There is a Parmenidean inclination of the state apparatus, according to Thoreau if we take into account the following reflection of Nietzsche: “But Heraclitus will be eternally right in saying that being is an empty fiction.
Is there a link between Henry Thoreau’s civil disobedience (in the work of the same name) and the values that would lead to a new morality of Nietzsche? Is civil disobedience a glimmer of aristocratic morality as opposed to Christian morality and the ascetic moral ideal? To what extent might this new morality foresee the coming of the ubermensch? To what extent does the power of language and metaphysical signification succeed in legitimizing the power of the state?
Thoreau’s work is not a statement against his political enemies (in this case, the general power structure of an oppressive state) but against those who passively submit to that structure without doing anything to remedy it. Thus, he expresses it: “My quarrel is not against distant enemies, but against those who, close to home, cooperate with those who are far away and obey their orders, and without whom the former would be inoffensive.”
He would later propose the example of the number of existing newspapers and pamphlets that rebelled against slavery but did not manage to exert any real risk or self-affirming action on the subjects who produced them. He even goes so far as to criticize the passivity (typical of a herd, as Nietzsche would indicate) implicit in the very act of voting. Throughout his work, Thoreau denounces slavery as a state policy. On the other hand, physical coercion is practiced by state agents to collect taxes, which are compulsory and, as an aggravating factor, directed to the acquisition of weapons. He also denounces the passive and non-conciliatory practice that comes with the mere fact of voting. He puts it this way: “Even to vote for what is just is not to do anything because it is imposed.” and “When the majority vote at last for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to it or because there is very little left to abolish through their vote.” In contrast to this, what such situations would require is a self-assertion of the individual within the Nietzschean aristocrat’s own style.
“Not to take their enemies and their misfortunes seriously is the sign of strong natures that are in full development and that possess a superabundance of plastic, regenerative and curative force, which knows how to forget.” This sentence in Genealogy of Morals is in keeping with his way of evaluating judgments as to whether or not they favor life. In this sense, it finds a meeting point with the political thought of Thoreau and his call for a form of direct action, of civil disobedience that pays no attention to the precepts established by a form of government but by the same moral and self-affirmative conscience of the individual. As an enemy of this, we have, in Nietzsche’s case, Christian morality, so suppressive of the Dionysian spirit of vitality and festive drunkenness, which Nietzsche expresses as follows: “Singing and dancing the human being manifests himself as a member of a superior community: he has unlearned to walk and talk and is on the way to take to the air dancing.”
This search for the ascetic ideal manages to weaken the individual, subjecting him to a current of annulment of his vital force, indirectly preventing him from actively rebelling against the mechanisms of power, in Thoreau’s case against the immoral state, which is the main object of his work.
Is there, then, a connection between Thoreau’s libertarianism and Nietzschean morality? In terms of the hierarchy of mental states within the individual necessary for his full living in the world, at least, yes. When Thoreau speaks of the degeneration of the man of his time, it is hard not to automatically generate an analogy with the counterpart to Nietzsche’s ubermensch.
“The American has degenerated into a strange specimen, an Odd Fellow who may be identified by the development of his gregarious sense, by the manifest absence of intelligence, and by a jovial self-confidence, and whose first and basic concern, in coming into this world, is limited to the asylums being kept in good order; an exemplary person who, rather than girding his loins to support widows and orphans, has dressed to go fund-raising; in short, someone who only risks living covered by the policy of the insurance company that has promised him a decent burial.”
Here, Thoreau is speaking to us of a subject who is in the world but who does not live, in the broad sense of the word, inasmuch as he is incapable of thinking intelligently, of making his own way, of seeking his own truth and fighting for his own freedom (like the lion stage in Zarathustra). In Nietzschean terms, he is a man who has achieved nothing by transcending himself into an ubermensch. That pacification, that sort of ontological castration that Nietzsche accuses, is, in turn, for Thoreau, the cause that makes a legitimate rebellion of the subject against a disproportionate and harmful state apparatus impossible.
