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Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3242509."

My dissertation examines three, interrelated themes in Friedrich Nietzsche's early writings. The first theme is the moral imperatives that appear in these writings. These imperatives, which are scattered throughout The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations in seemingly haphazard fashion, articulate a rigorous, post-Kantian concept of morality designed to respond to the problems of modern nationalism and modern nihilism. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I outline the character, importance, and origin of Nietzsche's imperatives. The second theme I examine is the relationship between Nietzsche's imperatives and his political thought. I show, through close readings of Nietzsche's early texts, that they deploy a series of moral imperatives to reformulate the tasks and meaning of modern political life. These imperatives tell the political community what ought to be done to avoid the twin dangers of nihilism and nationalism by articulating a broad principle of justice with universally valid foundations. Politics, Nietzsche argues, unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, but like Kant, must bend its knee to necessary moral commands. The third theme examined in my dissertation is the emergence, in Nietzsche's early writings, of a political position that he will eventual call “great politics.” Great politics is Nietzsche's solution to the petty, or small, politics of modern nationalism and modern nihilism. This concept of politics shifts the realm of political struggle away from the state and towards those values that support the state and legitimate its existence in its modern form. It achieves this end by revaluing values in response to the devaluation of values in modernity. These values are expressed in Nietzsche's imperatives.

The contemporary turn to traditions in social and political theory, exemplified in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer, can be distinguished from other forms of traditionalism by the emphasis placed on a critical engagement with traditions. In critical traditionalism traditions are understood to embody debates and disagreements over their meaning, their scope, and their validity. It is argued that a turn to traditions offers the possibility of a politics in which the history and experience of past generations mattered. I also show that a politics with remembrance enhances the rationality of political action. I argue that neither Walzer nor MacIntyre adequately concern themselves with the issue of how we are related to traditions and to the past. How is it that we ought to find ourselves "in" a web of traditions? In Edmund Burke's concept of inheritance we find an articulate view of how one might understand oneself as part of a tradition. I examine to what extent Burkean living in tradition is compatible with a critical appropriation of tradition. My interpretation stresses the strong emotional resonance of the term "inheritance" and the way in which it is a reflection of family life. I conclude that criticism "within the family" may be subject to various difficulties, including the fear of offending the "fathers"; but I also argue that Burke's understanding of practical politics and the need to keep the language of justice from becoming platitudinous goes some distance toward mitigating these difficulties. I pursue the question of our relationship to traditions a bit further when I discuss Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being and Alfred Doeblin's Karl and Rosa. Kundera challenges the turn to traditions with his notion of kitsch. Doeblin challenges the view developed in the dissertation that our recollection of deceased relations (our dead ancestors for instance) may mediate a relationship to the past that is also critical.

The texts that play a major role in my dissertation include Hobbes's Leviathan, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Toward a Genealogy of Morals. My research is situated on the border between ethics and politics because I challenge the belief that ethical conduct always requires universal laws. The articulation of an ethical sensibility that is not grounded on a universal law has been one of the thorniest issues in political theory. Ethical reflection has been unnecessarily trapped between the poles of moral universalism and/or relativism. Through readings of Hobbes, Kant, and Nietzsche in reference to foundations and specific human feelings, I demonstrate that the absence of moral universals does not put an end to ethics but is the condition for a new ethical sensibility that overcomes the this opposition. A critical ethic confronts the difficulty of articulating the relationship between ethics and politics in an age of disenchantment.

The aim of my dissertation is to explore the aesthetic approaches to questions of authority and justice in a post-metaphysical age in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. Both turn from a rationalist foundation for political order, and suggest that our aesthetic response to the world is central in forming our sense of legitimacy and allegiance as well as in orienting us ethically. Central to this response is a celebration of the plurality and relativity of human affairs in the form of a sense of tragic pleasure which I argue is of great ethical relevance to our post-metaphysical condition. This "aestheticization" places both Nietzsche and Arendt's work in great tension with conceptions of politics based primarily on concerns about social and economic justice. I explore these tensions, and argue that the line of thinking begun by Nietzsche is brought to real fruition in Arendt's work. As such, she offers an important alternative to the nihilistic and anti-political tendencies in Nietzsche's work, tendencies which haunt post-structuralist thinkers indebted to Nietzsche. Hence, this dissertation is situated between modernist rationalism and post-structuralist relativism.

In the past decade the burgeoning field of gay and lesbian studies has been mired in a philosophic and epistemic morass over the question of sexual identity. Known as the essentialist/constructivist debate, there is much agreement among scholars that the debate has outlived its usefulness, but it persists nonetheless to divide gay and lesbian communities, within academia as well as without. This question of sexual identity is not without consequences, as the perceived determinants of sexuality inform the social and political question "What is to be done with the sodomite, the homosexual, the gay and lesbian person?" Examining the epistemological models developed in the Nineteenth century to explain first the sodomite, and then the homosexual, I argue that these same models of criminal deviance, medical disorder, and psychological illness circulate still in the modern representation of the gay or lesbian person. Central to this debate over sexual identity, is political identification. How the State represents gays and lesbians in policy decisions will have a great impact on the daily lives of millions of gay and lesbian people. From civil rights and employment rights to privacy rights and protection from harassment and violence, the modern State has become both arbiter for, and contributor to the political creation of the gay/lesbian 'other.' Examining this process of political identification in the policy texts and political debates in The United States, I focus on the recent controversy over allowing "homosexuals" in the military, demonstrating how the state deploys both essentialist and constructivist strategies, often contradictorily in its construction of the modern gay and lesbian person. Finally, I examine the gay community's "flight to essentialism," questioning whether this recent trend is really the most productive and strategic conceptualization of identity. I conclude that although it may prove useful in the short run, it may also open the door to forms of regulation and scrutinization of our intimate lives previously unknown. There is much which suggests that this process of heightened surveillance and control is already underway.

This dissertation aspires to revive the dystopian liberalism which identifies the avoidance of the worst as the fundamental aim of politics. The theory I present consists of three elements overall: The first element is what I call the Priority Claim, stating that the most important aim of social institutions should, morally speaking, be to avoid cruelty qua worst evil (Part I). The second element is the identification of the informal structure, the set of social norms within a population, as an important site to realize this ideal (Part II). The third element is the application of the principle that cruelty be avoided to the in-formal structure (Part III). This leads to an account of desirable social norms and in turn to a concrete answer to the question how individuals can in their everyday lives do their part to create a world that is overall less cruel and more humane.

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Philosophy