Nietzsche’s Antichristian Ethics: Renaissance Virtù and the Project of Reevaluation
David Owen
In the opening sections of The Antichrist: A Curse on Christianity, Nietzsche provides a revealing summary not only on his concerns in this work but also on his understanding of his overall project. This is succinctly stated in s.3:
The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (the human being is a conclusion): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future.
This more valuable type has existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared—and out of fear the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man—the Christian.
(A 3)
In the preceding section, Nietzsche identifies the evaluative contrasts that he draws here in terms of his understanding of human being in terms of will to power:
What is good?—Everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself.
What is bad?—Everything stemming from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome.
Not contentedness, but more power; not peace, but war; not virtue, but prowess (virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtù, moraline-free virtue).
The weak and the failures should perish: first principle of our love of humanity. And they should be helped to do this.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Active pity for all failures and weakness—Christianity. (A 2)
In this chapter, my focus is on how we are to understand the problem and project that Nietzsche identifies as defining his philosophical enterprise and to do so by focusing quite specifically on his appeal to the idea of “virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtù, moraline-free virtue.” This focus is motivated in large part by my sense that Nietzsche’s appeal to the Renaissance idea of virtù is grounded in his own commitment to realism in ethics and politics. Thus, for example, in TI, Nietzsche draws a contrast between Platonic idealism and Thucydidean realism, and announces his own allegiance: “Thucydides, and perhaps Machiavelli’s principe, are most closely related to me through their absolute will not to fool themselves and to see reason in reality—not in ‘reason’, still less in ‘morality’” (TI “What I owe to the ancients” 2). My aim in this chapter is, through the focus on virtù, to draw out the implications of this commitment for Nietzsche’s project as he articulates it in The Antichrist.
I’ll start by attempting to clarify the terms of the problem that Nietzsche poses and the project he proposes, before turning to explore the Renaissance concept of virtù to which he appeals in the context of his stress on will to power—and I’ll do this by focusing on Machiavelli as the exemplary Renaissance theorist of virtù and as the Renaissance thinker with whom Nietzsche most closely associates himself. I’ll then turn back to Nietzsche’s project and try to show how this focus on virtù can help to illuminate it and to provide guidance on Nietzsche’s project and ethical outlook.
1 The problem and project
Nietzsche’s problem is the classical question concerning the form of the good life: “What is noble?” It is to address this problem that he articulates the doctrine of will to power and the idea of decadence as the paradoxical form of will to power directed against itself that he finds expressed in Christianity as a reevaluation of values. Much of The Antichrist is concerned with providing a genealogy of Christianity as an ethical orientation and an historical institution in which its emergence and development is translated back into what we may call “natural history,” that is, a naturalistic account of the history of human conduct that seeks as far as possible to account for Christianity’s ethical orientation and its emergence and development as an historical institution in terms drawn from human psychology that do not presuppose moral concepts internal to this orientation.
The importance of Christianity for Nietzsche is twofold. First, as an ethical orientation, it represents an evaluative ranking of values that is the target of his critical focus. Second, as a historical institution that has, for the most part, established this evaluative ranking of values as the hegemonic ordering of values in European ethical culture, it represents an example of a successful reevaluation of values that can be understood as having “willed, bred, achieved” the widespread cultivation of a particular type of human being. Together these two features define the scope of Nietzsche’s own project, namely, to (re-)found an ethical culture oriented to noble values through a reevaluation of Christianity as an ethical orientation and the constitution of a community of “free spirits” who displace Christianity as an historical institution. Although the latter is an important issue for Nietzsche’s project and one that requires close attention to the rhetorical performances that his texts enact, my focus will be on Nietzsche’s reevaluation of Christianity and the alternative ethical orientation that he proposes. In the remainder of this section, I lay out the terms in which Nietzsche takes up this task.
We can begin by noting that the object of evaluation for Nietzsche is an ethical culture, that is, the practical expression of an ethical orientation as a way of life. There are several reasons for this holist approach to the analysis of morality of which I will highlight two that are particularly important for our concerns.
