Humor me… Nietzsche is talking about the “true philosophers” here. Who falls into that category and who doesn’t?
When Zarathustra came down from the mountain, and was heading to the village and crowds, wasn’t his motivation for preaching and inculcating his ideals and truth to the mass of people (implying social engineering)?
And what did Zarathustra learn? Don’t preach to the herd.
Do you have the original text for that in Zarathustra?
But for Nietzsche, “the body” is itself a multiplicity of competing drives, affects, impulses, and interpretations. There is no unified physiological ground that simply generates psychological phenomena. Rather, physiology is already a field of struggle among forces. The body is not a thing but an organization of contending powers.
Mastery isnt the triumph of consciousness over instinct. It is the emergence of a higher ordering among drives themselves.
Nietzsche writes of thoughts coming when “they” want rather than when “I” want. He consistently attacks the fiction of a simple subject standing behind action.
The self isn’t an agent who can stand over his instincts and cultivate them. The individual is traversed by impulses that exceed personal identity. The conscious self is less a master than a provisional mask worn by forces that continually threaten to dissolve it.
‘Cultivation’ isn’t a teleological or developmental arrow of personal growth. The “higher type” isn’t the realization of a predetermined essence. What emerges is contingent, experimental, and precarious.
The question is not how a self masters its instincts, but how one configuration of forces temporarily achieves dominance over other configurations within a self that was never truly unified to begin with.
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Not the original text… My copy is in Dutch and in my attic. I actually contemplated digging it up 
Silly me…
Instead, this will have to do:
“I am not to be a herdsman, I am not to be a grave-digger. Not any more will I discourse unto the people; for the last time have I spoken unto the dead.”
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But for Nietzsche, “the body” is itself a multiplicity of competing drives, affects, impulses, and interpretations. There is no unified physiological ground that simply generates psychological phenomena. Rather, physiology is already a field of struggle among forces. The body is not a thing but an organization of contending powers.
Mastery isnt the triumph of consciousness over instinct. It is the emergence of a higher ordering among drives themselves.
Nietzsche writes of thoughts coming when “they” want rather than when “I” want. He consistently attacks the fiction of a simple subject standing behind action.
The self isn’t an agent who can stand over his instincts and cultivate them. The individual is traversed by impulses that exceed personal identity. The conscious self is less a master than a provisional mask worn by forces that continually threaten to dissolve it.
‘Cultivation’ isn’t a teleological or developmental arrow of personal growth. The “higher type” isn’t the realization of a predetermined essence. What emerges is contingent, experimental, and precarious.
The question is not how a self masters its instincts, but how one configuration of forces temporarily achieves dominance over other configurations within a self that was never truly unified to begin with.
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So, I’m right there with you for a lot of this: Mastery of the self isn’t the mind beating the instincts into submission. That would be far too Cartesian, or… Christian
Where I diverge is the conclusion. Why would Nietzsche be so fiercely prescriptive about revaluation of values? Why does he demand we must learn? There’s something about “becoming art” in “The Gay Science” I think, or “the man becoming art”.
If what you say is true for Nietzsche, he would be just a passive observer. Because, what else could he do then?
So, we don’t want to entangle agency and consciousness here. You don’t need to be a unified being to have agency.
The way I interpret Nietzsche here is that agency is the drive to organize lesser and higher impulses.
Does that make sense?
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A unified self directing forces and the self as a not stable center are not discreet possibilities but differences in degree. For Nietzsche, the people capable of doing life well are few in number. For these few, the self that is “an effect of competing impulses, drives, and affective intensities” is a “more unified” self than the self of the many. A more unified self is a more powerful sense of self.
The few having a more powerful sense of self are better able to understand, channel, and direct the competing impulses, drives, and affective tendencies of the will. And not for the purpose of amassing more power, but for the purpose of maintaining their already more powerful sense of self. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
All one needs to do is follow the feedback loop.
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I do not know whether he ever identified them by name, but his Dionysus and Zarathustra would fit in the category of “true philosophers”. As to human beings he was not so forthcoming. In the cited passage above Kant and Hegel are called “philosophical laborers”, and says people should stop confusing philosophical laborers and “scientific people” with philosophers. He ends the paragraph by asking about the true philosophers:
“Are there such philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not necessary that there be such philosophers? . . . .”
Yes! Exactly. So Nietzsche makes a distinction between philosophical laborers and true philosophers.
That’s important to your original post.
