Nietzsche:PowerasOppression

Nietzsche:PowerasOppression

byJamesH.Read

Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1+2/1989,pages:7287,onwww.ceeol.com.

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POWER, SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE BODY POLITIC

NIETZSCHE: POWER AS OPPRESSION

James H. Read My purpose in this essay is to discuss critically Friedrich Nietzsches view of power. I aim to show why Nietzsche believes that in practice power is always oppressive why the power of one always diminishes the power of another. But at the same time, while accepting some of Nietzsches crucial premises (for instance, that cruelty is an ineradicable human impulse, or that one can be powerful only if there is some object of resistance against which to direct ones power) I will criticize the conclusions he draws from his premises. I maintain that even if one accepts Nietzsches assumption that a will to power underlies all human motives, one need not conclude that the power of one necessarily comes at the expense of the power of another. Thus I attempt here an internal critique of Nietzsches view of power. Let us begin with what is probably the single most important practical issue connected with Nietzsches view of power: if he is right, then the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom (or universal liberation) is self-contradictory and absurd. The freedom or as Nietzsche would say, the power of one comes at the expense the freedom or power of another. Why? Not on account of the scarcity of material goods or social opportunities, a problem which could in principle be solved by producing a superabundance of such goods and opportunities. For Nietzsche ones freedom comes at anothers expense because to be free is to conquer another. There is no clear dividing line between the struggle to secure freedom for oneself and the intention to deprive others of their freedom; the one develops naturally into the other. Nietzsche writes in section # 86 of The Will to Power that freedom is
. . . the second stage in the metamorphosis of the will to power for these who lack freedom. On the first stage one demands justice from those who are in power. On the second, one speaks of freedom that is, one wants to get away from those in power. On the third, one speaks of equal rights that is, as long as one has not yet gained superiority one wants to prevent ones competitors from growing in power.1

Superiority, not equality, is the aim. The hatred of oppression and the desire to oppress are not opposites, but cousins. Liberalism signifies no exception to this rule; it too promotes freedom only so long as it is conquering someone. Consider the following passage from Twilight of the Idols:
The value of a thing does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well

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enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call
that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd animalization. These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings to ones cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example those of pleasure.2

In other words, liberalism is worth something only to the extent that it is selfcontradictory, when it is fired by illiberal instincts. What Nietzsche says here of the difference between existing liberal institutions and the fight for liberal institutions would presumably apply also to democracy and the fight for democracy, socialism and the fight for socialism. (Nietzsche tends to ignore the differences between the three; in his view they all pursue, in different ways and at different tempos, the same contemptible goal.) In general: any struggle to eliminate oppression, insofar as it really is a struggle and arouses the passions and virtues of a struggle, actually aims for the oppression of someone the oppression of, say, the enemies of freedom or the enemies of the people. Enemies provide the necessary object of opposition against which to direct ones power; without enemies one would become small, cowardly, and hedonistic, like the last man Nietzsche acidly portrays in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Often enough Nietzsche accuses liberals, democrats, and socialists of desiring just such a sleepy, self-satisfied world devoid of all struggle. But what is most interesting about this particular passage is that it suggests the opposite: that at least some of those who actively promote such ideas in fact enjoy the act of struggle and conquest. Their stated aim (Nietzsche claims) is to eliminate struggle from the world, yet as politically active individuals they draw their whole passion and purpose from the act of conquering their enemies. They wouldnt really want to live in the world-without-struggle they claim to promote. If the desire to oppress is so strong that even those who sincerely believe they favour universal freedom in fact aim at the opposite, then the ideal of universal freedom or universal liberation is absurd: liberation for one must always mean oppression of another. One basically misunderstands the problem if one sees only a conflict of values between those liberals, democrats, or socialists who value universal liberation and writers like Nietzsche who value the opposite. If Nietzsche is correct, no one truly seeks universal freedom; in truth we all no matter what our stated ends seek to gain power at anothers expense. The real quarrel, then, is between those who deceive themselves about their true motives and those who are honest.3 That a conscious or unconscious aim to oppress can hide behind the banner of universal liberation I do not deny. But my purpose here is to show that, while it is true that freedom or power may express itself as an urge to oppress, power

