The Sovereignty of Joy: Nietzsche's Vision of Grand Politics

Evan Simpson is dean of Humanities at McMaster University and the editor
of Anti-foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations between
Hermeneutics and Analysis.

Friedrich Nietzsche is often thought of as a nihilistic enemy of
morality and politics. A more benign picture emerges from this work.
According to McIntyre, “tragic joy is the poetic dissonance that
stands at the heart” of Nietzsche’s radical philosophy, exerting
sovereignty over all the rest. Joy in the actual inspires a critique of
customary morality as the negation of reality but supports a natural
morality in which the proper organization of a people is in many
respects anticipated by Plato’s Statesman.

In the notions of “tragic joy” and “poetic dissonance,” the
author gives fair warning that his interpretation of Nietzsche will
confront challenging paradoxes and enigmas. Central among these
challenges is making morality as a sense of community consistent with
the freedom of noble individuals. Part of the explanation lies in a
distinction between the free-spiritedness that comes from liberation
from old social constraints and positive freedom, which is autonomy. The
latter state combines classical freedom with modern individuality and
includes both love of that part of the actual which is humankind and
proper contempt for the all-too-human masses below the Overman. This
noble individual becomes a “legislator” who expresses command by
redefining a culture rather than by exercising public power.

Frequent references to Heidegger and a separate chapter on Rousseau
help to place this account with respect to other views. However, the
absence of an explicit and detailed comparison of Nietzsche’s
conception of the legislator with Rousseau’s is regrettable, for in
both this crucial idea is obscure. In the end, it remains slightly
misleading to employ political metaphors, such as “legislation” and
“sovereignty,” and to speak of “grand politics,” when the ideal
described is a culture that fosters the cultivation of masterly people.
If such a culture is imaginable, it is unclear how it would include a
form of politics anything like the social institution familiar to modern
society. If grand politics is something else, then another
focus—“Nietzsche’s vision of transfigured community,”
perhaps—would be more appropriate.

McIntyre’s reading, although necessarily selective, refuses to be
defeated by the dissonance of the corpus. Other readers of Nietzsche
will find the account absorbing.