So, now that we’ve established Nietzsche makes the distinction, and he disparagingly calls them laborers, can you see how Nietzsche doesn’t legislate on the political? It’s the cultural and the existential entirely. He’s saying true philosophers legislate on new values for humanity. State policy is beneath them
Was Nietzsche not interested in the “‘where to’ and ‘what for’ of people”? On my reading Nietzsche’s concern, like that of Plato, was with the politics of the soul.If anyone, I would think he would consider Plato a “true philosopher”. I also think he might have postponed answering whether he himself is a true philosopher pending the outcome of the last man versus the Overman.
He would not… He recognized Plato as a genius but also as a dangerous, decadent man who started down a path of nihilism. He didn’t hate his guts, like he hated Socrates’, but he wasn’t a fan.
I don’t know… To me that just doesn’t seem right. Nietzsche just isn’t a meaningful political philosopher in any way, shape or form.
I wonder what you mean by it exactly, but can we in any case agree that we’ve shifted substantively away from the idea that Nietzsche somehow was a social engineer?
No, Nietzsche wasn’t waiting around for anyone. He declared himself very much to be a true philosopher. He wasn’t a stranger to his own brilliance and he wasn’t cutesy about it either
Just as a side note, something that’s missing in almost every debate about Nietzsche on the internet:
To love Nietzsche… you need to embrace the fact that he was a 19th-century pompous, self-aggrandizing asshole, a kind and generous drinking buddy, a child, a rebel, a genius, a fighter, a sick man, dark and twisted, and joyous and light; and he had no problem oscillating between these modes.
That’s a difficult man to love.
I just wanted to write that down, because I feel the critique of Nietzsche often doesn’t exactly stem from his body of work, but rather our uneasiness with such a man. And so we make up these neat little character profiles for him: He’s either a “bona fide proto-nazi”, like most breadtubers will have you believe. Or he’s some secret Catholic, here to put Christianity right again, like Jordan Peterson would have you believe. It’s all bullshit.
Reality is, he was a difficult, brilliant man. And his work is both very dark, and very life-affirming and joyous.
I think Plato was a friend to Nietzsche. See the section “The Friend” from Zarathustra: “In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy. Thou shalt be closest unto him with thy heart when thou withstandest him.”
I agree that he was not a social engineer. His political philosophy, as I understand it, centers on the individual as creator. These is a direct through line here to Socrates and the tension between philosophy and the city. In line with his esoteric tendencies, his political philosophy does not take place in public. He plays the long game.
If we are in the age of the last man then Nietzsche would have failed to determine the where to and what for of people.
Is this drive simply one drive among others, or is it a privileged faculty that stands above them? Each quantum of force is a drive to dissipate its agency.If the “organizing” activity is itself just another impulse struggling for dominance, then there is no guarantee that it represents the whole organism or serves any stable self. The “I” who claims ownership of those drives is itself a transient arrangement of impulses.
Even simpler, I think what you’re trying to express is that our will can be weak or strong.
The fixation with well-being doesn’t strike me as very Nietzschean, btw.
This is a nice sentiment but a stretch at best. I think you’re taking some liberties that aren’t obviously there, nor meaningfully there. I won’t begrudge the sentiment (that a millennia-old dead friend can help you strive towards greatness… and not vice versa obviously), but I won’t attribute it to Nietzsche. Affirm life, remember? Not the dead.
Thank you… That’s what started this whole thing off in the first place
If a political philosophy doesn’t take place in public, there are no models of governance to speak of, and centers entirely on the individual as a creator… It’s just not political philosophy. Not even the esoteric variety. I’m sorry but it just isn’t. It’s aesthetics, existentialism and ethics.
You aren’t the first to attribute politics to Nietzsche and you won’t be the last… But it’s just not there in any meaningful sense. I would simply suggest to never look to Nietzsche’s process or work for any political truth or wisdom, because it isn’t there.
He wasn’t a fortuneteller… His words on the last man serve as an antidote to nihilism and profound decadence; a psychological condition. He’s describing cultural and existential mechanics; different field entirely from Nostradamus.
May I ask… Where do you get this from?
My brother in Christ… That level of metaphysical abstraction or super phenomenology, is well outside my wheelhouse. I’d love to follow you into the rabbit hole of the quantum force, but I don’t have the language to engage with it meaningfully. I’m sure someone else will pick up my slack
That sounds not quite in line with Nietzsche’s main principle “Will to Power”. Is the Will supposed to be free Will?
If we accept the Will to Power is based on one’s freedom, then there appears strong sense of moral realism, whatever meaning “Power” might have or imply.
I connect this to Freud, who pretended not to read philosophy but often echoes Nietzsche.