GUIDANCE NOTES FOR NIETZSCHE DISCUSSION SPACE ON X 14/08/25
Nietzsche talk 14 / 08 /2025
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I want to continue the Nietzsche talks week by week but I can see by the way they are developing that it is not going to be possible to separate them cleanly into a series of talks dealing each of them with “one theme in” or “one aspect of” Nietzsche. The last two talks were planned and announced, for example, as talks on the theme of “Nietzsche’s views on truth”. As you will remember, however, I ended up approaching this theme through the concrete example of an encounter, ten years ago, between a representative of “our” political camp – Owen Shroyer – and two young female “Nietzscheans” at a protest rally against Trump. The way in which I read this encounter – or began to read it, because we ran out of time – was in terms of the usefulness to these girls of a certain Nietzsche – specifically the “critic of truth” Nietzsche who is really the only Nietzsche that was taught to US undergraduates then or now, ten years later – in sustaining their political self-image and thereby their political morale. We find ourselves, then, at this point in the Nietzsche talks really already on the cusp of two topics: (1) the philosophy of “truth” and (2) the philosophy of Man’s understanding of his own being and identity: or “anthropology” in the philosophical sense of this term (which has little or nothing to do with what is taught in “Anthropology” departments, which the French more correctly call “ethnologie”).
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It is probably useful to recap the remarks of three weeks ago about Shroyer and the girls.
In fact, as you’ll remember, I considered the “usefulness of Nietzsche” for the two young female philosophy students whom Owen Shroyer encountered in 2015 from two points of view.
The first line on this that I considered was that which I – perhaps unfairly – attributed to a certain contemporary “centrist Right” represented by Peterson, James Lindsay and various others.
Peterson, Lindsay and their kind are basically of the same world as the progressives and therefore tend, whether they know they’re doing it or not, to focus on what is positive in them, i.e. on the ways in which they do effectively exert power.
Peterson’s and Lindsay’s analyses, then, of today’s Left’s recourse to “Nietzscheanism” are analyses that stress how this Nietzscheanism gives to the Left the rhetorical and argumentational power that similar ideas gave, for example, to the Sophists in the world recorded in Plato’s dialogues.
It allows them to win arguments.
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The second line on “Left Nietzscheanism” that I considered, however, was one inspired by currents running far farther to “the Right of the Right” than Peterson and Lindsay would venture. They would likely class these currents as “Woke Right”.
This is the reading of our current clashes “eugenicistically” or “bio-leninistically”.
“Bioleninism” is a reading of our present political and social situation that is gaining more and more resonance on the Right:
It is the thesis that the “progressive” movement is a coalition of the incapable and the weak.
Now a necessity for such a movement, if it is to be effective, is the holding at bay of this very perception of itself.
The members of the “coalition of the ugly and the weak” must find themselves to be beautiful and strong if their morale is to be kept up. Or at least no too clear and certain a knowledge of their ugliness and weakness must be allowed to settle on them.
Now, this is certainly a second reason, besides that which I’ve said a Lindsay or a Peterson is likely to offer, for Nietzsche – the epistemologist, truth-critical who, as I say, is really the only Nietzsche these girl philosophy undergraduates of 2015 would have been taught – becoming important to the new Left.
Nietzsche’s radical “constructivism”
– his extreme development of the idea verum esse ipsum factum (“truth is itself something made”) –
allows them not only to defend themselves against their interlocutors.
More importantly, it allows then to defend themselves against themselves,
It allows them to constantly “interpret away” that deeply demoralizing experience of themselves which would demoralize and paralyze them if they subscribed to any philosophy which held that “truth”, including the truth about the self and about the physical body that bears and is essential to the self, is unmade, is something that is what it is without any contribution from our side.
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Now, as I mentioned, as I remember it these girls of 2015 were not especially egregious examples of such beings.
They were not obese, and certainly not, as is more and more likely to be the case today, young men disgustingly trying to pass as young women.
But in these talks I am dealing with matters of general historical tendency
And the fact is that even in the decade between 2015 and today we have seen political and social reality coming more and more to corroborate the bio-leninist view that the “progressive” party is more and more the party of the ugly and the physically deformed.
The principal expression of this, of course, is the front ranks of leftist demonstrations being taken over by those epitomes of self-celebrating ugliness, the trans-sexuals.
