Nietzsche on Conflict, Struggle, and War

Pearson’s book is a systematic attempt to reconcile an apparent tension in Nietzsche’s view of conflict. There is no shortage of scholars who read Nietzsche as more or less in keeping with modern liberal-democratic sensibilities, yet this position seems difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s blunt endorsement of the “merciless destruction of everything degenerate” (EH “Books”; BT 4), his suggestions that slavery and war are required to support true culture (GSt; KSA 1:764–77, 767), and his antagonism against equal rights (BGE 44). These claims require contextualization and evaluation, and a clear account of Nietzsche’s view of conflict would greatly assist in that endeavor.Broadly construed, conflict can take on one of two forms: unmeasured or measured. Unmeasured conflict is destructive or eliminative; it aims at annihilating or excising the enemy. By contrast, measured conflict is competitive or restrained; it aims at conquering or dominating the enemy. An example of the former is a no-holds-barred war, of the latter the Olympic Games. At face value, these two types of conflict are irreconcilable (murderous violence is at least as out of place in the Olympic games as mere competition would be between opposing factions during war). What, then, should we make of Nietzsche, who at one time seems to celebrate measured conflict, yet at others calls for unmeasured conflict? What makes answering this question doubly difficult is that in addition to valorizing both measured and unmeasured conflict, Nietzsche occasionally appears to revile one or the other form. What do we make of this?In setting out to clarify Nietzsche’s view of conflict, Pearson identifies two main interpretive camps. On the one hand is what Pearson calls the “militaristic” and the “radical aristocratic” readings of Nietzsche. This is the Nietzsche of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Alfred Bäumler, and Martin Heidegger. In this camp, Nietzsche is read at the most extreme as a fascist and a “diabolical warmonger,” and at the tamest, as an aristocratic elitist who supports the violent “exploitation and exclusion of the weaker members of society” (30, 32). In opposition to these readings, alternative theories of Nietzsche’s view of conflict have been suggested by such scholars as Walter Kaufmann, Stanley Cavell, and James Conant. Pearson includes each of these in the “agonistic” camp, who read Nietzsche as arguing for spiritual rather than physical or literal conflict, and who dismiss Nietzsche’s overt praises of violence as mere hyperbolic rhetoric.Pearson frames his work as a reconciliation of these two camps. On the one hand, Pearson points out that Kaufmann and others in the agonistic camp have “sanitized Nietzsche,” which made him more palatable to contemporary readers, but which problematically dismissed several elements of Nietzsche’s genuine philosophy (31). Similarly, Pearson argues that the aristocratic reading (and especially the militaristic reading) is misguided, as not all of Nietzsche’s calls to conflict are straightforwardly violent and unmeasured in nature. Pearson’s thesis, in broad strokes, is that Nietzsche approves of both measured and unmeasured conflict in different contexts. In outline, Pearson dedicates part I of his text to exploring the two conflicting readings and developing his view of Nietzsche’s approval of both kinds of conflict, and part II contains Pearson’s novel solution to this problem: synthesizing measured and unmeasured conflict into what he calls organizational conflict. Pearson’s main claim in part II is that Nietzsche, properly understood, is an advocate for organizational conflict and that, for Nietzsche, the measured/unmeasured distinction is a false dichotomy.Like measured conflict, organizational conflict does not aim at the wholesale destruction of the enemy. Instead, organizational conflict attempts to incorporate or use whatever it conquers (for example, by exploiting it for resources or including it in a hierarchal organization). Similarly, like unmeasured conflict, organizational conflict destroys or excises whatever cannot be incorporated. Pearson compares this process to biological digestion, by which the body uses what it consumes to build itself up (measured conflict) and excretes whatever is unserviceable (unmeasured conflict). Thus, Pearson argues that Nietzsche’s view is consistent and that his advocacy of both measured and unmeasured conflict should be understood as complementary parts of a healthy system, whether biological, spiritual, or sociopolitical.Throughout his text, Pearson spends considerable time tracking the development of Nietzsche’s thought from his earliest views on conflict (primarily found in GSt and HC) to his most mature (EH, TI, and other late works). According to Pearson, Nietzsche’s earliest formations of conflict are based on Schopenhauerian metaphysics, a metaphysics Nietzsche ultimately rejects. As Nietzsche’s thought develops, some of the earlier Schopenhauerian elements drop out of the picture before it finally takes on its most mature form, in which Nietzsche conceives of conflict as intimately connected with his reflections on life as will to power.Those are the central features of Pearson’s work as I read it. Here I explore a few critical concerns I have with the book. Pearson relies heavily (and in some chapters, nigh exclusively) on Nietzsche’s unpublished literary remains. While some elements of the Nachlass are unquestionably taken to contain Nietzsche’s considered views (notably, those works that were prepared and intended for publication by Nietzsche himself: AC, NCW, and EH), there is no small debate concerning the rest (his early, unpublished essays, lectures, and