The first is that Nietzsche offers a naturalistic account of human agency in which drives play a fundamental role in shaping the agent’s evaluative orientations that is manifest in the structuring of “their perceptions, affects and reflective thought” (Katsafanas 2013: 752). However, drives play this role as drives that have been mediated and shaped by ethical culture. Our drive-complex as given by nature may be characterized by certain biological features that allow some differentiation of drives (e.g., food, sex, aggression) in much the same way as we can speak of animals being characterized by drives expressed in patterned forms of instinctual behavior; however, it is part of the ethology of humankind that we are also cultural beings. It is ethical culture embodied in social practices through which the raw material of our biological drives are shaped and given determinacy in their relations with one another. Nietzsche draws attention to this point early in Daybreak:
Drives transformed by moral judgments.—The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive: or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good. That is to say, it is attended by either a good or a bad conscience! In itself it has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense. (D 38)
Nietzsche continues in this passage to offer a further range of examples of this phenomenon. Thus, he notes that the ancient Greeks “felt differently about envy from the way we do; Hesiod counted it among the effects of the good, beneficent Eris” and “likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they felt it to be blind and deceitful,” while he claims that the ancient Jews “felt differently about anger from the way we do, and called it holy” (D s.38). While our biological drives may constrain the range of possible ethical cultures that humans can instantiate, this constraint still allows for remarkable diversity in ethical cultures and hence in the possible ways in which our drives can be shaped and relationally differentiated from one another. It is these culturally shaped drives that then structure our perceptions, affects, and reflective thought in ways that largely escape our conscious reflection and control.
This view of biological drives as shaped by ethical culture has two important implications. The first is that because our drives are shaped by ethical culture, transformations of ethical culture expressed through social practices reshape our drives and, hence, our evaluative perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. In GS, for example, Nietzsche remarks:
The true invention of the religion-founders is first to establish a certain way of life and everyday customs that work as a disciplina voluntatis while at the same time removing boredom; and then to give just this life an interpretation that makes it appear illuminated by the highest worth, so that henceforth it becomes a good for which one fights and under certain circumstances even gives one’s life. Actually, the second invention is the more important: the first, the way of life, was usually in place, though alongside other ways of life and without any consciousness of its special worth. (GS 353)
Notice that Nietzsche is here stressing two points. First, that an ethical culture is grounded in social practices and, second, that such practices are open to being redescribed (reinterpreted) in ways that transform ethical culture. The work of the religion-founder is that by transforming the terms in which we understand our own activity, our everyday practices, they transform these practices and hence what we are—and this transformation is not merely cognitive but affective and even physiological in the sense that our participation in these reinterpreted practices restructures our drives. In this passage, as in his discussion of the slave revolt in morality (GM I), Nietzsche is representing what is, no doubt, a long and complex social process in its essential psychological terms—and one of the important features of The Antichrist is that it offers a more elaborated account of this type of process and its path-dependencies. It is important to note further that innovators like the religion-founder or the priests of GM or The Antichrist have to work with the materials that are available to them, that is, they have to draw on resources given by the existing ethical culture in order to root their reevaluations within the affective perspectives of their audience and so to mobilize them in the direction of change.
The second reason for Nietzsche’s holistic focus on ethical cultures concerns his doctrine of will to power which we can gloss as the claim that human beings are characterized by a freestanding (i.e., nonderivative) drive to express, and experience the expression of, their agency in shaping themselves and their environment. However, as self-conscious beings, our experience of ourselves as agents (the feeling of power) is mediated by the ethical culture that we inhabit. Thus, for example, Nietzsche’s example of the religious-founder illustrates the point that a given way of life can be reinterpreted such that those engaged in this way of life experience a greater feeling of power even if what they can do (their power) does not change. The slave revolt in morality addressed in GM I exhibits this feature in its presentation of slaves as driven by their need to experience themselves as agents to endorse both a new view of agency and of what is valuable precisely because it enables their feeling of power. In The Antichrist too, Nietzsche’s stress on the inability of the existing “prophetic” ethical culture to sustain the feeling of power under conditions of internal conflict and external threat—“anarchy from the inside, Assyrians from the outside” (A 25)—indicates the conditions under which the priests could advance successfully an alternative interpretation of Jewish history and ethical culture:
But all hopes were left unfulfilled. The old god could not do the things he used to do. He should have been let go. What happened? His concept was altered—his concept was denatured: this was the price for retaining it. Yahweh, the god of “justice,”—not one with Israel or the expression of a people’s self-esteem any more: now just a god, under certain conditions. . . . His concept becomes a tool in the hands of priestly agitators who now interpret all happiness as a reward, all unhappiness as a punishment for disobeying God, for “sins”: that most deceitful of all modes of interpretation, the supposed “moral world order,” which turns the natural concepts of “cause” and “effect” on their heads once and for all. (A 25)
A similar logic is at play in Nietzsche’s account of the crisis of culture exemplified by Socrates in ancient Athens. Nietzsche presents Socrates as “only the most extreme and eye-catching example of what was turning into a universal affliction”:
People had stopped being masters of themselves and the instincts had turned against each other. Socrates was fascinating as an extreme case—his awe-inspiring ugliness showed everyone just what he was. Of course, his fascination lay mainly in the fact that he was an answer, a solution, the manifestation of a cure for this case. (TI The Problem of Socrates 9)
Nietzsche concludes,
When people need reason to act as a tyrant, which was the case with Socrates, the danger cannot be small that something else might start acting as a tyrant. Rationality was seen as the saviour, neither Socrates nor his “patients” had any choice about being rational—it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all of Greek thought threw itself on rationality shows that there was a crisis: people were in danger, they had only one option: be destroyed or—be absurdly rational. (TI The Problem of Socrates 10)
As with the Jewish case addressed in The Antichrist, it is the inability of the extant ethical culture to sustain the accustomed feeling of power of a people that is manifest as a cultural crisis in which the structuring of the drives breaks down and their conflicts are no longer contained that generates the conditions of transformation of ethical culture, that is, reevaluation of values.