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does not necessarily take that form. I will argue that even within the framework of Nietzsches hypothesis that the world is will to power and nothing else, it is possible to have power which does not come at the expense of another human being; there can be struggle that does not inevitably aim at conquest. In my analysis and critique of Nietzsche I will focus on three general issues: cruelty, the pathos of distance, and the need for opposition. All three pose obstacles to any attempt to argue for the possibility of power which doesnt oppress, and all three are implicit in the passage from Twilight of the Idols quoted above. Cruelty is suggested by the manly instincts which delight in war and victory; war also maintains the distance which separates us; the need for opposition the fact that one becomes strong only by directing ones energies against something is implicit in the entire passage. Nietzsche blends these three things such that they appear inseparable: war as a metaphor simultaneously suggests cruelty, the urge to put oneself above, and the effect of opposition in fostering strength. My procedure, on the contrary, will be to separate what he has blended. Nietzsche argues that cruelty is a basic impulse which can be redirected, spiritualized or repressed to a degree, but not eradicated. He also sees a fairly close practical connection between cruelty and the desire for power, though the opposite passion, benevolence, is also described as an expression of power. My approach here will be to accept the premise that cruelty is an ineradicable impulse, but argue against Nietzsches belief that an individual or group which suppresses this impulse necessarily weakens itself. Nietzsche describes the pathos of distance as the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a below.4 As such, it is a good which is exclusive by its very nature: in order for someone to enjoy this pathos of distance, it must be denied to someone else. Nietzsche sees a very close connection between the pathos of distance and the will to power; he believes that the weakening or disappearance of the pathos of distance would go hand in hand with the weakening or disappearance of power itself. Yet this conclusion can be challenged on the basis of some ambiguities and tensions within his description of this pathos. I will attempt to show that either this pathos of distance is ordinary vanity drawing ones sense of self from ones image in the eyes of others or it is based on an unwarranted and uncritical extension of the feeling of self-command beyond the limits of the self. The challenge posed by the need for opposition arises out of what Nietzsche calls the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal and it will rather will nothingness than not will.5 This relation between the will and its object always involves overcoming the resistance of someone or something. But though the will must have an object, it does not follow that it must have another human will as its object; one can redirect power over nature or over oneself instead of directing it toward the conquest of another human will. Nietzsche obviously prefers the latter outlet, but there is nothing in his description of power which would preclude a benign redirection of ones mental and physical energies. Such a redirection does not signify the disappearance of struggle and challenge; it does not amount to the self-satisfied last man whom Nietzsche would have us believe is the only alternative to the conquest and oppression he recommends.

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Let us begin by examining what Nietzsche means by power and the will to power, for although his use of the term power has much in common with our everyday use of the term, it is quite different from the concepts of power employed by most sociologists and political scientists. From a social-scientific perspective, power signifies above all a relation between human individuals or groups: thus the power of the President is a function of his constitutionally prescribed functions, his political connections, his popularity, and to some degree (but possibly to a very slight degree) his inner force, his intelligence or strength of character. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is interested above all in the latter, power as an expression of ones inner force, and is for the most part uninterested in everything else. Power for Nietzsche is indeed a relation, but it is not only a relation between distinct human individuals and human groups; power relations exist among different parts of ones own psyche, between oneself and nature, and (if one presses the idea far enough) between atoms and molecules. Consider the following passages from Beyond Good and Evil which illustrate what he means by the will to power.
A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience or that he believes renders obedience. . . Freedom of the will that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles but thinks within himself that it was really his will itself that overcome them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls to his feelings of delight as commander.6

We see here that power is not just the rule of one person or group over another, but the rule of one impulse or family of impulses over other impulses within a single individual. Nietzsche is willing to take this idea even further:
Suppose nothing else were given as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other reality besides the reality of our drives for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this given would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the socalled mechanistic (or material) world? . . . The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do and at the bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself then we have to make the experiment of positing the causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. . . The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its intelligible character it would be will to power and nothing else.7

In short, the will to power is everything relations of matter and energy as well as relations between various impulses and between different human beings and human groups. This will-to-power cosmology is an interesting idea, though I wont go into it in this paper. The fact that it is altogether unverifiable (or unfalsifiable) does not make it any less interesting. What concerns us here is Nietzsches description

