GUIDANCE NOTES FOR NIETZSCHE DISCUSSION SPACE ON X 23/08/2025
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I want to stick, in this talk, with the general framework of discussion I’ve used in these talks up until now.
I’ve spoken about two almost diametrically opposed “anthropologies” (“philosophical accounts of “what a human individual is”) comprised under the one name “Nietzsche”.
One account – it is the one almost exclusively taught in universities today – is an “anthropology of empowerment”: more specifically and importantly, of universal, or “democratic” empowerment.
We have run through the logic several times already:
In a first step the notion of an “objective reality independent of the action of Man” is denied: there is, for example, no “Nature” with a capital “N”.
But the real “empowerment” comes when this denial of the objective nature of things extends to the denial of the objective nature of the person who knows and experiences things:
The knowing and acting subject too is just a “mobile army of metaphors” and can thereby be deconstructed and reconstructed just as the “known” world can.
I have gone in some detail already into how this “frees up” and “empowers” the individual who embraces it (that is to say, potentially empowers every individual).
I concentrated specifically on the “prophylactic” aspect of this empowerment: the malleability of one’s own self as a part of the malleable “world” allows one to reinterpret – reinterpret out of effective existence, if necessary – anything about oneself (ugliness, weakness) that could undermine one’s morale.
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I spoke also, however, about the “anthropology of disempowerment” that is also to be found in Nietzsche.
I noted that this is not effectively found in Nietzsche’s work today. That is to say, his work is taught today at university in a way that blocks off this way of interpreting his writing.
That is why I had to take a text from a hundred years ago – Mauriac’s “Le baiser au lepreux” – as the model of “receiving” Nietzsche in this way.
In “Le baiser au lepreux”, we may say, we see a complete inversion of the reading of Nietzsche that predominates today:
Today’s Nietzscheanism proceeds from a de-objectification of Nature to a de-objectification of the personal nature of the knowing and acting subject, leaving this latter to “make himself whatever he wishes”.
The Nietzscheanism of 1920 takes an overwhelmingly real “objective Nature” as its starting point. Nietzsche’s own writings are characterized in terms of their likeness to a Nature that overwhelmingly is what it is:
A gale, a burning sun
By such a “naturalized” philosophical discourse, then, the reading subject is not “freed up” to be whatever he wishes to be. He is rather locked firmly into a specific identity:
Il était de ces esclaves que Nietzsche dénonce…
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Another way to describe the “philosophy of the human being” outlined in Mauriac’s account of what it is to read Nietzsche is as “teleological”.
Certainly, it is an unusual sort of teleology in that the aspect of the “Nietzschean telos of Man” that we are shown here is a remarkably negative one. (We are, after all, dealing with a Missrathener).
It must also be said that the teleological comes out more clearly in the discourses adjacent to Nietzsche’s discourses here – I mean Mauriac’s framing of it, and the rendering of the framed passages (from Antichrist and BGE) into other languages – than it does in Nietzsche himself.
The key phrase would be Mauriac’s
tout son être était construit pour la défaîte
which is merely context
or the language used to express Nietzsche’s Missrathener in the French that Mauriac cites or in English translations during the period of Mauriac’s text or or the Nietzschean text that he builds it around.
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It is worth dwelling on the various errors and failures of nerve in these linguistic transpositions of Nietzsche.
Mauriac uses Henri Albert’s 1908 translation of “The Antichrist”
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.
Qu’est-ce que le bonheur ? — Le sentiment que la puissance grandit — qu’une résistance est surmontée.
Non le contentement, mais encore de la puissance, non la paix avant tout, mais la guerre ; non la vertu, mais la valeur (vertu, dans le style de la Renaissance, virtù, vertu dépourvue de moraline).
Périssent les faibles et les ratés : premier principe de notre amour des hommes. 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
This shapes up very badly in certain respects against the 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…
Albert stumbles here at several points.
La pitié qu’éprouve l’action pour les déclassés et les faibles
is clearly a misreading of the sense of Nietzsche’s
Das Mitleiden der That mit allen Missrathnen und Schwachen.
Much more egregious an error, however, is this rendering itself of
Missrathnen und Schwachen
as
déclassés et les faibles
Missrathenen is a key term in what I want to say here, as it is in Nietzsche’s late philosophy as a whole. It is tolerably correctly rendered in the English translations of the 60s and 70s as
“those who have turned out badly / those who have not turned out well”.
What déclassés is doing here, then, is difficult to make out. The term in French bears the meaning: “finding oneself, mistakenly, outside the social class in which one really belongs”.
Such language, although Mauriac cites it, clearly has no bearing on the situation in which his protagonist finds himself. The terrible, rending agony that Jean Peloueyre goes through in this chapter and throughout the book has nothing to do with his social class. His agony is the agony of a being who knows his destiny to be defined and determined by natural, biological factors. If “class” were any determinant here, indeed, Jean Peloueyre would not be “made for defeat” at all. Right from the first chapter of the book on, Mauriac reminds us constantly that the Peloueyres are one of the richest, most respected families of the region.