The problem that is posed by this phenomenon is that, under such conditions, will to power motivates a reevaluation of values to sustain the feeling of power but that the reevaluation of values that takes place is one that turns will to power against itself, that is, disconnects the feeling of power from power in a specific sense. I take Nietzsche’s stress on the “falsification” wrought by such transformations of ethical culture to be registering this point (see, for example, A 26). To see Nietzsche’s argument, it is helpful to turn to a point acutely made by Reginster (2006), namely, that the experience of (the feeling of) power is dependent on the experience of (the feeling of) resistance and hence this doctrine is committed to the apparently paradoxical claim that willing a goal means also willing resistance to achieving this goal. The appearance of paradox is easily dissolved, however, by considering the concept of a challenge. It is of the nature of challenges that, first, they involve overcoming resistances (no resistance, no challenge); second, they must be attainable (if there is no practical possibility of you achieving X, then X is not a challenge); third, that their value is at least partially related to their difficulty (given two challenges distinguished only by their degree of difficulty, the more challenging option is the more valuable); fourth, once a challenge is met (if it is the kind of challenge that can be met finally and does not simply recur in new forms), it is no longer valuable as a challenge. Will to power can thus be characterized as the need to express, and experience the expression of, one’s agency through taking up and overcoming challenges, that is, through challenging oneself.
What is crucial for Nietzsche with respect to ethical cultures is not that they, as involving constraints on conduct and a ranking of values, set challenges but rather the attitude to challenges, to challenging oneself, that they express. One way to draw out the importance of this point is to note that the doctrine of will to power identifies human flourishing with the ongoing process of setting and overcoming ideals, and thus with ideals as challenges that are immanent to the temporal and spatial order of nature expressed in the history of human culture. Thus, for example, the history of art or of music can be seen as such a process in which artists or musicians take up challenges as ideals immanent to the historically specific practice in which they are engaged, whether in terms of bringing a style to a higher level of expressive realization (Mozart) or transforming style by creating new expressive resources (Beethoven). Moreover, as these examples illustrate, the way in which a challenge as ideal is taken up and overcome (indeed, exactly what the challenge is and what overcoming it amounts to) is not given independently and in advance of the actions through which an agent attempts to address it but rather is realized, when successful, in and through the performance, the exercise of agency. It is just this understanding of, and attitude to, ideals that Christianity as an ethical culture rejects.1 For Christianity, the ideal is a transcendent (and, indeed, ultimately unattainable) goal that is given in advance and independently of the agent. Yes, the Christian has to discipline himself, to undertake ascetic practices that enable him to repress erotic and other desires. However, and this is key for Nietzsche, what is expressed by Christianity is a devaluation of human being as will to power, as the will to challenge oneself, to engage in self-overcoming that affirms one’s agency as a part of the natural history of human culture (a clear indicator of this rejection is the Christian attitude toward the bodily and, thereby, to humans as embodied). As Katsafanas notes, Christianity expresses this denial of will to power in three main ways:
First, the values proposed by Judeo-Christian morality celebrate weakness and condemn power. For example, “weakness is being lied into something meritorious . . . impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’; timid baseness is being turned into ‘humility’; submission to people one hates is being turned into ‘obedience’” (GM 1.14). Second, the Judeo-Christian ethic associates negative emotions with manifestations of power and positive emotions with manifestations of weakness: “for too long, man has viewed his natural inclinations with an ‘evil eye’, so that they finally come to be intertwined with the ‘bad conscience’ in him” (GM II.24). Third, Judeo-Christian morality employs a conception of agency that enables the weak to see their weakness as chosen, and hence as strength (GM I.13). (2018: 86)
This devaluation can be grasped in terms of the way in which the attitude cultivated by Christianity expresses a relation to the challenges faced by the Christian as transcendent ideals for whose realization his or her agency is merely a vehicle. The Christian thereby instrumentalizes his own agency and cannot coherently value the feeling of power as expressive of power, of will to power, rather he must see it as something else, for example, as a sign of God’s grace.
