Nietzsche’s Sister and *The Will to Power* [Open College transcript]

Below is an unedited transcription of this previously released podcast.

Audio links:

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Topics and times:

• The drama of The Will to Power [00:00 — 03:59]
• My earlier position [03:59 — 08:30]
• What was Nietzsche’s sister’s actual involvement? [08:30 — 16:42]
• Advertisement: Adventures in Postmodernism tour in Australia [12:49 — 14:29]
• The book’s connection to the Nazis [16:42 — 18:25]
• The themes from The Will to Power [18:25 — 31:44]
• Advertisement: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault [23:43 — 25:41]
• Outro [31:44 — 33:00]

Transcription:

The drama of The Will to Power

He is living an itinerant life wandering about Europe on a meager pension, but he is nonetheless working vigorously, almost feverishly, on his iconoclastic philosophy possibly culminating in a work that he suggested is going to be his greatest. But then he collapses on the streets of Turin — only 44 years old — he is losing his mental faculties and most of his grip on reality. It’s speculated, mostly by his enemies, that he caught syphilis from consorting with prostitutes, but more likely we now think he had a slow-developing brain tumor. Nonetheless, the damaged philosopher is confined to an institution for the last decade of his life. But what of his final work? This unfinished manuscript he’d been working on — maybe his magnum opus? What would be its fate?

Enter Nietzsche’s sister. Nietzsche’s sister was not an attractive person. Her full name was Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Her husband, Bernhard Förster, was an ardent German nationalist and an anti-Semite. He was also a member of a composer Richard Wagner’s extended circle. He was involved in developing a colony in South America, in Paraguay. But upon Friedrich’s collapse, Elisabeth returns to Germany. This is now into the 1890s. Over the next decade, she plans with Heinrich Köselitz (one of Friedrich’s long-time friends, he best known as Peter Gast — a name he used). But Elizabeth and Köselitz are planning to publish an edition of this unfinished manuscript. She goes on — and again in the 1890s — to establish the Nietzsche Archive and she acquires control over Friedrich’s literary estate.

Now, let’s jump ahead one generation later, the 1930s, and the rise of the Nazis. They come to power in 1933. But Elisabeth had become a supporter of the National Socialists in 1930 before they came to power. She was a believer. The leading Nazi politicians and the intellectuals, most of them love Nietzsche. So they court the now-elderly Elisabeth who controls Nietzsche’s literary estate. She is willing to be so courted and she lends the prestige of the philosopher’s brilliance to this brutal regime.

So here’s the problem: Elisabeth is anti-Semitic and very friendly to the Nazis — Adolf Hitler himself attended her funeral in 1935 — and not only is she Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister but his literary executor.

Now, we go back to 1900: Friedrich dies, never having recovered and leaving behind the extensive notes and reworked drafts for his unfinished magnum opus, perhaps? In 1901, under Elisabeth’s direction, an edition is published with the title The Will to Power. And then the question is: What should we make of this work?

My earlier position

For a long time I’ve argued this way. I taught a CyberSeminar on Nietzsche in 1999, and we used The Will to Power. I got some heat from people about using what was judged by them to be a tainted work. And my response was to say: Well, look, we should treat The Will to Power the way we treat any author’s unpublished notes. When they end up being published, we just ask the standard questions about the editor, because editors can make mistakes. Did the editor add anything? Did the editor delete anything significant? Did the editor engage in any misreadings? What about the organization? Is that true to the original author’s intentions? Are there any ellisions where parts of text are joined together where, perhaps, the author did not intend to do so?

We can also ask questions about the published work. How does it relate to the work that was published in the author’s lifetime? Are the themes in these unpublished notes, manuscripts that eventually were published after the person died — are those themes identical with earlier published ones? Or are they, perhaps, not identical but at least compatible? Are they in tension or do they actually contradict earlier published ones? And if we find tension or contradiction, what does that mean? Does that mean that the author changed his mind, and so forth?