Needless to say, this was not the case ten years ago and certainly not the case during my own days as a leftist, forty years ago.
We need, then, to situate the two “Nietzschean” girls confronting Shroyer on this continuum of development.
They belonged, after all, to a generation that was well on the way to the present hopelessly body-dysmorphic one and there was doubtless much about their bodies that they wished to “blank out”
Nietzsche’s constructivism (and deconstructivism) gave them the tools to do so.
The idea of Nietzsche’s works as a “toolbox” has in fact become very prominent in recent years. Both Foucault and Deleuze use the image: Foucault, I think, as a description of his own, Nietzsche-inspired work; but Deleuze as a description of Nietzsche’s work, at least as Foucault uses it.
Today, Nietzsche is very much used as a “toolbox” to carry out, so to speak, “in-flight repairs” on the self-image of the leftist even as this latter flies into battle against the Right.
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For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to examine the very different role that Nietzsche takes on in this moral problematic of self-image, and of self-image’s effect on morale and the capacity for effective political action, where the epistemological moment, the “truth-critical” moment, in Nietzsche is allowed to recede and no longer plays the dominant, “lynchpin” role.
Now, as I also pointed out, there have been periods in Nietzsche’s Rezeptionsgeschichte when this was very much the case.
Kaufmann, as late as the 70s, felt he did not need to apologize for “slighting” Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge in his standard work.
I personally entirely missed this side of Nietzsche when I read him at that time.
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There are also, as I have already suggested, periods within Nietzsche’s own work in which the epistemological, truth-critical moment fades so far into the background as to become negligible, so that Nietzsche is in these periods effectively a realist.
I pointed, for example, to a passage at the end of the eighth section of “The Antichrist”, for example, suggests that Nietzsche had come by this point to view the position “there is no truth” as one that could be overcome by history
So lange der Priester noch als eine höhere Art Mensch gilt, dieser Verneiner, Verleumder, Vergifter des Lebens von Beruf, giebt es keine Antwort auf die Frage: was ist Wahrheit? Man hat bereits die Wahrheit auf den Kopf gestellt, wenn der bewusste Advokat des Nichts und der Verneinung als Vertreter der „Wahrheit“ gilt…
I give here the English version of this passage from the 1918 translation by H. L. Mencken (albeit a problematical translation whose difficulties I will return to below):
So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative....
For the Nietzsche of “The Antichrist”, then, there is a truth. It is the inverse of the “false truth” of Christianity – and is therefore the truth of the terrible second section.
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But the particular experience of Nietzsche that I want to focus on is that occurring in another age after the philosopher’s death, besides the 1970s of Kaufmann, when the experience of him seems to have been “innocent of epistemology”.
I linked up with this period myself at the end of the 1970s, when I was trying to learn German and French at the same time, and found my own experience of Nietzsche reflected in this experience from half a century before.
I mean the French intellectual milieu in the years after WW1.
Mauriac’s “Baiser”.
It is established even before the encounter with Nietzsche that the moral problematic of the novel is exactly the moral problematic that we’ve just touched on with the remarks about the “bio-leninist” Left:
How does the weak, ugly man maintain his energy and his morale, his will to live and to fight for what he believes to be his interests?
We are told already on page one that Jean Peloueyre is such a weak and ugly man, a failure on the crudest physical level.
He was so short that he could see his wretched face in the low mirror between the windows: hollow cheeks, a long red nose that looked as though it had been worn away to a point like a well-sucked stick of barley-sugar, a sharp angle of close-cut hair pointing down over a wrinkled forehead. He made a face at the reflection and saw two rows of decayed teeth. He had never so hated himself, but a few pitying words escaped his lips: "Out for a walk, you poor devil," and his hand went to his ill-shaven chin.
Peloueyre’s chance encounter with Nietzsche – or with Nietzsche’s ideas – occurs just two or three pages farther on into the book.
A novel written in the 2020s might have portrayed this chance encounter as an encounter with, as we have said, a toolbox containing interpretative “tools” that might have helped him to mend these seemingly unmendable defects – specifically by teaching him that
verum esse ipsum factum (“truth is itself something made”)
i.e. that his shortness, his ugliness, his sickness are ultimately “social constructs” that are negatives only insofar as a “speech-community” interprets them as negatives etc
But this culture of “France 1920” is another culture.