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of power on the human level, particularly the way in which this notion of power as energy or efficient force becomes in human beings a power-drive a synonym for vitality or growth. Consider these passages from The Antichrist:
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness. . . 8 Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking there is decline.9

Here Nietzsche describes power, insofar as it is active in living beings, as energy which is focused, which aims at accumulation and growth. Power only exists in its growth that is why for Nietzsche power and will to power are practically synonymous. We would not ordinarily say that power and the desire for power are inseparable: for instance, the urge to obtain political office is quite different from actual possession of that office. But for Nietzsche there is no such thing as possession of power; power itself exists only in the urge to accumulate more power; as soon as growth ceases, there is decline and loss of power. We would not ordinarily say that someone in whom the feeling of power or the desire for power is growing is for that reason powerful, nor would we deny that someone can be powerful who has very little of Nietzsches will to power. (A weak and lazy individual who happens to be king, for instance, is still quite powerful by ordinary standards - but not by Nietzsches standards. On the other hand, one could be powerful both by ordinary standards and in terms of Nietzsches will to power; Caesar and Napoleon would be good examples.) What is important from Nietzsches perspective is not how much power one presently possesses, but whether one is moving toward growth or decline. But the question that concerns us is this: must the growth in power for one human individual or group come at the expense of the power of another individual or group? If it does, then power as Nietzsche understands it is necessarily oppressive. It is clear from the passage I quoted at the beginning of this paper that Nietzsche does regard power as oppressive; power is like war, it conquers enemies. But it is not clear how this follows from the concept of power as vitality, growth, overcoming of resistance. Nietzsche himself, in the passages from Beyond Good and Evil quoted above, acknowledges that power over oneself (self-command) and power over nature are distinct possibilities. Likewise, in section # 403 of The Will to Power he writes:
Evolution of man, a. To gain power over nature and in addition a certain power over oneself. (Morality was needed that man might prevail in his struggle with nature and the wild animal.) b. If power has been attained over nature, one can employ this power in the further free development of oneself: will to power as self-elevation and strengthening.10

It is not clear why power, in the sense of self-elevation and strengthening, should necessarily come at anothers expense. Why does Nietzsche believe that selfelevation and strengthening does come at anothers expense? One possible answer based on the cosmological hypothesis deserves to be

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mentioned. If Nietzsche intends to substitute power or the will to power for both matter and energy in physics, then the principle that matter and energy are conserved (separately, as in 19th Century physics, or taken together as matterenergy, as in 20th Century physics) would mean the power is conserved. Nietzsche does indeed assume that power is conserved; he writes in section # 638 of The Will to Power.
Supposing that the world had a certain quantum of force at its disposal, then it is obvious that every displacement of power at any point would affect the whole system. . .

One might conclude that it is for this reason that Nietzsche regards all power as oppressive. Yet the assumption that power is conserved on the cosmic level does not require that it be conserved on the human level; for example, the human species could become collectively more powerful at the expense of the rest of the universe, or vice-versa, the universe could overpower us: we could become extinct. Thus the assumption that the power of one part of the cosmos comes at the expense of another part of the cosmos does not require that the power of one human being come at the expense of the power of another human being. So far as I know, Nietzsche never tries to deduce the one from the other. His actual reasons for concluding that ones power comes at the expense of another have more to do with his description of human psychology than with his cosmology. It is to his psychology that we now turn. If power and cruelty are as closely related as Nietzsche often implies, this would certainly be sufficient to make all power oppressive in practice. All power requires an object of opposition, something whose resistance is overcome; cruelty would be described as a special case in which overcoming resistance means deliberate harm to or destruction of another sentient being. Nietzsche does not say that all expressions of power are expressions of cruelty, but he implies that the two very often go together. In the Genealogy of Morals he writes:
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.12

Here Nietzsche comes close to saying that strength as such is cruelty, though elsewhere he claims that generosity and benevolence are also expressions of strength. (See e.g. Gay Science section #13.) Even if we do not read him to mean that strength must express itself as cruelty, it is at least clear that he regards cruelty as an ineradicable human impulse. This comes out most clearly in the Genealogy of Morals, Essay One, where he describes the difference between master moralities and slave moralities. In almost every respect the two are different: the moral outlook of the powerful individual or class is spontaneous, self-affirming; it finds the good in itself (good equals powerful) and does not even understand the concept of evil. The powerless, on the other hand, are resentful, vengeful; their concept of good is purely negative and derivative; they begin with the concept of evil (which is used to describe their powerful enemies) and label as good whatever is harmless and powerless.