Anyway, I also argued at the time that “every word in The Will to Power was written by Nietzsche in his notebooks of 1883-1888.” So it has that level of authenticity. Some of the notes, as author’s notes often are, are “working out of various thoughts,” and some were “part of a work-in-progress he intended to entitle,” perhaps, The Will to Power. Some of them, on my reading, are rough, some are polished; some are repetitive, some are brilliant, some are original. So it is a real mix. Sometimes the notes do contain, from my reading, insights that were perfectly compatible with his published works, or they offer slightly different formulations of themes that we had seen, or they take those themes and extend those themes in other directions. So my view — this is back in 1999 — was that I judged them to be a must-read for any serious Nietzsche scholar. They reflect what was going on in Nietzsche’s mind in the last working years of his life.

At the same time, they are notes in a notebook. So you have to be careful not to ascribe to them as much authority as to those works that Nietzsche did actually publish. Especially if we find any cases where there is a tension between the notes and his publications. This does not mean that there is no value to reading the notes.

Also, I pointed out that we in the English-speaking world have also had access to the translation of The Will to Power since 1967. It was produced by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Neither of them was anti-Semitic or contaminated with any sort of connections to the Nazis. Also since 1967 everyone has had access to the Colli and Montinari edition — a very carefully worked out edition of Nietzsche’s notebooks. So for the last half-century, 50 years or so, we have had good scholars working on the text and less fears about taint associated with neo-Nazis.

Now, that has been a minority position, the position I argued here. The most widespread view after World War II has been to dismiss The Will to Power on the grounds that it was distorted by Elisabeth: either by omissions, or by selective highlighting, or, possibly, additions. There is an additional complicating factor: Elizabeth was known to have forged letters that she wrote to people but she wrote them in Nietzsche’s name. So that raises the suspicion that possibly she did the same for some of the things that appear in The Will to Power.

Also after World War II, there was a strong attempt to rehabilitate Nietzsche, and that required distancing him from the Nazis and any association with them. And that meant that The Will to Power was seen widely as a disreputable work and/or illegitimate, and so to be dismissed by most people.

What was Nietzsche’s sister’s actual involvement?

Now, what we should then ask is the question about Nietzsche’s sister and what was her actual involvement in the production of The Will to Power. And here Professor R. Kevin Hill’s new edition is really invaluable. As I mentioned before, it was published in 2017. Translator Michael Scarpitti also contributed to the project. But the final version is authorized by Kevin Hill.

The point is that everything that appeared in The Will to Power in this edition is written by Nietzsche. Now, Hill goes on to argue that what we should do is, of course, look at the two principal people who are involved — they are Köselitz and his associates, and Elisabeth — and what exactly their roles were, and what judgment we can, from our now 21st-century perspective, take on the editing job that they did, particularly now that Professor Hill has access to the originals or facsimiles of the original hand-written notes by Nietzsche.

A quotation from Hill’s introduction:

“Most of the editorial work was done by Köselitz and his associates, and not by Elisabeth (as she herself explains in the preface to the 1901 edition, where she ‘stresses explicitly’ that she is ‘not even the editor of the book but at most and in the most modest sense of the word, a collaborator’).”

So apparently what Elisabeth did was none of the translation, very little of the editing work — her contribution was to organize the effort and engage in a lot of marketing and promotion of the book.

That then focuses our attention on Köselitz and his various editorial decisions, because notes in a notebook require a whole lot of that. And here is Hill’s professional judgment:

“Köselitz appears to have made a good-faith effort to select the material that was of the greatest interest, and much of the editorial activity was merely ‘tidying’” (p xii).

Hill goes on to argue that it was not Köselitz’s intention — and he made this explicit — against what many people claimed — that his intention was not to convey any sort of misleading impression that the book was Nietzsche’s magnum opus, as Nietzsche meant it to be.