notes). The debate turns on two related issues. First, we know that Nietzsche used his notebook material extensively in compiling his various publications, the implication being that the essays and notes in his Nachlass contain the “leftovers,” with no way to reliably distinguish between elements Nietzsche would endorse and those he would reject. Second, it is significant that Nietzsche requested that much of what we now call the Nachlass be destroyed after his death. These two facts together imply that what remained unpublished may have been, at least by Nietzsche’s lights, of dubious merit.The apocryphal nature of the Nachlass is potentially a problem for Pearson’s account, at least as he currently frames it. Much of his framing in support of organizational conflict is predicated on a few apparent contradictions between various Nachlass passages, or else between the Nachlass and Nietzsche’s published works. By way of example, the apparent contradiction that drives nearly the whole first half of his book arises only by comparing Nietzsche’s claims in GSt and HC, two unpublished essays Nietzsche gifted to Cosima Wagner in 1872. While Pearson’s exegetical work on these two essays is both convincing and interesting, for better or for worse, there are few Nietzsche scholars who would hold that these two essays are representative of Nietzsche’s considered philosophical views.My second concern is related to the first but is not reliant on the questionable status of the Nachlass. If we grant that both HC and GSt contain Nietzsche’s considered views, a troubling dilemma arises. Pearson takes the two texts to be advocating for two opposite forms of conflict: measured in HC and unmeasured in GSt. To reconcile the disparity between these two accounts, Pearson argues that in GSt Nietzsche was assuming a Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and thus that the murderous conflict in GSt evaporates to the degree that Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche’s thought wanes. This allows him to reconcile GSt with HC and, more broadly, with Nietzsche’s later thought. However, GSt and HC were written at the same time, and HC contains distinctly anti-Schopenhauerian ideas. For example, in HC Nietzsche explores how the Greeks transformed their violent impulses into sport (52–53). But this kind of self-plasticity is not available in the deeply pessimistic, determinist worldview Schopenhauer presents, where both character and will are intractably fixed, so an argument can be made that HC is predicated on a rejection of (or, at the very least, a departure from) Schopenhauerian metaphysics. This brings us to the dilemma. Either Nietzsche had already rejected Schopenhauer’s influence by the time GSt and HC were written, in which case Pearson cannot explain away the unmeasured violence in GSt by Nietzsche’s future rejection of Schopenhauer, or else HC and GSt are written out of two irreconcilable perspectives (such that each assumes a different metaphysics from the other: one Schopenhauerian, one not). Since Pearson explicitly rejects perspectivism as both a premature and dissatisfying explanation for resolving tension in Nietzsche’s works, he cannot accept the latter (30). But if Nietzsche’s support of unmeasured violence in GSt cannot be explained away by Nietzsche’s eventual rejection of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, it seems that either Pearson will need to rethink how Nietzsche’s views on conflict might be subject to his broader doctrine of perspectivism, or else he will need to provide some further account to reconcile HC and GSt and, more broadly, GSt and Nietzsche’s mature thought.My third concern is that organizational conflict is evaluatively lopsided. Someone from the aforementioned “radical aristocratic” camp would presumably find nothing amiss in adding agonal and measured conflict to her reading of Nietzsche’s praise of violence, but someone from the “agonal” camp would presumably find it very difficult, if not impossible, to fit unmeasured violence, excision, and destruction into his reading of merely spiritual or competitive conflict. It is thus far easier to read Pearson’s organizational conflict as an expansion of the aristocratic reading rather than as a bridge between the aristocratic and agonistic camps.Last, I want to point out a few things that Pearson doesn’t say. Particularly noteworthy is his relative lack of engagement with some of the more recent relevant scholarship on Nietzsche’s view of conflict, for example, in Christa Davis Acampora’s Contesting Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He and Acampora have some significant points of divergence, especially in their views of unmeasured conflict in Nietzsche. While Pearson does cite Acampora from time to time throughout his book, he relegates his most significant disagreements to footnotes (including a rather lengthy one in chapter 3). I think Pearson’s book would feel more in touch had he included a more sustained treatment of contemporary works that offer opposing accounts, especially where his account is at odds with the others.These concerns notwithstanding, I find Pearson’s book refreshing. I applaud in particular his careful analysis of a few unfamiliar scholars of Nietzsche’s thought, for example, in his tracking of Julius Mayer’s influence on Nietzsche’s will to power (through his text On Release), and Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, a copy of which Nietzsche owned and heavily annotated, and which very likely informed his mature conception of drives and affects (207). Pearson’s account of organizational conflict also sheds new light on the will to power, and for that reason I would recommend this text to those interested in that element of Nietzsche’s thought.