1920 founding Party Program, their authoritarian principles. Nonetheless, finding themselves in the democratic system that was the Weimar republic, they played mostly by the rules and out-democracied the other political parties. They used democracy to achieve anti-democratic ends.
Nietzsche’s political views are less developed and more ambiguous, but it is clear he favors some sort of aristocracy. “What is serious for me,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, is “the ‘European problem’ as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.”[130] Again, while Nietzsche is unspecific, he does not necessarily mean an official political aristocracy—he more likely means the de facto rule by an exceptional few, whatever the formal and official political structures are. In this way, even though Nietzsche despises the impulses that give rise to democracy, he does not worry much about the actual political dominance of democratic forms of government. Those forms of government, he believes, will simply become instruments through which the exceptional individuals, most likely from behind the scenes, will achieve their goals. As Nietzsche puts it, democracy will be a tool of “a master race, the future ‘masters of the earth’ … philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants” who will “employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”[131]
Nietzsche is not programmatic about what form the new aristocratic class will take or what specific goals it will pursue. He believes that will be up to the overmen themselves—they will create their own values and shape the vehicles of their realization. And Nietzsche did not think of himself as an overman—merely as a herald of their coming. But Nietzsche is extremely clear that any social method, however brutal, will be legitimate should the new aristocrats desire it. A healthy aristocracy, he puts it forcefully, “accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.”[132]
That is certainly anti-liberal and fits well with Nietzsche’s self-assessment that he is “not by any means ‘liberal’.”[133]
In addition to dismissing liberalism, Nietzsche dismisses capitalism as a dehumanizing economic system[134] and rejects individualism when it comes to matters of marriage and procreation. Marriage, he thought, should not be based on “idiosyncrasy”—that is, upon love and personal sexual attraction.[135] Rather, he suggested, marriage should be state-organized for breeding purposes.[136]
On all those points, the Nazis can and did find inspiration in Nietzsche.
We know that the National Socialists were thoroughly collectivistic and strongly anti-individualistic. For them the relevant groups were the Germanic Aryans—and all the others. Individuals were defined by their group identity, and individuals were seen only as vehicles through which the groups achieved their interests. The Nazis rejected the Western liberal idea that individuals are ends in themselves: to the Nazis individuals were merely servants of the groups to which they belong.
The anti-individualism of the Nazis was most blatant in their treatment of Jews. They did not see Jews as individuals with moral significance and rights—rather they saw members of a group they wished to destroy. This meant, as a matter of policy, that the Nazis were uncaring about the lives of individuals and were willing to kill as many individuals as was necessary to achieve their group’s advantage.
Even within their own group, the Nazis did not see Aryan/Germans fundamentally as individuals. They saw them as members of the Volk, the German people, the group to which they owed service, obedience, and even their lives.
Nietzsche has a reputation for being an individualist. There certainly are individualist elements in Nietzsche’s philosophy, but in my judgment his reputation for individualism is often much overstated.
When we speak of philosophies as being individualist or collectivist, three key points are at issue.
First, we ask: Do individuals shape their own identities—or are their identities created by forces beyond their control? For example, do individuals have the capacity to decide their own beliefs and form their own characters—or are individuals molded and shaped primarily by their biological inheritances or culturally by the groups they are born into and raised by?
Second, we ask: Are individuals ends in themselves, with their own lives and purposes to pursue—or do individuals exist for the sake of something beyond themselves to which they are expected to subordinate their interests?
Third, we ask: Do the decisive events in human life and history occur because individuals, generally exceptional individuals, make them happen—or are the decisive events of history a matter of collective action or larger forces at work?