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But in at least one respect the powerful and the powerless are alike: they are cruel. The difference is that the former are spontaneously and innocently cruel while the latter are resentfully and shrewdly cruel. If (as some believe) cruelty resulted only from frustration and powerlessness, then one could hope to eliminate or diminish cruelty by making everyone more powerful. But if even those who are powerful and self-confident are cruel, then increasing everyones power would only make things worse. But supposing even that cruelty is an ineradicable impulse, cannot its open expression be repressed? Yes, Nietzsche says but only at a high cost. In the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche describes conscience as a redirection against oneself of aggressive impulses ordinarily turned outward.
All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his soul. The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom punishments belong among these bulwarks brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience.13

Let us suppose this description is accurate: what is wrong with such internalization? Nietzsches objection seems to be that turning cruelty inward has the effect of weakening the individual, making him suffer, causing needless pain, producing self-pity; furthermore (and most importantly) that to the degree that any strong impulse is repressed the total vitality of the individual is diminished. Thus, repressing our cruel impulses may make it easier to live in harmony with one another, but only at the cost of weakening us generally. It is always better if we can find someone outside or below our own community upon whom to vent openly our cruel impulses; open cruelty is therapeutic. But one must be suspicious of any simple assumption that repression necessarily weakens the individual by reducing his overall vitality. If it were possible for all human impulses to be simultaneously satisfied, then it would be true that any repression diminishes the overall power of the individual. But Nietzsche himself denies that all of ones impulses can be satisfied; what is needed above all is selection, some relation of command and obedience among the affects which necessarily precludes a simultaneous and equal satisfaction of each impulse. If in any event some perhaps even most of our impulses must be repressed if our personality is to have any unity, then it isnt clear why the repression of cruelty should have any more of a weakening effect than the repression of any other impulse. It would all depend on how much of our total stock of impulses and affects were cruelty or akin to cruelty (and this would perhaps vary from individual to individual). If, say, eighty percent of our impulses were cruel, then repression of cruelty would have a significant weakening effect; if it were only five or ten percent the weakening effect would be much less, and the loss of energy might be balanced or outweighed by the effect of openly expressing other impulses which are themselves repressed when cruelty is given free reign.

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It may be the case that for an individual or a whole civilization accustomed to the open expression of cruelty, the whole force of the personality may be required to repress it; here perhaps Nietzsches image of an animal gnawing at the bars of its cage may be accurate. But not nearly so much effort would be required to prevent open expression of cruelty in a society in which prevention of such open expressions is the rule; here the image of an animal gnawing at the bars of its cage is no longer accurate. Yet Nietzsche seems to want to claim that the repression of cruelty necessarily means the weakening of the whole individual regardless of whether the practice of repression is new and drastic or old and stable. This just does not follow from either his psychological theory or his power-as-energy hypothesis. Another possible objection to repressing cruelty could be described as the time bomb thesis: that cruelty can be repressed only so long before it must explode outward once again with greatly increased fury. Nietzsche suggests this in the first essay of the Genealogy when he writes that this hidden core (cruelty and lust for victory) needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness. . . 14 He also speaks frequently (and prophetically) of the storm approaching European civilization:
For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.15

