Nietzsche’s Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy

By Donovan Miyasaki

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Date: 10/21/2022

Description:

“Nietzsche’s Immoralism” begins a two-volume critical reconstruction of a Nietzschean socialist politics. Nietzsche’s deterministic ideal of amor fati cannot be individually adopted. However, we can create its social conditions thanks to an under-appreciated aspect of his will-to-power psychology: we are driven not toward domination but resistance, a heightened feeling of power provoked by equal challenges that enables the non-instrumental affirmation of suffering. This leads to his distinctive immoralism: the abandonment of the morality of improvement for a historical materialist politics of breeding that produces future higher types through changes to our material conditions. Politics becomes first philosophy; not grounded in moral values but instead the very source of their legitimacy. Moreover, against his professed aristocratism, Nietzsche’s immoralism provides a stronger foundation for a renewed left, attacking conservatism at its root: the belief in a foundational moral order.