Let us take the first issue—whether individuals shape themselves significantly or whether they are the product of forces beyond their control. Only in an attenuated way does Nietzsche believe that individuals shape their own characters and destiny—to a great extent he is determinist, believing that individuals are a product of their biological heritage. As he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, “One cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors liked most to do and did most constantly.”[107] Any given individual’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, are an expression of an underlying set of traits that the individual inherited. Whether one is a sheep or a wolf is a matter of biology—one does not choose or shape oneself significantly—so to that extent it makes no sense to hold individuals responsible for who they are and what they become.[108]
What about the second issue—does Nietzsche believe that individuals are ends in themselves, that they exist for their own sake? Emphatically not. Here I think many casual readings of Nietzsche get him dead wrong. Take an initial obvious point: Nietzsche has nothing but contempt for the vast majority of the population, believing them to be sheep and a disgrace to the dignity of the human species. Their individual lives have no value in themselves. This is Nietzsche’s point in the following quotation, in which he denies explicitly that his philosophy is individualistic: “My philosophy aims at ordering of rank not at an individualistic morality.”[109] Nietzsche believes that most individuals have no right to exist and—more brutally—he asserts that if they were sacrificed or slaughtered that would be an improvement. In Nietzsche’s own words: “mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosperity of a single stronger species of man—that would be an advance.”[110] And again: “One must learn from war: one must learn to sacrifice many and to take one’s cause seriously enough not to spare men.”[111] It is hard to see as an individualist anyone who sees no value in the lives of the vast majority of individuals. And it is hard to see as an individualist someone who would sacrifice those individuals in the name of improving the species. Improving the species is a collectivist goal, and measuring the value of individuals in terms of their value to the species and sacrificing those who do not measure up—that is textbook collectivism.
This connects directly to the value Nietzsche sees in the few great individuals who crop up in each generation. It is his powerfully poetic rhetoric in speaking of those exceptional individuals that gives Nietzsche his reputation for individualism. But it is important to note that Nietzsche does not see even those exceptional individuals as ends in themselves—and he does not exempt them from the sacrifice either. The point of becoming exceptional is not to advance one’s own life but to improve the human species—in fact to get beyond the human species to a higher species-type: the overman. As Nietzsche says repeatedly, “Not ‘mankind’ but overman is the goal!”[112] Nietzsche’s goal is a collectivist one—to bring about a new, future, higher species of man—overman. This is the significance of his exhortations about the Übermensch, the overman, the superman.
So it seems that for Nietzsche none of us, whether weak or strong, exist for our own sakes. In direct contrast to individualists who believe that individuals’ lives are their own to find and create value within, Nietzsche’s belief is that our lives have value only to the extent we fulfill a goal beyond our lives—the creation of a stronger species. And on that general collectivist end, Nietzsche has an important point in common with the Nazis.
There is also the third sub-issue of individualism—whether the decisive events in human life and history occur because individuals, generally exceptional individuals, make them happen, or whether individuals are pawns of greater historical forces. Here the Nazis’ theory and practice were a combination of both. They believed in and utilized mass-movement politics, seeing their political movement as the vehicle through which a powerful cultural force—the German Volk—was asserting its historical destiny. At the same time, the Nazis held that those powerful historical forces singled out some special individuals to perform special tasks and that destiny spoke through those special individuals. This, at any rate, was Hitler’s firm belief when he made statements such as the following: “I carry out the commands that Providence has laid upon me”; and “No power on earth can shake the German Reich now, Divine Providence has willed it that I carry through the fulfillment of the Germanic task.”[113]
In invoking Divine Providence, Hitler is drawing upon a long philosophical tradition that goes back most famously to the German philosopher Georg Hegel, with his World-Historical Individuals—those individuals such as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, who, on Hegel’s view, were vehicles through which the Spiritual forces of history operated. That tradition goes back even further in religious interpretations of history.
Think, for example, of religious prophets. Prophets are special individuals within a religious tradition. The prophet, though, is not special as an individual—he is not an individual who has acquired his powers through his own efforts and who has created his own new and unique vision. Rather the prophet is special only because God has chosen him and because God is speaking through him. The prophet is totally a tool of God—his power comes from God and he is a mouthpiece through which God speaks his message. He is a localized vehicle through which the real force—namely, God—works.
Now let us return to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is an atheist, yet he offers a secular version of the same theory.
Nietzsche’s power force is not religious or spiritual force, but a biological one. His great men—prophets like the Zarathustras who may be among us and those who are to come—are special individuals in whom powerful evolutionary forces have converged to create something remarkable. And those powerful evolutionary forces are working through those Zarathustras to achieve something even more remarkable—the overman. Such exceptional individuals do not develop and use power; power develops and uses those individuals. Individuals are only the tools, the vehicles. This is what Nietzsche is getting at when he says that every “living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation itself speaks—the will to power.”[114]
Note what Nietzsche is saying the real causal power is: The will to power works through those individuals; it is not that those individuals develop and use power.