But is the cause of this coming explosion the long-practiced suppression of cruelty (under Christian influence) and a subsequent eruption of the hidden core once again? Such a simple mechanical analogy does not square with historical evidence, nor is it an adequate expression of Nietzsches own view, which is more complex. As for the historical evidence: if two millenia of Christianity had brought about two millenia of peace and the disappearance of open cruelty, then the time bomb thesis might be of some value in explaining the wars of the Twentieth Century. But cruelty was never successfully suppressed even in the most Christian era of European history; thus the time bomb metaphor is misleading. Nietzsches own diagnosis of the coming explosion is not so much mechanical as metaphysical: it is not that cruelty can no longer be repressed, but that the reasons for doing so among them the ideals of the Enlightenment no longer command respect. It is not that the suppression of cruelty in oneself has suddenly become too painful to endure. Rather, the meaning, the purpose of so doing has evaporated, or so Nietzsche maintains. But here we come to his diagnosis of nihilism, a topic I will leave alone in this short paper. It may be the case, however, that Nietzsche advocates cruelty not for its own sake but as a means to something else. Cruelty could be, for example, a regrettable but necessary means of destroying an egalitarian society and bringing about a hierarchic order in which the experience of great height or distance is the privilege of a few. Let us turn, then, to the pathos of distance. Nietzsche describes the pathos of distance as the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a below.16 It is particularly characteristic of the noble, self-affirming

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consciousness. It is a clear example of a good which is exclusive by its very nature: if I am to be above, someone else must be below; by distance Nietzsche means vertical distance, not merely the horizontal distance or elbow room sought by a secluded artist or a solitary walker. This comes across clearly in the following passage from Beyond Good and Evil:
Every enhancement of the type man has so far been the work of an aristocratic society and it will be so again and again a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without the pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained differences between strata when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and down upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive man, the continual self-overcoming of man, to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.17

The enhancement of the type man Nietzsche speaks of here is not progress for everyone; the aristocrats he admires do not promote the freedom or power of those they rule; they consciously reduce those below them to slaves and instruments so as to promote their own feeling of power. And they do not do this only because it is an unfortunate necessity e.g. because time, material goods, and the benefits of culture are in short supply. They do it above all because their feeling of freedom and power depends upon comparison: if others were not enslaved, they could not feel truly free. (See also Gay Science #18, where Nietzsche observes that the pride of the men and of the philosophers of classical antiquity was inseparable from the existence of a class of slaves beneath them.) If one wishes to produce distances within the soul we will examine below what that means one must begin with social distances. Thus, the freedom of one requires the oppression of another. This sounds very cruel; and yet the pathos of distance is not identical to cruelty. Cruelty may be necessary to establish a social order in which this pathos can be enjoyed one should not yield to humanitarian illusions about the origins of an aristocratic society, he says in the same passage yet once it exists it is compatible with some degree of pity and concern for the lower orders; one can even be generous so long as this does not make the recipient of ones generosity more powerful with respect to oneself. In the Gay Science Nietzsche writes:
Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising ones power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel in ones power, for pain is a more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent upon us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. . . Certainly the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty. . . 18

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This last statement might lead one to draw unduly optimistic conclusions. If it is more pleasurable to benefit others than to harm them, isnt it in the interest of all of us to benefit one another and thus all enjoy the unmixed good feeling of power? If hurting others is a sign of powerlessness, why not just make everyone powerful? But one must note the reasons why one chooses to benefit another: we want to increase our power over him, or increase his at the expense of some third party who threatens our power. (One could think, for instance, of cases in which a ruling class grants liberties and material benefits to a lower class only because of the threat of an external enemy.) So at best the link between power and oppression is displaced to the outside, not overcome. As soon as one benefits another too much, such that he begins to threaten ones own power, ones benevolence must disappear; one begins to feel a lack of relative power and so according to the logic above one must become cruel again in order to re-establish the original distance. Thus in spite of or because of the fact that the pathos of distance does not exclude benevolence, it is at least as serious an obstacle to the elimination of oppression as is cruelty. The idea that one desires power in order to put oneself above and put others down is a very common one; it may seem so obvious as to be nearly trivial. Yet the problem is more complicated than it seems. At first sight it may appear that this pathos of distance is nothing more than a Nietzschean rebaptism of what has traditionally been described as vanity: the need to derive ones sense of self from ones image in the eyes of others. Is not this pathos of distance like the vainglory of a conqueror, who enjoys his ability to look down only because he imagines the others look up to him? Isnt the necessary connection Nietzsche sees between the feeling of freedom and the existence of slaves likewise rooted in vanity the master drawing his sense of self from the slaves recognition of him as master? If this is the true core of the pathos of distance, then however deeply rooted it may be as a human motive, it cannot carry the high value Nietzsche attributes to it. For vanity is a notoriously self-defeating passion: it depends entirely on the recognition granted to one by those one considers inferior, yet the recognition accorded by an inferior can never be as satisfying as the recognition of an equal. (This is a point made, in different ways, by both Rousseau and Hegel.) Nietzsche claims that the pathos of distance is not vanity. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes:
Among the things that may be hardest to understand for a noble human being is vanity: he will be tempted to deny it, where another type of human being could not find it more palpable. The problem for him is to imagine people who seek to create a good image of themselves which they do not have of themselves and thus do not deserve and who nevertheless end up believing this good opinion themselves.19