An entirely different imagery defines this encounter.
It is an imagery which evokes not Man’s power – Man as homo faber – but Man as powerless before Nature, including his own nature.
Here, Nietzsche’s writings do not empower; rather they destroy, as Nature does:
Jean put the book down; and the phrases he had just read ran burning through his mind like the burning afternoon sun that pours into a room when the shutters are opened
He repeated Nietzsche's words over and over again, saturated himself with their meaning until it rushed through his thoughts like an October gale.
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It is worthwhile lingering on the text of this “non-constructivist Nietzsche” of Mauriac, who is all about confronting the individual with his own physical/biological reality and allowing him no “out” into “alternative interpretations”.
What Nietzsche does Jean Peloueyre actually confront here?
Jean stumbles on two passages in this book of “chosen pieces”.
The first is from “The Antichrist” ; it consists of the whole of its short second section
Now, this concords fully with the reading I have offered above of Nietzsche’s late and last work: i.e. the last year – in which Nietzsche really did largely abandon the “radical constructivist” thematic and returned to a sort of essentialism.
The second passage he stumbles on is more problematical in this context.
It is the 260th aphorism of “Beyond Good and Evil” from 1886, from which Nietzsche developed the first essay of the following year’s “Genealogy”
Now this book as a whole, as I’ve noted, is the locus classicus of the “critique of truth”
Lou Salomé noted that it would have been better called “Beyond True and False”
But it is true that we are not dealing, in this 260th aphorism, with one of the “truth-critical” passages of the book.
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In any case, I want to focus on the “Antichrist” passage
It is interesting to look at the text and compare the German original, the French text, and a certain English rendering.
German original:
Was ist gut? — Alles, was das Gefühl der Macht, den Willen zur Macht, die Macht selbst im Menschen erhöht.
Was ist schlecht? — Alles, was aus der Schwäche stammt.
Was ist Glück? — Das Gefühl davon, dass die Macht wächst, dass ein Widerstand überwunden wird.
Nicht Zufriedenheit, sondern mehr Macht; nicht Friede überhaupt, sondern Krieg; nicht Tugend, sondern Tüchtigkeit (Tugend im Renaissance-Stile, virtù, moralinfreie Tugend)
Die Schwachen und Missrathnen sollen zu Grunde gehn: erster Satz unsrer Menschenliebe. Und man soll ihnen noch dazu helfen.
Was ist schädlicher als irgend ein Laster? — Das Mitleiden der That mit allen Missrathnen und Schwachen — das Christenthum…
Mauriac’s French text:
Qu'est-ce qui est bon? — Tout ce qui exalte en l’homme le sentiment de puissance, la volonté de puissance, la puissance elle-même.
Qu'est-ce qui est mauvais? — Tout ce qui a sa racine dans la faiblesse.
Périssent les faibles et les ratés — et qu'on les aide encore à disparaître !
Qu'est-ce qui est plus nuisible que n'importe quel vice? —
La pitié qu'éprouve l'action pour les déclassés et les faibles : le Christianisme.
Then the text as it appeared in James Whitall’s 1923 English translation of “Baiser”:
What is good?
Everything that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness.
The weak must perish, and we shall help them to perish.
What is more harmful than any vice?
Pity for the weak and helpless—Christianity.
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The word that is “danced around” in both the French and the English renderings is the difficult, but absolutely philosophically crucial, key word in Nietzsche’s late writing
Mißrathener
Whitall essentially omits it, believing it to be covered by “the weak”, which in fact only accompanies it in Nietzsche’s original.
Mauriac’s French text proceeds still more strangely:
It translates the same word in two very different ways just two lines apart
Les faibles et les ratés might pass as an adequate translation of Die Schwachen und Missrathnen.
Les déclassés et les faibles definitely cannot
This seems to represent a slippage back into a social-constructivist Nietzsche: the Missrathener is only missrathen because of class, i.e. of social, not biological reasons.
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Since we’re on the topic of translation it is worth looking at Mencken’s very poor translation of this passage from five years earlier
What is good? —- Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil? —Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; no¢ virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.
And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak— Christianity. ...
