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.play.therough game (BGE 205).The foregoing confirms that the new philosophers are what I havebeen calling the random mutations , those creative No-sayers who enablea culture or people constantly to reinvent itself so as to survive andflourish in an ever-changing environment.Thinking in Darwinian fash-ion, Nietzsche anticipates that many of the attempts at a new where toand what for for a people will fail.With luck, however, one of the valueexperiments will succeed and a new age of stability will replace the age of 132 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religionexperiment (see pp.181 2 below).In this new age the philosopher ascodifier will replace the philosopher as experimenter.Each experimenterhas before his eyes this ideal of his own superfluity (BGE 212).nietzsche s republicWhat will the new age, the age in which the philosopher-king replaces thephilosopher-experimenter, look like? Nietzsche, of course, cannot say inany detail.Partly because the new ethos grows out of empirical experi-ments whose results cannot be anticipated in advance, partly because ofthe paradox of creativity, the paradox that the attempt to teach creativityappears destined to stifle creativity.(This, of course, is why Zarathustratells his disciples to stop being disciples.(See, further, pp.192 3 below.))Nietzsche s description of the new age is, therefore, highly abstract, formalin character.The image of greatness that hovers before the eyes of any authenticphilosopher will be one, he says, that (in opposition to the levelled out,mass culture of today) will locate the concept of greatness in the veryscope and variety of human society, its unity in multiplicity (Ganzheit imVielen) (BGE 212).The looked-for future will be one that belongs to aculture or people unified as such by a shared ethos (containing all ofhumanity according to the globalisation theme (BGE 208)).Secondly,unlike the levelled, mass culture of today, it will be a culture of rankordering : like Plato s Republic, an aristocracy.In fact, like Plato s Re-public, it will contain exactly three classes: the spiritual leaders, aneducated and self-disciplined class who aspire to higher spirituality andfrom whom, one day, future rulers might arise, and, finally, commonpeople, the great majority (BGE 61).Since rank excludes equality andequal rights , and since, like virtues, rights and duties are relative to one sstation in the social hierarchy, Beyond Good and Evil s future society will,as we have seen, contain slavery in some sense (BGE 257).Since this proposed structure is identical with the pyramid explicitlyborrowed from Plato in the unpublished essay of 1871/2 entitled TheGreek State (see especially, GM pp.184 5), one can say that Nietzsche sideas on the structure of society (and the need for the state as the ironhand that enforces that structure) have altered not at all since the periodof the writing of The Birth.The reaffirmation of the necessity of slavery returns us to the immoral-ism issue briefly touched on in connexion with The Gay Science (pp.93 4 Beyond Good and Evil 133above).What makes this an issue of importance to this book is that itsinterpretative thesis that Nietzsche is (always) a religious communi-tarian would not have the philosophical interest I take it to have ifNietzsche s communitarianism did not represent a serious challenge tothe elevation, in contemporary thought, of secular liberal democracy (plusfree-market capitalism) to the status of an eternal value.If, however,Nietzsche s communitarianism is genuinely immoral it immediatelyfollows that there is no possibility of it representing such a challenge.Nietzsche is, I take it, not just a polemical immoralist an opponentof Christian morality but the proponent of a genuinely immoralposition if he holds that only the higher types of human being have aclaim to well-being.If he holds that the mediocre masses have no suchclaim, that they are just a support system for the lives of the elite, then histhought is immoral.If, in a word, Nietzsche treats the majority as merethings, if he infringes Kant s imperative never to treat human beings asmere means, then he really is an immoral thinker.John Rawls thinks that both of these things are true: that Nietzschebelieves in an elite consisting of the likes of Socrates13 and Goethe whoseeliteness consists in their doing art and science, which alone constitutesthe justification of humanity and, further, that he has no independentconcern for the well-being of the mediocre.This, he suggests, is an im-moral attitude which elevates a taste for aesthetic perfection above theclaims of justice.For Nietzsche, he claims, Greek philosophy justifiedGreek slavery (Rawls (1971) section 50).1413 That Rawls can think that the castigator of Socratism could possibly be admitted to Nietzsche shighest elite suggests that he has read too much Kaufmann and not enough Nietzsche.14 Another conspicuous defender of the immoralist reading is Philippa Foot.Nietzsche, she claims(see Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values in Richardson and Leiter (2001) pp.210 20), was agenuinely immoral thinker because he was prepared to throw out the rules of justice in theinterests of producing a stronger and more splendid type of man (pp.218 19), one to whom weattribute value in the way we attribute value (aesthetic value) to art objects (p.216).In evidenceof her reading, Foot quotes (on p.216) Nietzsche as affirming, in section 6 of the Preface to TheGenealogy of Morals, that his fundamental aim is to realise the highest power and splendouractually possible to the type man.But this is a Walter Kaufmann mistranslation.What Nietzschedesires is the highest power and splendour of the type man (höchste Mächtigkeit und Pracht desTypus Mensch).(Though species is a little free, Carol Diethe gets the sense of the passage exactlyright in rendering it as desiring that man as a species should reach his highest potential power andsplendour (GM Preface 6).) Given this translation, it clearly makes no more sense to think of thespecies man achieving splendour through the production of a few beautiful individuals than tothink of a vegetable garden full of weeds and rotting potatoes achieving splendour on accountof the thriving of a couple of freak tomato plants.In general, it seems to me, when Nietzschespeaks of the flourishing of the species or type man he is speaking of the flourishing of anorganic whole.A withered community inhabited by a freak genius would resemble the inversecripple a tiny stunted body with a huge ear (Wagner), for example who arouses Zarathustra s 134 Nietzsche s Philosophy of ReligionThe first part of this claim is clearly wrong and based on a very shallowacquaintance with Nietzsche
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Tematy
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