Nietzsche’s concern with ethical culture is predicated on whether an ethical culture, as the relevant unit of evaluation, can value the feeling of power that is the expression, and experience of the expression, of one’s agency as a creative expression of will to power and, hence, as an affirmation of humanity as part of the natural order of the world.2 The importance of the ethical culture of the Renaissance and the concept of virtù for Nietzsche is that it can be seen as a rebellion against Christianity that aims to engage in just such an affirmation of humanity.
2 Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and Renaissance virtù
Nietzsche had read Machiavelli’s il Principe in Italian (and possibly also German) in 1862 as part of his extracurricular Italian class when aged seventeen or eighteen (Brobjer 2008: 44). Twenty-five years later in 1887 he may have reread it in French translation while engaging with Gebhart’s Etudes meridionales which contained a chapter on Machiavelli—which Brobjer speculates led to Nietzsche’s praise for Machiavelli in TI (Brobjer 2008: 104) and, by implication, The Antichrist. Between the young Nietzsche and his final texts lies also his engagement in Basel with the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy was the first serious cultural history of the Renaissance as a distinct period and whose account of political agency in artistic terms is significantly drawn from Machiavelli. It is worth noting further that Nietzsche’s own background in philology and his teaching at Basel meant he was also in a position to read Machiavelli’s il Principe with a keen appreciation of its complex rhetorical composition and the way in which that text engages Greek and Roman history and thinkers such as Cicero and Seneca. Before we turn to focus on Machiavelli, however, some more general features of the Renaissance and the reasons for its significance for Nietzsche need to be brought into view.
In the penultimate section of The Antichrist, having charged Christianity with denying the fruits of both the classical world (A s.59) and of Islam represented in Moorish culture of Spain (A s.60) to Europe, Nietzsche remarks:
Here it is necessary to touch on a memory a hundred times more painful for Germans. The Germans have robbed Europe of the last great cultural harvest Europe had to bring home—of the harvest of the Renaissance. Is it at last understood, is there a desire to understand, what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the attempt, undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with genius of every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values, the noble values. . . . Up till now this has been the only great war, there has been no more decisive interrogation than that conducted by the Renaissance—the question it asks is the question I ask—neither has there been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, and more strenuously delivered on the entire front and at the enemy’s centre! (A s.61)
This memory should be painful to Germans because Nietzsche regards Luther’s establishment of the Reformation as Christianity’s overcoming of the Renaissance as countermovement. But in an important and revealing remark in this section, Nietzsche identifies his own stance with a possibility that was, by misfortune, lost:
To attack at the decisive point, in the very seat of Christianity, to set the noble values on the throne, which is to say to set them into the instincts, the deepest needs and desires of him who sits thereon. . . . I see in my mind’s eye a possibility of a quite unearthly fascination and splendor. . . . I behold a spectacle at once so meaningful and so strangely paradoxical it would have given all the gods of Olympus an opportunity for an immortal roar of laughter—Cesare Borgia as Pope. . . . Am I understood? . . . Very well, that would have been a victory of the only sort I desire today—Christianity would have thereby been abolished! (A s.61)
Instead, Luther went to Rome:
What Luther saw was the corruption of the Papacy, while precisely the opposite was palpably obvious: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead! the triumph of life! the great Yes to all lofty, beautiful, daring things! . . . And Luther restored the Church: he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great in vain! (A s.61)
Nietzsche compresses a great deal into these remarks and to unpack them I will start with his thought-experiment of Cesare Borgia as Pope, before turning to his comments on the Renaissance and noble values, and finally to Machiavelli.
The counterfactual that Cesare Borgia as Pope would have had serious consequences for Christianity is a thought that Nietzsche may have drawn from Burckhardt, albeit with a different valuation. In his classic study of Renaissance Italy, Burckhardt comments on this possibility noting that there is good reason to think that Cesare Borgia aimed to succeed his father as Pope and further commenting:
In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that Cesare, whether chosen pope or not after Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical state at any cost, and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he could not as pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody, could have secularized the States of the Church, and he would have been forced to do so to keep them. Unless we are much deceived this is the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Machiavelli treats the great criminal: from Cesare, or from nobody, could it be hoped that he “would draw the steel from the wound,” in other words, annihilate the papacy—the source of all foreign interests and of all the divisions of Italy. (1990: 88)
While Burckhardt is skeptical about Cesare’s abilities to achieve these goals even if he had not died, he acknowledges that it is unclear “how far scandal and indignation of Christendom might have gone” if Borgia had continued his activities under his father’s papacy and comments:
And what might not Cesare have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sickbed! What a conclave would that have been, in which armed with all his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had judiciously reduced by poison—and this at a time when there was no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses itself in an abyss. (1990: 90)
Nietzsche, by contrast to Burckhardt, is a thinker willing to risk staring into abysses.