Further Hill goes on to argue about Elisabeth in particular:

“Elisabeth’s editorial contribution seems to have been limited to her insistence that Nietzsche had produced a philosophical system that could compete with the systems of such figures as Kant and Hegel.” (p. xiii)

So, what she is doing is, of course, engaging in some marketing claims: Nietzsche is a towering figure on the order of Kant and Hegel, and you will see the evidence of this in this work. Now, that might be marketing hyperbole, but we can, of course, each make our own judgments about the extent to which we do think that what Nietzsche has produced is a system on the order of someone like Kant or Hegel. What she said might be true. Also, apparently the title, The Will to Power, was chosen by Elisabeth. Köselitz had made another decision, but Elizabeth overrode him, and The Will to Power then ended up being the title that it is published. And that is the one that sticks now.

The initial edition (1901) included only 483 selections, so maybe we could argue: Well, by excluding a whole lot of stuff that was in Nietzsche’s notebooks maybe it gives a misleading impression. But shortly after that Köselitz and Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche did produce an expanded, more definitive edition that included 1067 sections. And all of the current and subsequent editions since then have included those 1067. Shortly thereafter the full set of notebook selections was published.

Now, then what we should do is cycle back and ask about the possible editor errors, the kinds of mistakes that editors can make:

* Did the editors — that is to say, Köselitz and/or Elizabeth, Nietzsche’s sister — add anything to Nietzsche’s notebook? And the answer is: No, they did not.
*Did they delete anything of significance? The answer is no.
* Did they misread anything? And Hill says, well, possibly there are some minor misreadings and, in part, some of those things depend on punctuation placement. Maybe it is not exactly clear where a sentence ends or where a comma should go, and so forth. All right, so possibly there are some issues there, but, of course, those are the kinds of issues that the editor of anybody’s notebooks is going to run into.
* Were there any ellisions? That is to say, putting together two chunks from Nietzsche’s notebooks that were separated in the original notebooks but put together in a misleading fashion. Hill’s answer is no; there doesn’t seem to be any of that.*
* What about the overall organization of the book? The current edition is organized into four parts with titles and subheadings. Hill goes on to point out that Nietzsche had wrestled with the overall organization of this work, and he had tried out several organizational schemes, and the editors, Köselitz and Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, used one of the organizational schemes that Nietzsche himself had devised.

On the book’s connection to the Nazis

Now, we are left with the next question, which is: what about the book’s connection to the Nazis? Because one of the things that justifiably raises questions in people’s minds and can put anybody off is an author or a work that has strong connections to the Nazis. And particularly after WWII, there was a great scholarly and intellectual effort to distance Nietzsche from any sort of connection to the Nazis. Walter Kaufmann and many others who think there is a significant philosophical value to be found in Nietzsche, they want to do that distancing.

There, of course, is the issue: what should the connection be between Nietzsche’s views and the Nazis’? And with or without The Will to Power, that is a legitimate intellectual and historical question. I have written a book on this, Nietzsche and the Nazis, but aside from that plug right now I’m not going into those themes.

I’ll only say this for now: the Nazis did, in fact, use The Will to Power, they quoted from it — various intellectuals, politicians, and activists — but that is not relevant to accepting or rejecting The Will to Power. The Nazi politicians and the Nazi intellectuals interpreted and quoted from all of Nietzsche’s books, and we don’t and shouldn’t reject Nietzsche’s published writings for that reason. Instead, we should each read Nietzsche for ourselves and make our own judgments about what is true, what is false, what is interesting, and so forth. So, in one way, that is an irrelevant issue to the value and the importance of The Will to Power.

Themes from The Will to Power

Of course, The Will to Power is important. And wrestling with all of these themes about the editorial history and the later connections to the Nazis that is important to take up because The Will to Power really does contain philosophical dynamite.