There is legitimate controversy among scholars over this interpretation of Nietzsche, but to the extent this interpretation is true it does undermine Nietzsche’s reputation as an individualist and strengthens the claim the Nazis have on him as a philosophical forerunner.
References
[107] BGE 264.
[108] “There is only aristocracy of birth, only aristocracy of blood” (WP 942).
[109] WP 287. Morality is a social product: it arises “when a greater individual or a collective-individual, for example the society, the state, subjugates all other single ones … and orders them into a unit” (HH 1.99).
Part of the answer, says Nietzsche, is biological.
All of organic nature is divided into two broad species-types—those animals that are naturally herd animals and those that are naturally loners—those that are prey and those that are predators. Some animals are by nature sheep, field mice, or cows—and some animals are by nature wolves, hawks, or lions. Psychologically and physically, this divide also runs right through the human species. Some people are born fearful and inclined to join a herd—and some are born fearless and inclined to seek lonely heights. Some are born sedentary and sluggish—and some are born crackling with purpose and craving adventure.[53] Some of us, to use Nietzsche’s language, are born to be slaves, and some are born to be masters.
And which type you are—there is little you can do about it. There is a brute biological fact here: Each of us is the product of a long line of evolution, and our traits are evolutionarily bred into us. Just as a sheep cannot help but be sheepish and a hawk cannot help but be hawkish, each of us inherits from our parents and from their parents before them a long line of inbuilt traits. “It cannot be erased from a man’s soul what his ancestors have preferably and most constantly done.”[54]
The master types live by strength, creativity, independence, assertiveness, and related traits. They respect power, courage, boldness, risk-taking, even recklessness. It is natural for them to follow their own path no matter what, to rebel against social pressure and conformity.[55]
The slave types live in conformity. They tend to passivity, dependence, meekness. It is natural for them to stick together for a sense of security, just as herd animals do.[56]
Now, Nietzsche says, let’s talk about morality, about good and bad, right and wrong. For a long time we have been taught that morality is a matter of religious commandments set in stone thousands of years ago.
Not so, says Nietzsche. What we take to be moral depends on our biological nature—and different biological natures dictate different moral codes.
Think of it this way: If you are a sheep, then what will seem good to you as a sheep? Being able to graze peacefully, sticking close together with others just like you, being part of the herd and not straying off. What will seem bad to you? Well, wolves will seem bad, and anything wolf-like, predatory, aggressive. But what if you are a wolf? Then strength, viciousness, and contempt for the sheep will come naturally to you and seem good. There is nothing the wolves and the sheep can agree on morally—their natures are different, as are their needs and goals, as is what feels good to them. Of course it would be good for the sheep if they could convince the wolves to be more sheep-like—but what self-respecting wolf would fall for that?
“That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: ‘these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?’ there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: ‘we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.’”[57]
The same point holds for humans. The divide between strong and weak, assertive and timid, runs straight through the human species. The key question to ask about morality is not: Is such and such a value universally and intrinsically good? Rather the question is: What kind of person finds this value to be valuable?
In Nietzsche’s words, one’s moral code is a “decisive witness to who he is,” to the “innermost drives of his nature.”[58] “Moral judgments,” Nietzsche says, are “symptoms and sign languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure.”[59]
So: one’s moral code is a function of one’s psychological make-up, and one’s psychological make-up is a function of one’s biological make-up.
The biological language and examples in those quotations show that biology is crucial to Nietzsche’s views on morality. Nietzsche was a precocious fifteen years old when Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Evolutionary ideas had been in the air for a long time before Darwin, and much of the intellectual world was moving away from thinking of the reality in terms of timeless, unchanging absolutes to viewing it in terms of process and change. All of this applies to morality too.
Moral codes, Nietzsche is here suggesting, are part of a biological type’s life strategy of survival, and the more we look at the history of morality evolutionarily and biologically, the more we are struck by the diversity of circumstances and how dramatically beliefs about values have changed across time.
This is precisely our key problem culturally, Nietzsche argues. The evidence shows that we once prized excellence and power and looked down upon the humble and the lowly. Now the meek, the common man, the kindly neighbor are the “good guys” while the aggressive, the powerful, the strong, the proud are “evil.”[60]
Think of it this way: Suppose I gave you the following list of traits and urged them upon you positively.
It is good to be proud of yourself, to have a healthy sense of self-esteem.