However, let us step back from the counterfactual of Cesare Borgia as Pope and pose the more general question of Nietzsche’s identification of the Renaissance with the valuation of noble values. The central ethical innovation of the Renaissance was undertaken by the humanist thinkers who sought to rehabilitate love of worldly glory as a worthy human end in the context of its attempts at reconciling classical ethics and Christianity. It is worth noting that this stance of the humanists contrasted with the view taken by the scholastic philosophers of this period such as Giles of Rome and St. Thomas Aquinas who insisted on the inappropriateness of love of glory on the grounds that the good man should exhibit contempt for worldly glory (Skinner 2002: 122). As Skinner remarks,
Among the many contrasts between the schoolmen and the humanists, one of the most revealing is that the latter never exhibit any such guilt or anxiety about world glory or its pursuit. On the contrary, we find Petrarch declaring that his whole purpose in offering advice to Francesco da Carrara is “to lead you to immediate fame and future glory in the best possible way.” Petrarch accepts that rulers ought to cultivate those qualities “which serve not merely as means to glory but also as steps to heaven at the same time.” But this concession represents his whole acknowledgment of the deeply rooted Christian suspicion of gloria mundi and those who aspire to it. (2002: 122)
The valuing of worldly glory as one of the highest values so manifest in the Greek and Roman texts that animate the Renaissance—and so critical to both Burkhardt’s and Nietzsche’s own understandings of the agonic character of ancient ethical culture as key to production of genius—is central to the culture of individuality that finds expression in the Renaissance and its valuing of the creative talent—across the domains of art, science, economics, and politics—of individuals with little regard to circumstances of birth or social position. It is this valuing of worldly glory that finds expression in the Renaissance concept of virtù to which Nietzsche appeals, where virtù refers to those capabilities required for, and manifest in, virtuosi performance in a domain of human conduct constitutively exposed to chance and necessity—and it is Machiavelli who is the most penetrating theorist of virtù, not least because Machiavelli both recognizes and mobilizes love of worldly glory against Christianity, that is, not merely against the papacy as a major source of the political ills of Italy but also against Christianity as an ethical orientation. Thus, in his Discourses, Machiavelli constructs a sharp contrast between the outlook of Christianity and that of the civic religion of the ancient world:
The old religion did not beatify men unless they were replete with worldly glory (mondana gloria): army commanders, for instance, and rulers of republics. Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt of the world (dispregio delle cose umane), whereas the other identified it with greatness of spirit, bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to make men very bold. And if our religion demands that in you there be strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things. (1996: 278, translation adjusted)
In contrast to humanist authors who sought to reconcile Classical and Christian outlooks, Machiavelli takes direct aim at Christianity as a way of life that unfits one for politics in respect of the disposition and capacities that it cultivates, and does so because, as an outlook, it glorifies spiritual grace rather than worldly endeavors and achievements. Notice the asymmetry here in the context of Nietzsche’s point concerning ethical culture and the valuing of will to power: although Christianity glorifies those who are judged to have achieved a state of spiritual grace through institutions such as sainthood, being thus glorified cannot be a coherent motivation for anyone whose achievements would legitimately qualify them for such glorification since such a motivation would entail failing to exhibit the disposition (humility, abnegation, contempt for world things) required for a state of spiritual grace; by contrast, those who are glorified by civic religion can coherently be motivated by the love of glory. Christianity is a problem for political culture because it devalues worldly glory, subordinating it to spiritual grace—an act of subordination that is given material and symbolic expression through the artistic and institutional glorification of saints. The political effect of the ideological hegemony of Christianity is, Machiavelli charges, “to have made the world weak, and to have handed it over as prey to the wicked” (1996: 278).
In The Prince, Machiavelli adopts the authorial persona of adviser to il principe nuovo rather than counselor to an established ruler (as was more typical of the humanist speculum principis genre) and develops an account of princely virtù in terms of the qualities that il principe nuovo requires if he is to meet the challenges of maintaining his rule and establishing a stable structure of rule that will survive beyond him, this being the basic criterion of achieving glory in the political domain.3 For my current purposes, I want to highlight only three features of Machiavelli’s text that would have been immediately apparent to Nietzsche and that compose the point to which Nietzsche refers in TI, namely, Machiavelli’s realism.
The first is that The Prince is grounded in a coolly analytical exploration of a range of political scenarios that il principe nuovo may confront depending on how he came to acquire his state and the internal conditions and external circumstances in which it is situated that embeds the reader within the task of thinking through political action under these conditions through consideration of a range of exemplars of success and failure drawn from classical history and contemporary events, both of which make them vivid to his humanist audience. We may think of the text as “a politics simulator” by analogy with the flight simulators on which pilots are trained; one is through which Machiavelli attempts to cultivate the art of political judgment that attends to the human, all too human motivations of political actors.