(Just in passing, it might be mentioned that Houellebecq proves himself one of our “best Nietzscheans” in this regard: he insists, from the time of Extension on, against a “doxa” that was especially in circulation in the late 20th century, that society cannot be understood in terms of a single hierarchy defined in terms of “more or less money”; he insists on the “untranslatability” into monetary terms of the separate axis running from laid bête to belle bête).
Albert, by turning
missrathnen
Into
déclassés
seems to be straining forward already toward the constructivism that was to dominate Nietzsche studies decades later:
Jean Peloueyre’s wretchedness is a social and political construct that can be deconstructed by social and political (“class”) action.
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It is also worth throwing a glance at the English translations of this passage, meaning both Mauriac’s text and the text of Nietzsche’s embedded in it.
The Nietzsche text cited in the first English translation of the Mauriac novel – James Whitall’s in 1925 – does not go as wrong as Albert’s text. But, like Albert’s, it is something of a confession of defeat by Missrathenen
Nietzsche’s text has, first
Die Schwachen und Missrathenen
And then
Allen Missrathenen und Schwachen
The 1925 text simply skips the term Missrathenen first and then substitutes for it a very approximate “helpless”.
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.
It is also of interest to cite an English translation of “The Antichrist” that had been in existence for five years by the time James Whitall produced his translation of Mauriac’s “Le baiser au lepreux” but that Whitall does not use.
This is the translation by the very important figure in anglophone culture H. L. Mencken.
Despite Mencken’s importance, the translation is very bad. It runs:
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; not 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. ...
The most egregious and catastrophic error here is, of course, the translation of Nietzsche’s schlecht as evil.
This is perhaps the most grievous and fundamental mistake one can make in the understanding and interpretation of Nietzsche – though it is made by everyone from Jordan Peterson to Howling Mutant.
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But I want to focus, because my concerns are more specific in this talk, on another error of translation.
Again, it is that of the key word Missrathen
Mencken retains, at least, that formal structure of the original German text that the rendering of it in both Mauriac’s French text and Whitall’s English version of it abandon.
To Nietzsche’s
Die Schwachen und Missrathnen…
and
…allen Missrathnen und Schwachen
There corresponds, structurally speaking, Mencken’s
The weak and the botched…
and
…for the botched and the weak.
The problem, though, is a substantial, not a structural, one: namely, the rendering of Missrathenen as “botched”.
I want to concentrate on this word because it conveys an understanding of what Nietzsche is saying in this passage from “The Antichrist” that converges with the understanding that Mauriac places in the mind of Jean Peloueyre when he has him derive directly from the reading of this passage (more correctly, from the passage from “Beyond Good and Evil” that he reads directly after it) the conclusion about his own nature, character and destiny that runs:
tout son être était construit pour la défaîte.
“Construction”, “botching” – these two terms and notions both derive from the intellectual and imaginative universe of what is sometimes called intelligent design.
(“Konstruktion”, in fact, in its German usage, corresponds much more closely to the English notion “design” than it does to that of “construction; a “Konstrukteur” in German is rather a “designer” than a “builder”; I do not know if the same is the case of the French “constructeur”).
Both of these elements within the corpus of “Nietzschean ideas” that concerns us here, then – and yes, of course, it should be borne in mind that I am not pointing in either case here to a proposition of Nietzsche himself but rather to some interpretation or translation of one of his key propositions – evokes something that I called a little while back “teleology” – that is to say, a type of philosophical argument based on the idea that there are ends or purposes that inhere in all entities – including the entities that are human beings – which dictate the path of development of these entities.
These inherent ends or purposes – so runs the teleological argument – override any “free will” on said entities’ part and even, as ultimately all-decisive “intrinsic causes”, override any random “extrinsic causes” that may come to knock these entities off this predetermined path of development.
The doctrine of teleology, then, might be characterized, to borrow the language of Hamlet, as the doctrine that “our ends are shaped, rough-hew them how we will”.
Indeed, it would not be to do too great an interpretative violence to the words that Mauriac and Mencken write – presenting them as, at only the slightest remove, the words of Nietzsche – to paraphrase them with Shakespeare’s phrase in its entirety:
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will”.
Mauriac’s “Nietzschean” idea of a human being as “constructed for” something, Mencken’s “Nietzschean” idea of a certain kind of human being as a “botched” piece of work (necessarily, then, of a “worker”, a “demiurge” of some sort) really do undeniably imply a “shaping divinity” of some sort, be it a pagan or a Christian one.
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The distinctions I’ve rushed over here are, of course, distinctions that would require, if justice were to be done to them, hundreds of pages of analysis.
The vicissitudes of the “teleological” idea – the idea that there is something in us that “shapes our ends” that is not entirely of us – make up a significant proportion of the entire history of the Western mind.