Nietzsche clearly rejects the notion that the noble (a noble by his standards at least) draws his self-confident self-image reflexively from the eyes of others. It is above all the weak and resentful who are vain, who have nothing within themselves of any value and who can only self-affirm by way of comparison. The nobles, on the contrary,

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. . . felt themselves to be the happy; they did not have to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to persuade themselves, deceive themselves, that they were happy (as all men of ressentiment are in the habit of doing) . . . 20

But if this is the case if the noble sense of power is truly spontaneous why must they have a class beneath them? Couldnt someone truly confident of his inner strength do without the supposedly necessary inferiors? If power energy, vitality comes from within, why this need for external props? One possibility is that this pathos of distance is above all an aesthetic experience characteristic of hierarchical social orders, a pleasure in the contemplation of social distances somewhat akin to the pleasure experienced by a mountain climber in surveying geographical distances. As an aesthetic experience, it would be a pleasure existing independently of anyone elses opinion; unlike vanity, it would not require ones reflection in the eyes of others. When Nietzsche speaks of ever higher, rarer, more remote, more comprehensive states of the soul he could have in mind such an aesthetic experience.21 The problem with this account of the pathos of distance is that it is difficult to see why such an aesthetic experience should be so closely connected to the will to power and the possession of power as Nietzsche believes. Rare and exquisite states of mind and an aesthetic attraction to great contrasts are perfectly compatible with weakness of the will and lack of power; conversely, one can be strong-willed, spontaneous, self-affirming without possessing any taste for rare and exquisite experiences. It may be that a pronouncedly hierarchical social order offers aesthetic experiences unavailable to those who live in more egalitarian social orders; but this does not prove that power and strength of will are impossible in the latter. The distances within the soul Nietzsche speaks of could, however, be interpreted differently: not merely as an aesthetic experience, but as a precondition of self-command. If it were the case as Nietzsche implies in section # 19 of Beyond Good and Evil (the passage quoted on page 75, above) that exerting power over others is directly parallel to exerting power over oneself, over ones own limbs and impulses, then one could describe the pathos of distance as something entirely different from either vanity or the aesthetic experience discussed above: it would instead be an extension beyond oneself of the feeling of self command. Consider the following passage from the second essay of the Genealogy, where Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual, the ripest fruit of a long historical evolution:
This emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses he deserves all three and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?72

Note how readily power over oneself blends into power over others. It seems the autonomy of one requires the non-autonomy of others. But why? It is not obviously the case that to command oneself one must control others, nor that self-command enables one to control others, as Nietzsche implies.