The second is that Machiavelli’s analysis is an exemplar of tragic vision in that he acknowledges—as a central part of his account—that the world in which we act is only ever partly intelligible to us and not necessarily receptive to our purposes. This is most clearly drawn out in Machiavelli’s treatment of the figure of fortuna and his acknowledgment that while political virtuosity can reduce one’s dependence on luck, it cannot fully eliminate it. Human beings are constitutively exposed to chance and necessity, and actors in the political domain are perhaps exceptionally vulnerable in this respect, hence any ethics—and any political ethics—must begin with the acknowledgment of the circumstances of human agency.
The third is that Machiavelli’s development of his account of princely virtù involves intense engagement with the Roman moralists—primarily Cicero and Seneca—in terms of both their accounts of the general virtues (prudence, justice, courage, temperance) and the specific virtues that human authors termed “princely virtues” (liberality, clemency, and fidelity). With respect to the former, Machiavelli is clear that a prince should act virtuously when possible but insists that he must be prepared to act otherwise and acquire the skill of judging when it is prudent to do so. Here Machiavelli sets himself against the Roman moralists and roots himself in the tradition of Thucydides and Roman historians such as Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. Machiavelli can be taken to be redefining virtù such that prudence now encompasses judging when departures from the “moral virtues” of justice, courage, and temperance in their classic Ciceronian exposition are appropriate to the purpose of sustaining the state. However, as Skinner (2017) has recently argued, Machiavelli largely (if not fully consistently) adopts a different tack when addressing the “princely virtues” in which he charges that what in our corrupt world, we take to be liberality, clemency, and fidelity are not the princely virtues as they should be understood but rather as they have been redescribed through the use of the rhetorical device of paradiastole by which a vice is made to appear as a virtue. We may note, as Skinner does not, that in each case the redescription is one that serves to align the name of the classical virtue more closely to the substance of Christian ethics; thus, liberality is construed in terms that align it with the Christian duty of beneficence to the poor and needy (where doing so will require increasing taxes and hence the risk of hatred by the citizenry), clemency in terms that align it with the Christian duty to forgive one’s enemies (where doing so increases threats to the state), and fidelity in terms that align it with the Christian duty of keeping one’s promises (even where others do not and this exposes the state to danger). In relation to these princely virtues, then, Machiavelli’s analysis is directed to exposing the way in which the humanist attempts to reconcile the ethical outlook of Christianity with classical virtue serve only to provide redescriptions of the latter in which what are more rightly taken to be princely vices that undermine the political agent’s ability to meet the challenges that they confront are now presented under the name of these virtues. It is notable in this context that a key part of Nietzsche’s charge against the priests in the first essay of GM is precisely that they deploy this technique of paradiastole in redescribing the noble virtues as vices—this is what the dialogue of Mr. Rash and Mr. Curious (GM I s.14) discloses.
How, though, does this focus on Machiavelli and virtù deepen our understanding of Nietzsche?
3 Nietzsche’s ethics of virtù
The first point that I want to draw out of this discussion of Machiavelli and the Renaissance for Nietzsche is that the realism that Nietzsche identifies himself as inheriting from Thucydides and Machiavelli and construes as “their absolute will not to fool themselves and to see reason in reality—not in ‘reason,’ still less in ‘morality’” (TI “What I owe to the ancients” s.2) is to be opposed to the “mendacity” and “falsification” that Nietzsche identifies with the Jewish priests and with Pauline Christianity. This psychological realism is, for Nietzsche, a principle of intellectual conscience, a methodological requirement for any ethical investigation of the natural history of humanity—and its presence or absence in any ethical culture that he investigates is symptomatic of the psychic health of that ethical culture.
Where Nietzsche takes himself to build on his predecessors is in his development of an analysis of human psychology that combines an account of human drives and of ethical culture that can, through the doctrine of will to power, both explain how ethical cultures emerge in which will to power takes pathological forms (i.e., in which it is manifested in ways that devalue itself) and provide an account of human flourishing not in terms of an ethical telos, an substantive ideal of perfection to be realized, but in terms of the conditions of an ethical culture in which human beings stand in appropriate practical relations to their ideals as challenges, in which they exhibit the relevant attitude toward their agency, one that he identifies with “freedom”—and recall that, for Nietzsche, will to power can be glossed as “the instinct for freedom” (GM II s.17)—conceived as “the will to self-responsibility” (TI Expeditions s.38). The ethical culture of the Renaissance to the extent that it is structured in terms of love of worldly glory is exemplary of one way in which this attitude can be expressed and it is so because it situates the individual with an agonal culture. Gloria mundi has three salient aspects for Nietzsche’s concerns. First, its achievement requires the exhibition of virtuosity in the relevant field. Second, it situates the actor within an agon, that is, in competitive relations with both contemporaries and past practitioners. Third, it affirms the value of this world. All three of these are needed on Nietzsche’s account for an ethical culture of human flourishing.