Wealth is good, for it gives you the power to live as you wish.
Be ambitious and bold, and seek your highest dream.
Don’t take any nonsense from other people—make it clear that you will take vengeance and exact justice against those who mess with you.
Seek to improve your life and devote yourself only to things that will profit you; don’t waste your time or resources.
Seek great challenges, great pleasures, including sensual pleasures of the body, and go your own independent way in life, embracing whatever risks you must to develop a full and realized sense of yourself as an individual.
And when you accomplish something great, admire yourself for what you have done and indulge yourself in the rewards that greatness deserves.
Now consider the elements in this list together as a package. Does that list resonate with you? Do you feel in your bones that if more people lived this way they would live more active, fuller lives and they and the human species would realize its highest potential?
Now consider a different list of traits, and let me urge them upon you positively too.
One should be humble, for pride goeth before the fall. The meek shall inherit the earth, and blessed are the poor. As for wealth and the rich, it shall be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. Instead of seeking profit, one should sacrifice and give to charity. Be patient and forgiving. Turn the other cheek. Be aware of one’s weaknesses and sins, and be ashamed and self-deprecating as a result. Practice self-restraint, particularly with respect to your lower, impure, and often disgusting physical desires. Play it safe, think of other people’s needs and don’t rock the boat, and realize that we’re all dependent upon each other. Obey your parents and your preacher and the politicians.
Does the list on the right resonate with you? Do you feel that if more people lived that way they would live better lives and they and the human species would realize its highest potential?
Nietzsche is crystal clear about the list on the right—that list is dangerous to human potential. It reeks of weakness, even sickness and unhealthiness. It undermines the human potential for greatness, and it is, tragically, the dominant morality of our time. In our time, the traits that ennoble man are condemned, and all the traits that weaken man are praised. Morality, as Nietzsche puts it paradoxically, has become a bad thing; morality has become immoral: “precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that precisely morality was the danger of dangers?”[61]
Accordingly, Nietzsche concludes, “we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed.”[62]
Once the corruption is totally swept away, the project of building a moral society can commence. Naturally, the good edifice to be raised must start from a good foundation. The primitive state of nature was good, but unfortunately we cannot return to it. Reason, once awakened, cannot be dulled entirely. But neither can we tolerate anything that would lead us back to contemporary advanced civilization. Fortunately, history provides us with good models, for looking back upon most tribal cultures we find that their societies, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man.[19]
The best we can do, accordingly, is to try to recreate in modern form a society on that model.
The re-creation must begin from a proper understanding of human nature. Contrary to the claims of the Enlightenment philosophes, man is naturally a passional animal, not a rational one.[20] Man’s deepest passions should set the direction of his life, and reason should always give way before them.
Passions are an appropriate foundation for society, since one of the deepest desires is to believe in religion, and, Rousseau believes, religion is essential to social stability. That desire to believe can and must override all Enlightenment objections. “I believe therefore that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will. I see it or, rather, I sense it.”[21] Rousseau’s feeling that God exists, however, did not provide him with much detailed information about the nature of God. God “is hidden equally from my senses and from my understanding,” so his feeling gave him only the sense that a powerful, intelligent, and good being created the world. The arguments of the philosophers about God not only did not clarify matters, they made things worse: “The more I think about it,” Rousseau wrote, “the more I am confused.”[22] So he resolved to ignore the philosophers—“suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of God”[23]—and to let his feelings guide his religious beliefs, holding that feelings are a more reliable guide than reason. “I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light; it will lead me astray less than they lead me astray.’“[24] Rousseau’s inner light revealed to him an unshakeable feeling that God’s existence is the basis for all explanations, and that feeling was to him immune to revision and counter-argument: “One may very well argue with me about this; but I sense it, and this sentiment that speaks to me is stronger than the reason combating it.”[25]
This feeling was not to be merely one of Rousseau’s personal whims. At the foundation of all civil societies, Rousseau argued, one finds a religious sanction for what its leaders do. The society’s founding leaders may not always genuinely believe in the religious sanctions they invoke, but their invoking them is nonetheless essential. If the people believe that their leaders are acting out the will of the gods, they will obey more freely and “bear with docility the yoke of the public good.”[26] Enlightenment reason, by contrast, leads to disbelief; disbelief leads to disobedience; and disobedience leads to anarchy. This is a further reason why, according to Rousseau, “the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”[27] Reason, accordingly, is destructive to society, and should be limited and replaced with natural passion.[28]
