Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times by Richard Avramenko Ethan Alexander-Davey

Author:Richard Avramenko,Ethan Alexander-Davey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Spiritual Aristocracy in Democratic Times

This last point, that the few and the many share a fellowship in this new type of aristocracy, points toward Nietzsche’s broader motivation in developing this new type of aristocracy, as well as its philosophical significance. In this section, I argue Nietzsche transforms the traditional Natural Aristocracy in order to make possible human excellence in a democratic age.

Many social critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including most prominently Burke and de Maistre, challenged the democratization of the modern age on the grounds that it dissolved all traditional modes and orders—communities, religions, moral systems—and leaves behind an anarchic system in which all conflict can be resolved only by force. For these conservative thinkers, the modern age must arrest the progress of equality and restore the Natural Aristocracy represented (imperfectly) by the ancien regime.

Nietzsche resists the turn back to the Natural Aristocracy because, like Tocqueville, Nietzsche sees the “democratic movement” as “inevitable.”[56] All traditional communities built on natural inequality are dissolving in the wake of “Europe’s democratic movement,” replaced a vast sea of individuals who demonstrate “increasing similarity” and “growing detachment” from their origins. What results is an “essentially supra-national and nomadic type of person,” the “European in a state of becoming.” In this condition, human beings are loosed from all sources of meaning in their lives, and for most human beings, this is disorienting. As a result, the many flock together into one mass “herd,” as all share the need for meaning but nobody individually has a solution to it. Most human beings become “useful, industrious, abundantly serviceable, and able herd animal man.”[57]

Nietzsche’s fear of this “democratization of Europe” is quite different from Burke’s or de Maistre’s. It is not that conflict will become irresolvable and hence war will increase (although he does indeed believe that too). Rather, it is that this herd mentality will lead to the “leveling and mediocritization of man,” that the herd mentality will deaden the ambition that is a precondition for human achievement and excellence. This is an endemic problem with democracy that Nietzsche offers little guidance for overcoming.

However, at the same time, Nietzsche thinks that this “democratization of Europe” provides an exceptional opportunity not to return to the Natural Aristocracy of the old, but rather to introduce something new. Namely, he says that the “same new conditions that generally lead to a leveling and mediocritization of man—a useful, industrious, abundantly serviceable, and able herd animal man—are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional people who possess the most dangerous and attractive qualities.” Democratization destroys the sources of meaning, which drives all individuals together into a herd in search for meaning. But this herd cannot supply the meaning individuals desire, and so the herd longs for “exceptional people” or spiritual leaders to provide such meaning. Indeed, Nietzsche claims, this democratization “is at the same time an involuntary exercise in the breeding of tyrants—understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual [geistigste].”[58]

What is this new condition that

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