The notion of the “telos” begins, indeed, in paganism, with Aristotle and it must be questioned whether – although Aristotle’s philosophy certainly provides for “a divinity” – this divinity can really be, in this context, an agency that “plants our teloi in us”. The Aristotelian “Prime Mover” hardly seems developed enough to become a “Creator God” in this degree of detail. As Platonic-Aristotelian doctrine passes on, however, through Neo-Platonic reworkings into Scholasticism, we do indeed see the merely mechanical First Cause acquire powers of Providence.
The development of the “Demiurge” of Plato’s “Timaeus” in both Gnostic and Christian directions.
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Two things can be said with absolute certainty, though:
One: We have clearly moved over, in turning to these matters, to the absolutely opposite philosophical pole from the one occupied by the “constructivist/deconstructivist” Nietzscheans whom I’ve been referring to, since the start of these talks, as the presently predominant school of thought in the teaching and interpretation of Nietzsche. Despite the apparent near-identity in terms of vocabulary, the philosophical/theological doctrine whereby some “constructing” or “designing” force is understood to infuse entities, including human entities, with a “telos”, or inherent guiding idea, is a doctrine radically opposed and antagonistic to all “constructivism” in the sense in which I’ve talked about “constructivism” up until now. The “constructivism” (and “deconstructivism”) that we’ve talked about up until now is an entirely human activity – and the more one assumes human beings to be subject to some directing or “designing” force that precedes human action, the less one is “constructivist” – and “deconstructivist” – in this sense. The “constructivist/deconstructivist” Nietzscheans of today, then, are obliged to insist that the interpretation of Nietzsche that is implied in Mauriac’s
tout son être était construit pour la défaîte
and Mencken’s notion of the Missrathenen as a
“botched job of demiurgic labour”
is a fundamentally misguided and mistaken interpretation. To interpret what Nietzsche is saying in this way – so must the new, “constructivist” Nietzscheans argue – is to fundamentally fail to recognize how his philosophy is the first to really take a stand against that whole “theo-teleological” delusion that runs through Western thought from Aristotle and his teacher Plato, through the Neo-Platonic and Scholastic reformulation of Platonic-Aristotelian teleologism into a Christian doctrine of “Providence”, into modern Rationalist doctrines of “innate ideas”.
Two: Equally certain is that – in this regard at least – the “new, constructivist Nietzscheans” are right. They certainly do have a great deal of textual evidence that they can legitimately cite in support of this thesis that Nietzsche cannot possibly have been any sort of “teleologist”.
One endlessly fascinating, and extremely important, passage that I want to return to, and linger over for some time, later in these talks is
The twelfth section of the second of the three essays that make up “On the Genealogy of Morality”.
This passage is, among several other things, one of the most violent and thorough repudiations of teleologism in the history of philosophy.
The doctrine of teleology – as we have seen and as is well-known – turns on the notion of “inherent end” and “inherent purpose”. I have suggested above that we see such a doctrine exhibited in such understandings of Nietzsche’s philosophy as that offered by Mauriac, whereby reading Nietzsche can teach a man what he is “constructed for”, what he is “made for” (be it “defeat” in Jean Peloueyre’s case or “victory” in someone else’s).
But in this passage Nietzsche repudiates as illusory and mistaken all understandings of anything in the world as being “made for” something, as being inhabited by a specific “purpose” that will prove resistant to all re-purposings:
For history of every kind there is no more important proposition than that the cause of the genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration into a system of purposes, lie toto caelo apart; that something extant, something that has somehow or other come into being, is again and again interpreted according to new views, monopolized in a new way, transformed and rearranged for a new use by a power superior to it; that all happening in the organic world is an over powering, a becoming-lord-over; and that, in turn, all overpowering and becoming-lord-over is a new interpreting, an arranging by means of which the previous “meaning” and “purpose” must of necessity become obscured or entirely extinguished. However well one has grasped the utility of some physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a form in the arts or in religious cult), one has still not comprehended anything regarding its genesis: as uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to earlier ears,—for from time immemorial one had thought that in comprehending the demonstrable purpose, the usefulness of a thing, a form, an arrangement, one also comprehended the reason for its coming into being—the eye as made to see, the hand as made to grasp. But all purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it; and in this manner the entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a practice can be a continuous sign chain of ever new interpretations and arrangements, whose causes need not be connected even among themselves—on the contrary, in some cases only accidentally follow and replace one another.
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For all this, however, I want in next week’s talk to show how, two years after writing this, Nietzsche reasserted a recognizably “teleological” vision – and not just in the text we have just touched on, “The Antichrist” but, much more clearly and undeniably, in the two other key texts of the final year: “Twilight of the Idols” and “Ecce Homo”: namely, in the doctrine he develops here of the Missrathener’s counterpart, the Wohlgerathener.