So important is religion to a society, wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, that the state cannot be indifferent to religious matters. It cannot pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or even view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject the Enlightenment’s dangerous notions of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers:
“While the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death.”[29]
A society properly founded on natural passion and religion will override the self-centered individualism that reason leads to, making it possible for individuals to form a new, collectivized social organism. When individuals come together to form the new society, “the individual particularity of each contracting party is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” The will of each individual is no longer that individual’s own, but becomes common or general, and under the direction of the spokesmen for the whole. In moral society, one “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.”[30]
In the new society, the leadership expresses the “general will” and enacts policies that are best for the whole, thus enabling all individuals to achieve their true interests and their true freedom. The requirements of the “general will” absolutely override all other considerations, so a “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”[31]
Yet there is something about human nature, corrupted as it is now by reason and individualism, that militates and always will militate against the general will. Individuals rarely see their individual wills as being in harmony with the general will; consequently “the private will acts constantly against the general will.”[32] And so to counteract these socially destructive individualistic tendencies, the state is justified in using compulsion: “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”[33] The power of the general will over the individual will is total. “The state … ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole.”[34] And if the leaders of the state say to the citizen, “‘it is expedient for the state that you should die,’ he should die.”[35]
We thus find in Rousseau an explicitly Counter-Enlightenment set of themes, attacking the Enlightenment’s themes of reason, the arts and sciences, and ethical and political individualism and liberalism. Rousseau was a contemporary of the American revolutionaries of the 1770s, and there is an instructive contrast between the Lockean themes of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in the Americans’ Declaration of Independence and Rousseau’s social contract oath for his projected constitution for Corsica: “I join myself—body, goods, will and all my powers—to the Corsican nation, granting to her the full ownership of me—myself and all that depends upon me.”[36]
Lockean Enlightenment politics and Rousseauian Counter-Enlightenment politics will lead to opposite practical applications.
References
[19] Rousseau 1755, 50.
[20] Rousseau 1755, 14.
[21] Rousseau 1762a, 276.
[22] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[23] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[24] Rousseau 1762a, 269.
[25] Rousseau 1762a, 280.
[26] Rousseau 1762b, 2:7.
[27] Rousseau 1755, 22.
[28] Rousseau extended the limiting of reason to limiting its tools of expression: “Considering the awful disorders printing has already caused in Europe, and judging the future by the progress that this evil makes day by day, one can easily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their States as they once took to establish it” (1749, 61). And following the examples of Cato the Elder and Fabricius, Rousseau urged: “hasten to tear down these amphitheatres, break these marble statues, burn these paintings, chase out these slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you” (1749, 46).
[29] Rousseau 1762b, 4:8.
[30] Rousseau 1762b, 1:6.
[31] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[32] Rousseau 1762b, 3:10.
[33] Rousseau 1762b, 1:7.
[34] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[35] Rousseau 1762b, 2:5.
[36] Rousseau 1765, 297, 350. See also 1762b, 1.9.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 1:23 pm. 2 comments
Intellectual systems and movements are defined philosophically by means of their characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. As historical movements, they are defined by the time of their formulation and most vigorous activity.
So in the following table I offer a definitions of pre-modernism and modernism, each with the implicit genus “philosophical system” and a five-dimensional differentia.
[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Stephen Hicks discusses the debate over whether Existentialism is individualist. This is from Part 11 of his 
Part 7. Nietzsche as a Proto-Nazi 
The biological language and examples in those quotations show that biology is crucial to Nietzsche’s views on morality. Nietzsche was a precocious fifteen years old when Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Evolutionary ideas had been in the air for a long time before Darwin, and much of the intellectual world was moving away from thinking of the reality in terms of timeless, unchanging absolutes to viewing it in terms of process and change. All of this applies to morality too.
Nietzsche is crystal clear about the list on the right—that list is dangerous to human potential. It reeks of weakness, even sickness and unhealthiness. It undermines the human potential for greatness, and it is, tragically, the dominant morality of our time. In our time, the traits that ennoble man are condemned, and all the traits that weaken man are praised. Morality, as Nietzsche puts it paradoxically, has become a bad thing; morality has become immoral: “precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that precisely morality was the danger of dangers?”[61]