The Will to Power is organized into four parts, with a number of subsections (a grand total of 1067 sections)

I: The First Part is focused on the theme of nihilism. And some of the striking things here are about how prescient Nietzsche is in diagnosing the nihilism of his era — but going on to argue that it is only going on to get worse. In his view, the theme of the Death of God is in its early stages. This is in section 31, just to give some sample quotations: “European pessimism is still in its infancy” (31) and, in contrast to Christianity, which tried to stand for something, however pathetically in Nietzsche’s views, “We are rushing headlong towards the opposite values” (30). Those two are from sections 31 and 30.

What we find in this opening section focused on nihilism is Nietzsche being very prescient about 20th-century intellectual developments — how the 20th century came to be a very skeptical, pessimistic, and nihilist century, particularly in the humanities disciplines.

II: Part Two, one of the longest sections. Nietzsche is diagnosing what he sees to be a failed history of philosophy with its attempts to ground moral psychology either in the Judeo-Christian tradition or some related thing. And Nietzsche, from his other published works (Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals published in the middle of 1880s), is very well known for his scathing attacks on Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, what he calls “slave morality.” He is also known for his scathing indictments of socialism which he sees as a pathetic halfway step from slave morality. This is a theme that is picked up again in, for example, in section 30.

But there is an interesting point, and that is a theme that Nietzsche has sounded in some of his other works, but he pushes this button harder in this Second Part of The Will to Power: Christianity has a strong reputation for being a kind of altruism, emphasizing selflessness, willingness to sacrifice for others, and so forth. But Nietzsche, interestingly, argues that Christianity really is a kind of selfishness. So we read in section 246 of The Will to Power this interesting passage:

“Christianity considered the individual to be of such absolute importance that he could no longer be sacrificed, even though the survival of the species depends upon human sacrifice …”

So here we have a couple of themes. One is what Nietzsche goes on to develop in greater length in The Will to Power and, of course, he had argued this in other works as well, that our goal is to advance the species — human beings as they currently are should be seen as a means to an end. And so Nietzsche is arguing that Christianity is standing in a way of this, not for its advocacy of altruism per se, but because of its individualism and what he is interpreting as a kind of egoism, a kind of selfishness. It [Christianity] is saying: we should treat each individual ego, each individual self as being of such importance that we cannot engage in sacrifices — and so since we are actually selfish, we are not being altruistic in the sense of being willing to sacrifice human beings for the sake of the greater good, the advancement of the species. That’s an interesting twist. Nietzsche had elsewhere called that kind of individualism the “egoism of the weak,” and his diagnosis of the proper taxonomy ethically within we should place Christianity is quite striking here.

Also in this second section, we find that while Nietzsche has a reputation for being a strong humanist, for glorifying human potential — a number of very anti-humanistic themes are emerging. In section 303, for example, he says (and this is a direct quote):

“Man is a minor, transitional animal species, which — fortunately — has had its day.”

Of course, the relationship between Nietzsche and the postmodernists is a matter of some fun controversy. I’m reminded here of Foucault’s call for the end of man, and Foucault at various points did call himself a Nietzschean. This is the sort of Nietzschean theme that Foucault and some of the other postmodernists will take and run with in the 20th century.

III: We move on to sampling from Part III, another very long part here. Nietzsche devoted a couple hundred pages to talking about metaphysics, talking about epistemology, and it is better to say, I think, that what we have is an anti-metaphysics and an anti-epistemology because the consistent themes are an undermining of causality, identity, knowledge, and truth. All the themes, again, that the postmodernists are going to run with in the coming generations. You can find them in a strong proto-form in The Will to Power.

Reality is a subjective construct, for example, here is section 602:

“The world seen in perspective, this world as it presents itself to the eyes, ears and touch, is quite false, no doubt …”

So that’s also a Kantian connection that we can find, and the Kantian themes run quite strongly through this Third Part of The Will to Power.

Also on the value side of things, we Nietzsche’s explicit subjectivism and projectionism: we do not find value in the world, it is not in anyway intrinsic and/or objective, rather we put value in the world. Section 590:

“Our values are read into things.”