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The key seems to be that in Nietzsches view the feeling of self-command first originates from the experience of commanding others; distances within the soul (which are necessary if there is to be self-command at all there must be a hierarchy among the various impulses) grow out of, and presumably decay in the absence of, social distances. Those beneath one are necessary because they furnish a crude but useful metaphor. They are not valued for their subjectivity (as would be the case with vanity) but purely as instruments, like arms and legs. (. . . the ruling caste constantly looks afar and down upon subjects and instruments. . .) From this perspective the pathos of distance one feels when contemplating an obedient slave would be like the feeling of confidence in a well-trained muscle; a rebellious slave would be like a muscle that exalts its subjectivity by twitching involuntarily. One does not care to be recognized by ones muscles, one wants them simply to obey; it is the same with ones inferiors. This explanation does escape the criticisms directed at vanity no one would say the feeling of self-command is unsatisfying or self-defeating, as is the case with vanity but at the cost of opening a whole new field of problems. Isnt this analogy between human body and social order wholly misleading? A muscle, an affect does not possess a brain, does not speak, complain, protest, the way that enslaved human beings do. It is simply false that one does or can command other human beings the way one commands ones own body. This conclusion does not depend upon the existence of true freedom of the will (which Nietzsche rejects) but follows from any observation of human interactions, which are always such that relations of influence flow in both directions, neither party causing the thoughts and actions of the other. The most Nietzsche can plausibly claim is that we instinctively want to be able to control other human beings and the rest of the universe as we control our own bodies. But this implies that we are incapable of distingushing or should not even attempt to distinguish between ruling ourselves and ruling the rest of the world. It may be the case that a naive faith in the causal power of our own will a childish illusion of omnipotence is natural to us; it may also be the case that the feeling of individual autonomy originally arose as a consequence of social hierarchies, although one would have to know more about human history than anyone does in order to determine whether this is true. But it is not the case that we are incapable, as adults, of critically distinguishing between self-command and command of others; and if this is possible, then there is no reason why, whatever may have been the case historically, self-command requires a civilization which is hierarchical through and through, in which the autonomy of one depends upon the non-autonomy of another. Let us now turn to the third and final problem I noted at the beginning of he essay: the fact that power always involves overcoming resistance in some form. The type of social order Nietzsche hates most one of self-satisfaction and stagnation, the last man is one in which no challenges remain, in which there is no resistance to be overcome. Let us agree with Nietzsche that there can be no power where there is no resistance; still, it does not follow that this resistance must take the form of crushing another human will. Of course when power is closely connected with cruelty or with the desire for inherently exclusive goods like the pathos of distance, then the power of one does become oppression of another. But the

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purpose of the two previous sections of the essay was to show that this connection between power, on the one hand, and cruelty and the pathos of distance on the other, is not a necessary connection. Opposition is necessary, but it need not take the form of war (understood literally or figuratively). That the will to power can select as its object of resistance the will of another human being I of course do not deny. Yet if this resistance does not take the form of oppressing another human being, what other forms does it take? Let us consider in the most general way the relation between the will to power and the object which resists it. Nietzsche writes in the opening section of the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals:
That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man . . . is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal and it will rather will nothingness than not will.23

In the closing paragraphs of the work he re-emphasizes the point:

Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; why man at all? was a question without an answer. . . Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. . . We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself all this means let us dare grasp it a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will. . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said in the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.24

The nothingness which human beings will in the absence of any other goal is not confined to inner destruction; he makes clear in Book One of the Will to Power that the will to nothingness can just as well be directed outward: It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction as active nihilism.25 One should first notice that the will to power is not per se destructive either when it is directed inward or outward. The will to destruction Nietzsche describes here does not originate in cruelty or the passion to conquer; those affects will almost certainly accompany any will to destruction, but they are not the cause. The cause is the lack of any other available or acceptable end, or the inability to choose between various incompatible ends; only under these circumstances does the will become destructive. In theory, the principle set forth here that the will needs an object is completely general; any object will do. War and oppression could be purposes giving content to the will, but the prevention of war and the elimination of oppression would serve the same purpose (not, however, the kind of liberation which constantly requires enemies of liberation to crush this is just another form of war). If true peace or true liberation were actually achieved, of course, some new goal

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would have to be found; the will is neutral with respect to specific purposes, but it rejects any final fulfillment of all purposes. The fact that any goal fits the need means that cruel and oppressive goals are, from Nietzsches perspective, just as good as any others. In this respect the problem of nihilism which Nietzsche diagnoses remains unsolved, for one of the causes of nihilism is the lack of any solid grounding for one choice as opposed to another. Why even care about universal freedom? Why not deliberately choose to exalt oppression, for the impulses it gratifies (such as cruelty and the desire to be above)? Nothing in Nietzsches philosophy would enable us to convince someone who rejected universal ideals in the first place to change his mind. But another cause of the nihilism he describes is the suspicion which perhaps has entered the mind of each of us at one time or another that the universal ideals of the Enlightenment are incoherent, self-contradictory; what nihilism means, Nietzsche tells us in the first part of the Will to Power, is that the highest values devalue themselves. If it were the case that the power (or freedom) of one necessarily came at the expense of another, then to believe in the ideal of universal freedom or universal liberation would reflect not a choice but a delusion. (Recall the earlier discussion of cruelty: one ceases to repress cruel impulses not because self-restraint has become too painful, but because the reasons for sell-restraint no longer convince. For this reason the perceived incoherence of the ideal is a far greater obstacle than is the existence of an ineradicable impulse toward cruelty.) It has been my aim in this essay to challenge Nietzsches criticism of these ideals by showing that power for one does not necessarily mean the oppression of another. In Nietzsches own writing one occasionally encounters hints of an alternative view, one which suggests that even for Nietzsche power doesnt necessarily tend toward conquest and oppression. Consider the following passage from Twilight of the Idols:
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church exists. In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual much more sensible, much more thoughtful, much more considerate. Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true in power politics. A new creation the new Reich, for example needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary. Our attitude to the internal enemy is no different; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only so long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace.26

