Conceptualising the role of 'crisis' in the development of Nietzsche's political thought necessitates first situating the relationship of his thinking to political philosophy as a whole. A "cultural physician" and "psychologist" of modernity, what he termed the "age of the masses", Nietzsche's works are situated in the period of 19th century transformations in industrialisation, imperialism and the rise of the nation-state. Despite this, and since his works perceived recovery from appropriation by the Nazi's by Walter Kaufmann, great debate within the historiographical tradition has concerned Nietzsche's situation within the history of political thought; namely, disputes concerning Nietzsche's actual role as a political thinker. This essay will situate Nietzsche not only as a thinker of the political par excellence, but in so doing will seek to recontextualise his works in the political and discursive debates of their occurrence. Specifically, it will be argued that the tension of crisis is implicit within the interpretation of the will to power and "overcoming", by which Nietzsche aims to situate a politics of difference in which the world will be affirmed. Orienting Nietzsche's metaphysical views in relation to crisis, it will be definitively argued that Nietzsche is a political thinker concerned with "Great politics" against the "petty politics" of the Bismarckian age (Rochon, 2016).
Born in 1844, Nietzsche's acquaintance with the problem of "crisis" was a period imputed with a dual significance. Namely, this occurred with two prominent events in the year 1848, the 1848 revolutions that in an 1858 writing dubbed The Years of My Youth a young Nietzsche would recall "violent events shook nearly all the nations of Europe" parallel to which in September of that year he would recollect his father: "suddenly became mentally ill". Contextualising Nietzsche's early exposure to the problem of 'crisis' as psychologically constituted, a key theme in his latter writings, we may situate these early events as constitutive not only of the intellectual provenance of Nietzsche's thought, but further their presence within a decisively political problematic. The problem of the European 'crisis' would not abate in this period, writing in 1885 in the wake of the "Death of God" (Nietzsche, 1882), Nietzsche would refer to a "magnificent tension of spirit in Europe", stating that "the European experiences this tension as a crisis or state of need" (Nietzsche, 1886). Writing later on the problem of nihilism, Nietzsche would refer to this "anticipation of disaster" as the "rise of nihilism" itself (Nietzsche, 1906). Against the backdrop of this crisis, we find in Nietzsche a decisively political intervention, paradigmatic of the debates in political theory of the time in Prussia and Germany following the 1848 revolutions. This debate concerned the relationship of the State's authority to ethical and moral premises and what was termed by Rohmer "Germanic Caesarism". Illustrating two paradigmatic models, the Rechtstaat (state of law) and Realpolitik a core concern was the relationship of the state in this "crisis of the political" to the independence of the political as such. Situating Nietzsche within this discursive background, it can be argued against Walter Kaufmann's view of Nietzsche as an "anti-political" (Abbey; Appel, 1998) theorist that Nietzsche is the political philosopher of "practical politics" par excellence, what Rochau defines as: "practical politics has only to do with the simple fact that power alone can rule" (Prutsch, 2020).
Centring the problem of 'crisis' to the development of Nietzsche's political thought as a theorist of "power politics" reference must be drawn to Nietzsche's metaphysics of the "Will to Power". Influenced by Pre-Socratic philosophers and the cosmological arguments for existence derived from the singular arche, in conjunction with a critique of the Kantian category of the "thing-in-itself" and its appropriation by Schopenhauer as embodying non-subjective truths, Nietzsche argued: "The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its 'intelligible character' - would be just the 'will to power' and nothing else". Adopting a framework of perspectivism, Nietzsche would articulate a metaphysics that exteriorised the problem of power, and politics as the means of power, from a coupling to moral philosophy, what he considered the intrusion of the scientific principle in Socrates that characterised "Christianity [as] Platonism for the "people"" (Nietzsche, 2018; Nietzsche, 1886). Reconceptualising the concept of 'crisis' within these terms, for Nietzsche it was precisely the Christian "hypothesis of morality" and its Socratic-scientific principle of the "will to truth" that constituted the crisis of nihilism in modernity, "morality [as] the renunciation of the will to live" (Nietzsche, 1907). As a classicist by profession, teaching at the University of Basil from 1869, this unorthodox relation to the scientific principle and methods of modern pedagogy would be the backdrop for Nietzsche's polemical writing in the Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche's writing on history co-existent with his statement: "We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life" (Nietzsche, 1997). Coupling this scientific origin