I think the glorification of crime is a very real phenomenon, particularly among young men. In my experience, the posters hanging on the walls of college dorms will generally be of either famous musicians (the poet archetype) or various Hollywood villains (e.g., Tony Montana of Scarface seems to have enduring popularity, Tyler Durden of Fight Club and Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix's Joker as well). A Batman poster is the sort of thing you have your parents buy for you as a kid. As a teenager or young adult, you get a poster of the Joker. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. Although those film references are more Gen X than current.

But I’ve always suspected that the antihero would eventually morph into a fully antisocial hero at some point.

I can’t comment on Nietzsche, but is the anti-hero, and the glorification of crime and anti-social pretentions part of the West’s apparent self-loathing and deconstruction, where (for many) only forms of subversion are deemed worthy of veneration?

I think that's part of it. I am interested to see where Landa takes it. I think another factor is a sort of perspectivism that justifies just about anything, which then leads to a sort of artistic/aesthetic preference for the transgressive simply because it is exciting but also no longer beyond the pale. So, the good old fashioned bourgeois boredom Flaubert captures in Madame Bovary and that Tolstoy picks up in Anns Karenina is a factor.

And then there is also Mark Fisher's suggestion of the role of capitalism in generating a dominant anthropology where "keeping it real," i.e., being most authentic, most oneself, is necessarily to adopt the role of the egoistic utility maximizer. Fisher looks at pop culture a lot and one of his comparisons is the old time, "brotherhood/community ' oriented classic mafia stories, and the transition to fully neoliberal era heist movies where everyone is a wholly atomized self-seeker (e.g. The Godfather of Goodfellas versus Heat or Baby Driver). The evolution of the Fast and the Furious might parallel this.

That's very interesting and certainly resonated with some of my thinking.

Have you ever reflected on Nietzsche’s initial identification of Wagner as a kind of “great hope,” followed later by his disillusionment and condemnation? You can almost see the need for an Übermensch as a kind of antidote for the sorts of transformative cultural heroes who promise renewal but will eventually will let you down.

Did you have Luigi Mangione in mind by any chance? He that shot a healthcare CEO in the back, on the street, at point blank range, and has become a cult figure in the US and beyond due to the perceived injustices of the US health insurance scheme.

I wanted to do a reading group on Ishay Landa's The Joy of the Knife: The Nietzschean Glorification of Crime. It is a chapter from his The Overman in The Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture. It covers a topic I have been mulling over for a while and it is also very accessible and deals with popular culture icons I think most will know (e.g., Hannibal Lector, everyone's favorite cannibal :grin: ). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wonderful. Another Critical Marxist misreading Nietzsche. If you’re going to stand a chance of doing justice to Nietzsche’s prose, it’s a good idea to get some fundamentals right. Landa tries to situate Nietzsche within a Marxist framework as an ideological apologist for a specific, "Dionysian" form of bourgeois crime. This is a reductive and moralizing interpretation which misses the point.

“The Joy of the Knife" claims that Nietzsche performs an ideological sleight of hand by glorifying a specific, immaterial, "spiritual" form of crime (the "joy of the knife") to metaphorically justify the real, material violence of capitalist competition and class hierarchy. The criminal becomes a symbol of rebellious individuality, but only to ultimately serve as a "guardian angel of private property" by directing rebellion away from material critique and towards a metaphysical struggle against "mass society."

This is a fundamental misreading. Nietzsche is the philosopher of **immanence**, not transcendence. The will to power is not a metaphysical entity "inside" us (a ghost in a machine); it is the genetic and differential principle of forces in the world itself. The body is not a vessel for a spirit; it is a complex, dynamic arrangement of forces.

The Nietzschean body is a "play of forces”. The "joy of the knife" is not an abstract idea but a capacity for affecting and being affected. It is the feeling of a force expanding and overcoming resistance. To interpret this as "idealism" is to completely miss Nietzsche's radical materialism of forces. Landa’s claim that Nietzsche ignores "material motivation" fails because it operates with a crude, economic notion of the "material." For Nietzsche, the drive and feeling of power is the primary material reality. Landa claims that Nietzsche's philosophy is a "recuperation for bourgeois purposes" and that his criminal ultimately justifies the existing social order by rebelling against "mass society" rather than property relations. He is a "guardian angel of private property."

