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The Rule of the Misfits: Ridicule in the Politics of Nietzsche and Machiavelli
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12990 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1987 |
4,301 Words |
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Robert Eden
Robert Eden is professor of political science at Dalhousie
University in Nova Scotia and recently published a monograh on
Nietzsche and Max Weber |
Rather than postpone your gratification, I shall skip the preliminaries and get down to what you want to hear, namely, what is wrong with Ronald Reagan. To appreciate what a misfit he is, as I shall indicate, you need only turn to those connoisseurs of the absurd, Machiavelli and Nietzsche. It should be clear to everyone by now that President Reagan does not give a tinker's damn about what matters most: I mean the things for which men and especially presidents are praised and blamed by cognoscenti like ourselves. It would not offend our standards of fitness were he simply ignorant. The true misfit so eludes our standards as to defy the understanding upon which those standards rest. Reagan succeeds not by superior aptitude, but merely by being what he is. To put the monstrosity crudely, what is wrong with Reagan is his happiness, the happiness of a "natural." I trust this example to capture your attention for the question I propose to discuss: why the natural political man does not fit, or, to be more precise, appears as a misfit, in the politics of Machiavelli and Nietzsche.
No knowledgeable reader will deny that Nietzsche's use of ridicule is closely intertwined with his "heresy in morality," his revaluation of "pagan, master morality, virtu." What will doubtless provoke argument is the further claim that Nietzsche's derision makes the natural political man appear a misfit. The evidence seems to confute this claim. Clearly, Nietzsche blames "morality as timidity," for clouding the reputation on princely men, and forcing them to labor under opprobrium, so that we (and eventually they) mistake their natural health for illness or worse:
We thoroughly misunderstand the beast of prey and man of prey (for example, Cesare Borgia), we misunderstand "nature" as long as we still look for something "pathological" at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for some "hell" that is supposed to be innate in them.
I do not dispute that Nietzsche rehabilitates the predatory man. My question is not whether he does so, but how. Does his reinterpretation merely affirm the "healthy natures" he so eloquently defends? Or does he select, enhance, reshape, and distort and then defend them?
Aside from the connotation of misfitness conveyed by his suggestive choice of terms--"monster" and "beast of prey"--Nietzsche himself insists that his revaluation is selective interpretation, a form of legislation. Moreover, his interpretation is hostile to the possibility that man is naturally sociable, that tyrannical rule is
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