The state itself, for Thoreau, does not want man to become ubermensch; does not want him to be able to draw on his own conscience or his own reason to generate new meanings. In reference to the latter, Thoreau enunciates the following: “Why is he not more willing to anticipate reform? Why does he not take into consideration his wise minority? Why does he shout and resist before he is hurt? Why does he not encourage his citizens to analyze their faults and do better than he could? Why does he always crucify Christ, excommunicate Copernicus, and Luther, and declare Washington and Franklin rebels?” It is from this scheme of power that one could interpret the birth of the slave morality proposed by Nietzsche, which he expresses as follows: “Whereas all aristocratic morality is born of a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality opposes a “no” to everything that is not its own; this “no” is its creative act. This total change of point of view is characteristic of hatred: the morality of the slaves has always needed an opposite, external world, it has always needed external stimulants to take action; its action is a reaction”.
The state, insofar as it creates the conditions for non-reflection and insofar as its confrontation with the individual is ultimately through physical coercion, generates the conditions necessary to create an authentic slave morality. The relationship of the modern individual, heir to the industrial revolution, to military service also contributes to this scheme: “A natural and very common consequence of excessive respect for the law is that we can see a line of soldiers-colonel, captain, corporal, privates, artillerymen, etc.-all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to war against their will. Yes, against their conscience and their common sense, which makes every step of the march more arduous and their hearts heavier”.
Military life, in Nietzschean concepts, reduces man to being almost an animal to the extent that he is incapable of forging his own schemes and metaphors, of seeking his own conceptualization of reality that allows him to make correct decisions. Everything that elevates man above the animal depends on this capacity to volatilize intuitive metaphors into a scheme; in short, on the capacity to dissolve a figure into a concept.
In militarism, according to Thoreau, there is what Nietzsche would understand as a brutal repression of the primordial instincts, the axes of virtue. “To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula of decadence: as long as life ascends, happiness equals instinct.” The fight against instincts, which in this case for Thoreau translates into a fight against the senses, against man understood as a raw biological being subject to death, is one of the lowest tools exercised by the state through the prison system. “The state never voluntarily confronts the intellectual or moral conscience of a man but has to deal with his body, with his senses. It does not arm itself with superior wisdom or honesty but resorts to brute force”. In this way, the language used by the state is that of brute physical coercion, never that of re-signification through language as a reflective tool for the individual.
Language, as inspired by individual metaphors, constitutes a sacred and inalienable form of expression within the life of the subject. This is expressed by Nietzsche when he states: “While every intuitive metaphor is individual and has no other identical one and therefore always knows how to save itself from all classification, the great edifice of concepts boasts the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and breathes into logic the rigor and coldness peculiar to mathematics.” We can deduce, from the state attitudes pointed out by Thoreau, that the state uses this Roman edifice-like conceptual rigidity to prevent free thinking and free definition within the subject. In this way, language, and even more, the avoidance of generating a new type of language, would become an important axis within the mechanism of control.
There is a Parmenidean inclination of the state apparatus, according to Thoreau if we take into account the following reflection of Nietzsche: “But Heraclitus will be eternally right in saying that being is an empty fiction. The <<apparent world>> is the only one: the <<true world>> is nothing but a lying addition… So, if in Nietzschean terms, we assume the world as an appearance, as an ebb and flow of meanings subject to constant transformation, the very ontological pretension of the state apparatus (at least that which comes to extend itself as a uniform and imperial order) would become a lie. A lie that, beyond existing as a simple isolated fiction, acts through negation or through the reactive negation to which Nietzsche relates as proper to the slave.
Finally, the conclusion Thoreau reaches, and which goes hand in hand with the Nietzschean conception of the ubermensch, is that the state must see the subject as more than a statistic, number, or raw life susceptible to be eliminated at any time should it present a threat to the subject’s existence. He concludes thus: “No state can ever be truly free and enlightened until it recognizes the individual as a superior and independent power, from which it derives its own power and authority, and treats him accordingly.” It is in this way that the links between Nietzsche’s attempt at the free individual responsible for his own actions find a solid foothold in Thoreau’s central concept of civil disobedience.
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