The salience of the institution of the agon and of agonal culture in this context is that it cultivates the disposition to challenge oneself through a mode of evaluation that privileges the achievement of virtuosity (more precisely, virtù in Machiavelli’s sense) in both specific practices such as politics, dramatic composition, sport, and the general practice of living a life. The institution of the agon and agonal culture more generally situates participants precisely in this stance of relating to one’s engagement in a practice as taking up the challenges that mastery of the practice requires, where such mastery is manifest in one’s ability to develop or alter what can count as an exemplary performance of the practice.4 (Thus, for example, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides may each be seen as altering our understanding of what can count as an exemplar of tragic drama.) It is important to note though that this agonic stance cannot be adopted at will, rather it is only through the praxis of agonic practice (in the dual sense of participation in an agonic practice and the practicing of this agonic relation to self) that agents become agents with the capacity and disposition to stand in this relation to themselves.
We can draw out the link to Nietzsche’s conception of freedom by considering the difference that is introduced in relating to the practicing of one’s practices as the praxis of agonic practice. The praxis of practice forms the agent through the development of their powers to engage in, and realize the goods of, the practice in question (to be able to overcome obstacles and resistances to mastery of the practice that are internal to participation in the practice, for example, the cultivation of the skills required) and, at the same time, the development of their power to engage in the self-directed exercise of one’s powers (i.e., to be able to overcome obstacles and resistances to mastery of the practice that are internal to one’s own current constitution as an agent). The praxis of agonic practice cultivates also the disposition to develop one’s powers to overcome the challenges posed by mastering the practice, including those challenges to achieving this mastery that are internal to one’s current constitution as an agent. Thus, the praxis of agonic practice cultivates an agonic relationship to oneself, a practical relationship to oneself characterized by a disposition to self-overcoming understood as the disposition to increase one’s powers to act and especially one’s ability to self-direct the exercise of one’s agency.
This power of self-direction refers to one’s ability to set and bind the exercise of one’s powers to one’s own ends and hence to take responsibility for oneself, for who one is, for what one’s projects are, for how one acts. To stand in this practical relationship to self is, on Nietzsche’s account, to exhibit “the will to self-responsibility” that distinguishes the autonomous agent (TI Expeditions s.38) and he gives expression to this understanding of freedom through the exemplary figure of the sovereign individual: “The human being with his own independent long will, the human being who is permitted to promise [der versprechen darf]” (GM II s.2). The sovereign individual is autonomous precisely because he is able and disposed to set his own ends as challenges to overcome and to bind his will to the task of realizing these ends as meeting these challenges.
To see the relationship of this view to the formal view of human flourishing that Nietzsche advances, we need only notice that as one’s powers (including one’s power to engage in the self-directed exercise of one’s powers) develop, so too do the demands of what can count as a challenge—and hence this activity of self-overcoming has no final telos (if the challenge can be overcome, it is not a final telos; if it cannot be overcome, it is not a challenge), rather it denotes a continuing process of self-overcoming. This conception of freedom thus discloses Nietzsche’s commitment to a view of human flourishing that is not pictured as directed at a final telos, but rather as a process of moving from, in Emerson’s terms, “the attained self” (one’s current constitution as an agent) to “the attainable self” (the constitution of one’s agency that one can achieve through taking up challenges, that is, pursuing valuable ends that one is or becomes capable of realizing).
If cogent, this argument shows how Nietzsche’s relation to Machiavelli provides him with an exemplar of a mode of theorizing that is engaged in a project of reevaluation and of an ethical culture—the Renaissance—that is practically engaged in the project of revaluing Christian values and of embracing a noble mode of valuation. But can reflection on Machiavelli provide any further insight into Nietzsche’s work? I think so.
One important insight that emerges from engagement with Machiavelli is particularly pertinent in relation to the figure of the sovereign individual as an exemplar of freedom through which Nietzsche draws a contrast between those who can credibly promise and those who cannot (GM II s.2). Although there is considerable debate about whether or not the sovereign individual represents some kind of ethical ideal for Nietzsche, I do not want here to focus on that debate beyond noting that being able to make credible commitments is a condition of possibility of ethical integrity. Rather I want to draw attention to a point that has received less attention, namely, Nietzsche’s characterization of the sovereign individual in the following passage:
The “free” man, the possessor of an enduring, unbreakable will, thus has his own standard of value: in the possession of such a will: viewing others from his own standpoint, he respects or despises; and just as he will necessarily respect his peers, the strong and the reliable (those with the prerogative to promise)—that is everyone who promises like a sovereign, ponderously, seldom, slowly, and is sparing with his trust, who confers an honour when he places his trust, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he is strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even “in the face of fate”: so he will necessarily be ready to kick the febrile whippets who promise without that prerogative, and will save the rod for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it passes his lips. (GM II s.2)
Here Nietzsche aligns the sovereign individual’s promising with the classical virtue of prudence that Machiavelli, like Thucydides and the Roman historians (Livy, Tacitus, et al.), endorses. Two points are particularly notable for our purposes. The first concerns why the sovereign individual “promises like a sovereign, ponderously, seldom, slowly, and is sparing with his trust” and why he “confers an honour when he places his trust.” The second concerns the relationship of this virtue to Christian morality.