Mencken’s most serious error here does not concern Missrathene
It is his translation of Nietzsche’s
Was ist schlecht?
as
“what is evil?”
This is to completely confuse and scramble together some of the basic dichotomies and antagonisms of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
I have had occasion, on X, to correct some of BAP’s hangers-on on this particular point.
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One glimmer of hope for our present-day world – a world which Nietzsche, of course, would have judged, had he seen it, to have fallen almost entirely into ressentiment and décadence – is that this master-morality language of goodness and badness (Güte and Schlechtigkeit), as opposed to the slave-morality language of goodness and evil (Güte and Bosheit), is still circulating in this world.
I can tell a personal anecdote about an occasion when I heard it.
I spoke on X about an infatuation I developed, long ago when I was still only middle-aged, with a girl I first encountered on Stickam. She was Californian and, for a long while, I could ease the pain of her refusing to meet me with the thought that distance made such a physical meet-up impossible anyway. But three years or so into our acquaintance she came to Europe, to the city of my birth: London. I was living in Paris at the time – but that is no great distance. So I had to face the pain of the fact that it was not extrinsic circumstances that prevented her from meeting me.
One particular remark of hers, that I read in some Skype message or somewhere like that, hit me particularly hard because I was just then having to face these hard truths.
The remark was a throwaway one, a quip, and I don’t think it was even directed at me.
Someone, in leaving her, said “be good” and she quipped back
“good at what?”
Now really, we have the whole argument of the 260th aphorism of “Beyond Good and Evil”, of the first essay of the “Genealogy” that develops this aphorism, and of this second section of “The Antichrist” here, in these three words.
Nietzsche points to it in the line:
nicht Tugend, sondern Tüchtigkeit
The “good” in the “master morality” dichotomy of “good and bad” is not about conforming to some idea of the morally right but simply about being “fit for purpose”, being “good at things”.
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It is relevant to our wider topic to remark that Stephanie was certainly no Nietzsche scholar.
Like many beautiful women she was a chameleon. She just adopted the appearance, the mores, the language of her environment.
Which raises some very important moral and political questions about the environment that she lived in in that year
Indeed, it raises questions about this whole juncture at which we currently stand, at which it is difficult to say if the left has absorbed Nietzsche, or Nietzsche absorbed the left.
The environment she lived in – rent-free in a run-down house that had been bought by a rich, Cambridge-educated Indian at the top of Brick Lane – was surely in most ways a “left” one.
But this Nietzschean ethos of Tüchtigkeit rather than Tugend circulated in it, doubtless as a weird mixture of the legacy, through the old universities – the Indian was a Cambridge Maths graduate – of ancient British aristocratic virtue and new ultra-capitalist values of “start-up Shoreditch” in 2010.
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Again, my pain over seeing Stephanie in that environment, and over my own exclusion from it, brings us back to the philosophical points we have been touching on.
Especially those excluded from such a milieu are tempted to emphasize its “constructedness”: these hipsters only formed an elite by social convention etc.
But that was not really so.
A certain Tüchtigkeit – a “good-for-something-ness” – circulated there after all
And made their milieu Nietzschean in many regards.
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But I have digressed.
Really, as a way of moving toward the transition into the next element of Nietzsche that I want to take up and examine – namely, the core of his “anthropology” in the philosophical sense developed in the sixth chapter of “Twilight of The Idols” – it is a second translatorial error of Mencken’s that I want to focus in on.
I mean his rendering of Missrathener as “botched”
It is not as bad a mistake as is rendering Missrathener as déclassé.
But it is misleading.
It suggests a Creator God, or a Demiurge.
Above all, it fails to foreground the element of chance that is inherent in the term
Missrathen
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But in this regard this misdirection links up to a misdirection in the Mauriac text.
Mauriac has the Mißrathener “made for failure and defeat”:
He was one of the class denounced by Nietzsche; he knew that with his abject appearance he was inevitably sentenced to slavery; his personality was made for failure and defeat
This “made for” hardly seems Nietzschean, since one of Nietzsche’s central critical targets was teleology.
Strangely enough, though, once a certain individual has happened to turn out well, we DO re-enter, in Nietzsche, something like the realm of teleology.
This is the “Wohlgerathener” of “Twilight of the Idols” and also of “Ecce Homo”.
But this is for next time.