of the concept of the 'crisis' to Nietzsche's physiological role as a "cultural physician" concerned with the connection of "truth" to the extent that it serves life (Ahern, 1990), reference can be drawn back to Nietzsche's conception of the will to power, in which: "life itself is will to power" (Nietzsche, 1886). Parallel to his personal friend and interlocutor, Jacob Burckhardt's conception of an ages "cultural unity" that concentrates on the "culture which made the art possible" (Burckhardt, 1860), Nietzsche's unity of life and the world as "will to power" unites a metaphysical doctrine in which a genealogy of morals could transform the "mistrustful relations between philosophy, physiology, and medicine into the most amicable and fruitful exchange" (Ahern, 1990; Nietzsche, 1887). Subsequently, the concept of the 'crisis' directly parallels Nietzsche's political psychology, in which, "philosophic systems are very important […] they may be used to reconstruct the philosophic image, just as one may guess at the nature of the soil in a given place by studying the plant that grows there" [Nietzsche, 1887] (Cambridge, 1994). Assessing the historical engagements in the problems of Nietzsche's thought, a movement may thereby be identified from his early classical engagements and psychological critiques to a concern situating the relation of the concept of the nihilistic crisis to the problem of morality's relation to the political.
Subsequently, for Nietzsche, the problem of the political becomes the problem of power politics par excellence. In Nietzsche's interpretation of history, this parallels Burckhardt's consideration of the Greek state in which the Greek polis sits as the "state determined by culture" (Burckhardt, 1860). For Nietzsche, this goal, which situates the distinction of paradigmatic moral typologies of what he calls "master morality" and "slave morality" (Nietzsche, 1887; Nietzsche, 1887), situates a necessary distinction and separation of powers between subjects and their relation to the state. Against a liberal thesis of the interiority of subjects to the law, Nietzsche thereby proposes that "there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed outside the national and state-instincts". The effectual force of this distinction, for Nietzsche, could only be maintained by unequal powers and slavery. Directly, this helps to situate Nietzsche not only as definitively a political theorist, against Kaufmann's interpretation, but additionally to critique interpretations of Nietzsche in the political literature that situate him as a "radical democratic" theorist, such as the view expressed by Lawrence Hatab that "Nietzsche should have preferred democracy to any other political arrangement". Rather, conceptualising Nietzsche as a theorist of power politics in the crisis of nihilism, it becomes possible to situate his work as a critique of the necessary violence that underlies any democratic regime. In this way, the genealogy of morals can be read as the analytic prior to what must come before Aristotle's "Political animal". For Aristotle, who emphasises the anthropological distinction of the human necessitated in the property of memory from which: "the property of being intelligent appears; and with this hearing, the ability and disposition to learn appears, the ability to be a disciple" (Foucault, 2014), Nietzsche presents the genealogy of morals as the prior existence of the political. It is this prior existence, then which concerns the "breeding of an animal which is entitled to make promises" and from the exercise of power and domination in images of violence "one eventually memorised five or six 'I will not's, thus giving one's promise in return for the advantages offered by society". In this sense, Nietzsche's political thought directly situates itself within the crisis of nihilism, situating the necessity of the political in a "great politics" that will be exterior to the problems of morality. For Nietzsche, the purpose of cultivation is the purpose of the political par excellence, through which, ironically, democracy itself became possible.
In conclusion, the concept of the 'crisis' situated and defined in Nietzsche's reference to the crisis of nihilism, is instrumental to considering and contextualising Nietzsche's political thought and its development. Additionally, by situating Nietzsche within discursive debates around the role of history, and the responsibility of the state and power in reference to morals and the law, it becomes possible to specify Nietzsche's thoughts as definitively political, against prominent interpretations of Nietzsche as an apolitical theorist following the Second World War. Finally, situating the nature of Nietzsche's politics, it becomes highly untenable to conclude, as does Hatab, that Nietzsche's metaphysics presupposes a politics of radical democracy. To the contrary, situating Nietzsche's philosophical framework involves integrating it within a direct concern for power politics in Germany and Europe in 19th century debates around the relationship of the political and moral spheres. Thereby, it can be concluded that with reference to the 'crisis' of nihilism, Nietzsche can be considered a political theorists of power politics par excellence.
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