With respect to the first point, we can note that prudence, for realists such as Thucydides and Machiavelli, entailed close attention not to what others say but what they do. To engage in promise-making with another, mutually binding yourself to one another (for example, through a treaty between states), is to make yourself dependent on the fate of another, to expose yourself to their exposure to chance and necessity. When Nietzsche writes that the sovereign individual is one “who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he is strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even ‘in the face of fate,’” he is drawing attention to this point (consider, for example, the United Kingdom’s Treaty with Poland which required the United Kingdom to come to its defense if subject to invasion by another state as occurred when Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939). Given that such promise-making exposes the individual to the fate of another, there are good reasons to consider the character of the actor to whom one is binding oneself. Are they trustworthy? This encompasses not only whether they are honest in their dealings, but also whether they are prudent in judgment and in action, that is, whether their conduct is liable through, for example, recklessness, cowardice, or hubris to expose you unnecessarily to fortuna. It is for just this reason that the sovereign individual, in engaging in promise-making with another, is conferring distinction because he or she is acknowledging the other as one who can be trusted and can be relied on to act prudently.
With respect to the second point, let us recall Machiavelli’s reevaluation of the princely virtue of fidelity in The Prince. Here, as Skinner (2017) argues, Machiavelli is not primarily making the point that the prince may need to do what is seen as evil for good reasons (a point that Machiavelli does make more generally), rather in chapter 18 of The Prince Machiavelli is charging that the classical virtue of fidelity, of keeping faith, has been redescribed through Christian morality as an unconditional duty, a categorical imperative. However, in a world in which many others cannot be relied onto keep faith, Machiavelli notes this amounts to redescribing and condemning—that is, reevaluating—prudential calculations about who to trust about what and to what extent as “cowardice or deceitfulness” (Skinner 2017: 151). Machiavelli is, thus, engaged in the project of reevaluating fidelity, of showing that the idea that you should maintain faith with anyone and everyone no matter what embodies “a dangerous misunderstanding of fides and its requirements” (Skinner 2017: 151). In this context, Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual should not be seen simply as the expression of a view on autonomy, on binding oneself to one’s own laws, but rather as the reclaiming, following Thucydides and Machiavelli, of the noble virtue of fidelity from Christian morality. The sovereign individual is characterized by mastery over the practice of promising which means knowing when to promise and when not to promise, but also when to keep, and when it is justifiable to break, one’s word.
4 Conclusion
In this chapter I have focused on one specific feature of Nietzsche’s argument in The Antichrist, namely, his appeal to the Renaissance concept of virtù. In doing so, I have tried to show that attending to what Nietzsche says about the Renaissance in this text and working through the concept of virtù in the hands of Machiavelli, the Renaissance thinker with whom Nietzsche most closely identifies, helps to clarify the nature of the problem that Nietzsche takes himself to be addressing and the project in which he is engaged. More specifically, we may note that Nietzsche finds in Machiavelli an attitude toward realism in ethical inquiry and agonism as a cultural ethos that he identifies with ethical cultures that support human flourishing. At the same time, I have sought to show that attending to Machiavelli helps to draw out features of Nietzsche’s understanding of the problem of Christianity and his reflections on the sovereign individual that have tended to be overlooked in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. There is much more than could be said here concerning Machiavelli’s and Nietzsche’s uses of history, the rhetorical composition of their works, their common recourse of exemplars, and their shared endorsement of republican political institutions. These topics must, alas, await another occasion.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Dan Conway for allowing me to pursue this topic and for his patience as I did so.
Notes
1 I take this point to be continuous with the focus on what ethical outlooks express that Huddleston (2015) identifies as central to Nietzsche’s critique of morality.
2 See Katsafanas 2018 for a fuller analysis of this point.
3 Debates concerning how to understand what Machiavelli is doing in the text-act that is The Prince are as legion as those concerning, for example, what Nietzsche is doing in the text-act that is GM. A particular point of contention is how this work relates to Machiavelli’s own republicanism—for my own view, see Owen (2016).
4 The phrase “develop or alter” is meant here to register the point that mastery can be exhibited both by taking an established way of performing the practice to new heights (for example, Mozart) or in transforming the way of performing the practice (for example, Beethoven).
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