And again, this is a cue that 20th-century thinkers, the Existentialists, for example, will pick up, these sorts of Nietzschean themes, and run with those.

IV: Part Four of The Will to Power is the one that will get most people’s blood boiling, particularly those of us who were raised in freedom-loving liberal democracies, because in Part IV we find very strong endorsements of aristocracy, social hierarchy, war, and outright slavery. The anti-individualistic themes and the anti-liberal themes in Nietzsche are on display quite prominently in Part IV.

Nietzsche does have a strong reputation, though, for being an individualist, and I have argued against that: the reputation for individualism elsewhere is much overstated. But just for the purposed of this podcast here let me quote a couple of sections from Part IV.

Section 854 starts off with his general complaint here:

“In this age of suffrage universel, in which everybody is allowed to sit in judgement upon everything and everybody, I feel compelled to re-establish the principle of hierarchy.”

So that is to say going against, obviously, democracy and universal voting, not everybody should have political power, not everybody should be allowed to vote, not everybody should be in the position of judging: some people should, some people should not.

Section 855:

“Rank is determined and distinguished by quantities of power alone: nothing else.”

So again, the principle of hierarchy is going to be put in place, and politics and social ordering should be based on power. A consistent and what is going to be a ruthless power-politics, but this is going to be power shorn from any sense that power is for the sake of justice, power for the sake of truth, power for the sake of any redeeming normative value. And again, this is going to be a theme that postmodernists and others are going to take and run with in the 20th century.

Section 859, in the modern world a great battle between individualism and collectivism, kind of free market capitalism and economically socialism. Nietzsche makes it clear that he is rejecting both of those alternatives:

“I stand equally aloof from both moral movements, individualism and collectivism.”

And then he goes to single out individualism for special scorn here:

“because the first knows nothing of hierarchy and would give one individual the same freedom as another. …”

So we should not be individualistic, we should not believe that everybody should have equal freedom. The real question, Nietzsche goes on to argue, is

“to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, or even enslavement may provide the basis for the production of a higher type.”

And so again, a forthright endorsement of the limitations of freedom on many people and even slavery for many people.

It is striking that this is Nietzsche in the 1880s because one of the important themes of the 19th century had been the ongoing battle against slavery, British Navy’s efforts, Civil War in the United States, many countries, individuals, and movements around the world joining in this great moral crusade against slavery. And then finally we are getting rid of it, but here is Nietzsche, a leading intellectual, arguing quite forthrightly for the opposite.

Now, all these themes are continuous with Nietzsche’s earlier published works. But The Will to Power is the mature Nietzsche. He is now in his 40s; he is a genius and he is articulating in his unique powerful rhetorical style themes that do come to dominate 20th- and now even 21st-century intellectual life. Anybody who is trying to understand contemporary philosophy has to engage with Nietzsche, and, in my judgment, that should definitely include engaging with The Will to Power.

Sources:

• Robert Matthews, “‘Madness’ of Nietzsche was cancer not syphilis,” Telegraph, 2003.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, translators. 1967.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. R. Kevin Hill, editor and translator, Penguin, 2017.

* Professor Hill writes to clarify: “there are a small number of elisions in the German text of WTP, but I removed them by inserting a centered asterisk between the texts that were merged in the printed German but not in the notebooks. Assuming that the use of the centered asterisk is sufficiently clear, there are no elisions in MY text. And none of the elisions conveyed an inaccurate impression of Nietzsche’s meaning. So it’s not quite “there are no elisions.” But in my text, they are flagged so that there is no confusion.”

Related:

• Nietzsche and the Nazis page links to audio editions of the book
• 22 points from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
• Zarathustra’s predatory collectivism
• Foucault as Nietzschean: on knowledge as injustice
• Excerpt from my 1998 lecture on how Nietzsche Perfectly Forecasts the Postmodernist Left
• Nietzsche and Rand: 96 Similarities and Differences
• Interview with R. Kevin Hill

The complete series of Open College with Stephen Hicks podcasts.