In short: it may sometimes be in the interest of ones power not to seek entirely to conquer ones opponent; it may even be in ones interest to deliberately strengthen an opponent. There is no indication here that he is merely suggesting that one strengthen one enemy in order to make common cause with him against a third

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party who is an even greater enemy; the phenomenon he describes here does not depend upon any displacement of conflict. Furthermore, the reason for not wholly conquering ones enemies is not common prudence e.g. that a humiliated foe may become dangerous if he ever recovers but rests entirely in the value of conflict itself: if ones enemies disappear (and this would be the result either of a perpetual peace or of a complete and permanent conquest), one loses the beneficial effects of conflict. What makes this particular passage unusual for Nietzsche is not that he recommends that one have enemies he made that claim in the passage about the contradictory nature of liberalism quoted at the beginning of this essay, and it is one of his most common refrains. What is different about this passage is in the manner in which one acts with respect to those enemies. Instead of continually conquering enemies and then searching for new ones (as Nietzsche often recommends), he recommends here the consideration and preservation of ones enemies. In this passage both the continued existence of spiritualized cruelty and the need for opposition in the form of a human enemy appear compatible with a nonoppressive description of the will to power. For oppression and conflict are not identical; oppression is one possible result of conflict a conflict which terminates in unambiguous victory and defeat but not every conflict concludes this way. In this passage Nietzsche implies that complete victory need not even be the aim of the opposing parties. What is missing from this passage, however, is the pathos of distance: if one deliberately acts so as to preserve the strength of ones opponent, one cannot reduce the other to the level of an instrument and thereby enjoy the pathos of distance. That pathos of distance is inseparable from a feeling of great height, which in turn is the fruit of a complete conquest (e.g. the reduction of an individual or class to the condition of slavery.) Suggestive as this passage about considerate hostility may be, it runs counter to the general current of Nietzsches writing; far more frequent are the passages in which he recommends unambigous conquest and the cultivation of the pathos of distance.
NOTES
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 53. 2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 542. 3. Gilles Deleuze seems to believe that Nietzsches ethic of war can be reconciled with a leftist ideal of liberation; he writes: We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsches thought ... he made thought into a machine of war a battering ram into a nomadic force. Gilles Deleuze, Nomad Thought in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B Allison (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 142-49. But according to Nietzsche the aim of war is precisely to conquer, to establish oneself as superior and to treat the conquered foe despotically. 4. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1969), 26. 5. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 97. 6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1966), 26. 7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 47. 8. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, from Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche, 570. 9. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 572. 10. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 213.

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11. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 340. 12. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 45. 13. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 84. 14. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 85. 15. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 3. 16. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 26. 17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 201. 18. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), 86. 19. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 208. 20. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 38. 21. The best analysis of Nietzsches pathos of distance as an aesthetic phenomenon for that matter one of the few good treatments of the pathos of distance from any perspective is in Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1907), 211-230. Simmel observes that for Nietzsche the highest experience, the meaning of existence, is to be found in the swing of our pendulum between heaven and hell. In practice this means that in order to attain such spiritual states, one must sacrifice other human beings; this is the essence of the pathos: . . . the absolute height of the essence of a human being is conditional upon its relative height . . . Life lives, so to speak, at its own cost . . . its height comes at the expense of its breadth. 22. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 59. 23. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 97. 24. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 162. 25. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 18. 26. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 488.