--- Rather dubious!! Antisocialist, antidemocratic, misogynist, yeeks! Ok, he wasn't an Nazi or an antisemite, contrary to still-surviving misconceptions. But his politics, his express political views anyway, suck. Which isn't to say that historical materialism hasn't got a lot to learn from him.
Among the things Nietzsche has that historical materialism in general and Marx and Engels in particular ain't got is a profound and sensitive psychology which is also integrated into a very subtle class analysis. M&E tend to treat people as "bearers of class positions" (as Marx says he treats capitalist in capital, and while there is a point to doing that, up to a point, it misses a lot that radical theory has intermittently and not wholly successfully struggled to put in for over a century and a half.
And this is very much to the detriment of historical materialism, because it tends to lead to mechanical materialism, by which I mean the futile effort to read psychology right off class position of the sort that we saw for example in (pardon me, Marvin) Marvin's sketch of a theory of politic attitudes based on the source of income.
Unfortunately I think the Nietzsche-tinged Marxists have not been inspired by this aspect of Nietzsche's work so much as certain questionable interpretations of Nietzsche's metaphysical and semantic views. For example his his so called perspectivism, skepticism about truth, rejection -- supposedly -- of historical grand narratives and also his alleged doubts about the sense of talking about historical or moral progress -- all of which is, in my view, at least highly doubtful and most of which is based on tendentious readings. Freudian-flavored Marxism in the tradition of Reich, Fromm, and Marcuse has done somewhat better on psychology, but Freudian psychology is primitive compared to Nietzsche's.
And Marx-tinged Nietzscheans like Foucault, whose work I profoundly respect in many ways (Foucault's, I mean), have tended to completely ignore Nietzsche's psychology and in favor of the same set of (frankly) idealist doctrines, idealist, I mean, in the Marxian sense while retaining and even amplifying Marx's neglect of psychology. Foucault strips psychology almost entirely out of almost all his various changes to the point of abolishing agency and leaving us with nothing but structure.
Nietzsche also offers a much richer approach to a sort of materialist or naturalized value theory rooted in not only social psychology but even in physiology. A lot of his thinking about the origin and effects of different kinds of valuations ("good" and "bad" vs "good and "evil", for example) is speculative or not based on sound science, but the spirit of his approach, integrating social class analysis of these -- it's not incidental that Nietzsche discusses moralities as "master" moralities and "slave" moralities, and only adolescents, immature minds,and careless or uninformed readers think he's making an invidious comparison or advocating the former over the latter -- anyway, integrating social class analysis with a nontrivial depth psychology that's not based on Freud's clunky hydraulic fictions _and_ with the roots and effects of the moralities _and_ the social circumstances on the body. Thus all the talk about sickness and health, to start with. If "dialectical" means holding the whole together in view of a vivid awareness of each part, this is a profoundly dialectical value theory.
We can't just take over Nietzsche's psychology, but we can aspire to integrate a real psychology (not the crude rational-choice theoretic approach that mechanical materialism shares with neoclassical economics) with our science and our sociology in the service of our ends in something like the way that Nietzsche did.
Anyway, that's for starters.
By way of pleading guilty my early inspiration to study philosophy was reading Nietzsche. I didn't follow it up beyond reading and occasionally teaching Nietzsche, but I have never lost my love for the mustachioed one.
--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> >
> > The Nietzsche-Foucault-Marxist area of thought is
> an
> > area I'm extremely excited & interested in. Does
> > anyone know of a list (a "left-Nietzschean" list)
> that
> > explores this specific area? Not a list run by
> > Fou-Cult gurus, but one a bit more liberal and
> lax?
> > I'm interested in other writers that have plumbed
> > these depths. Like I mentioned, _The Philosophy of
> > Friedrich Nietzsche_ by HL Mencken, with the
> > explanatory intro by anarchist Charles Bufe, is
> > excellent, esp. where the Bufe into lays out where
> > Nietzsche converges and diverges with
> left-libertarian
> > thought. ANd again there is the book _I Am Not a
> Man,
> > I Am Dynamite: Nietzsche and the Anarchist
> Tradition_
> > which reveals his influence on anarchism, even
> though
> > Nietzsche explicitly condemned anarcists as
> suffering
> > from ressentiment.
>
> I would recommend Wendy Brown's work, States of
> Injury, which is a
> critique of a certain feminist politic that call to
> the state for
> protection, although I think that its analysis of
> the concept of
> wounded identity can be used in other contexts. To
> be honest, this
> has been my largest engagement in Nietzsche (my
> interests are more
> Spinozist.) I have also heard good things about
> Deleuze's analysis.
> I think that the largest Nietzsche influence on
> historical
> materialism is rather indirect, from Sorel to his
> critical uptake in
> Gramsci. To turn to your earlier comment about N's
> rather dubious
> politics, the unfortunate thing is that if one were
> to reject
> philosophers for racism and misogyny we would be
> erasing a great deal
> of continental philosophy if not all of it.
>
> robert wood
>
>
>
> > Additionally, French writer Daniel Colson wrote
> about
> > Nietzsche's influence on early French and European
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