But Nietzsche is not a conservative or an apologist; he is a radical genealogist. His project is not to justify any existing order but to show how all orders (including bourgeois morality and law) are founded on contingent, violent, and often ignoble beginnings. Genealogy is not about finding the origin but about tracing the descent and emergence of concepts. It is a history of the present designed to show that what we accept as true and necessary (our morals, our laws, our sense of justice) is historically constructed and shot through with power relations. Nietzsche doesn't defend bourgeois property; he asks “What violent history, what forgotten suffering, what will to power instituted this concept of "property" and made it seem sacred?
The goal is to denaturalize and destabilize the present order, not to affirm it. Nietzsche's "yes" is not a yes to
what is but a yes to what becomes, to what differs. The "individualism" Nietzsche champions is not the bourgeois individual (a product of the market and state power, but the "Overman" , an overcoming of the human, all-too-human type produced by modern society.

Landa links Nietzsche to Sade, arguing that his philosophy is essentially sadistic, advocating the infliction of pain for the pleasure of mastery. It uses the figure of Hannibal Lecter as an exemplar of this Nietzschean sadism. This is a moralistic and psychological reduction. Nietzsche's interest in hardness, suffering, and cruelty is ethical, not psychological. It is about the conditions for artistic and spiritual creation. The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression. It is the feeling of a force being equal to its concept. It is the feeling of the artist wielding the chisel, the philosopher wielding the concept, the warrior wielding the sword perfectly. To reduce this to a psycho-pathology of "bloodlust" is to completely miss its aesthetic and ontological dimension.

Landa also says Nietzsche’s individualism is merely a means to a collectivist, hierarchical end, thus betraying its supposedly liberatory potential. But Nietzsche's "individual" is not the liberal subject. It is a transindividual site of forces. The "Will to Power" is not what an individual *has*; the individual is what the will to power becomes in a specific configuration. The Overman is not a super-powered individual. The Overman names a process, a going-across, a transformation of the human into something else. It is about the creation of new possibilities, new ways of being, new values. It is not about the triumph of one individual over others but about the emergence of a new form of life that transcends the current human economy of ressentiment and bad conscience. His purpose is not to glorify any specific crime or social order but to provide the tools for a ruthless critique of all values, especially the moral ones we hold most dear. He doesn't offer a new system to believe in but a method for questioning,

Landa’s major error is to read Nietzsche as prescribing a content ("be a criminal who loves the knife"). Nietzsche’s rebellion is not against "mass society" on behalf of a bourgeois elite, but against the "herd instinct" within all of us, the instinct that prefers comfortable lies to dangerous truths, that prefers slave morality to the difficult task of creating new values. His war is not between social classes but between different types of forces, active and reactive, that cut across every individual and every social formation.

I wonder if Nietzsche is the most misread of popular philosophers.

I haven't made it through the whole thing yet. I agree in part; I am not wild about the "Marxist" framing either. The part that originally grabbed my eye when skimming it on Hannibal Lecter didn't fall into this as much. I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think it causes Landa to miss some pretty obvious counter examples. For one, the spiritual, artistic, and economic home of gangster rap is America's urban ghettos, just as the home of the cult of prohibition gangsters was low-income working-class neighborhoods. Likewise, the fetishization of evil (or at least its outward, macabre symbols) in the horror movie scene, and groups like Korn, or Rob Zombie (who crosses over into film) issues more from the trailer parks of economically marginal areas in the South, Appalachia, and the Midwest than from bourgeois suburbs (so too for the hardcore punk stream of horror fetishization, which comes from working class urban neighborhoods. Hence Dickies and Carhart work clothes being an enduring part of that style; it's what young mechanics and factory workers showed up in to shows after work).

Now, to be fair, not all of this is necessarily "Nietzschean" in its "glorification," so perhaps it doesn't fit his target. However, some of it certainly is. The fetishization of serial killers he describes is at least equally shared by the working class as the bourgeoisie. Arguably, it's almost "classist" to assume that the "proletariat" cannot get the appeal in the same way :smile: .

However, the thread he follows does seem quite relevant to me. Whether the reading of Nietzsche as aligned with a certain form of capitalism (or more accurately, a certain form of life within the context of capitalism) is the "correct reading of Nietzsche" is less interesting to me than that elements of such a view have clearly been a very popular and influential reading of Nietzsche. For instance, I've seen Nietzsche invoked by Hollywood filmmakers, hip hop stars, and some rock stars (e.g., David Bowie and Iggy Pop) in this sort of way.

This isn't an explicit justification of capitalism (which I don't think is what Landa is saying from what I've read). Rather, capitalism is what it is, and there is a certain sort of way to live in it and take advantage of it. It is only "justified" or "preferable" in that it leaves open the path to go beyond it as a sort of Dionysian overcomer. Capitalism is a useful expedient because it clears away the "tyranny of the herd" (socialism or progressive liberalism) as well as the calcified rule of old ideas/traditions/norms and their protectors, the old aristocracy (e.g., forms of conservative liberalism). The part on the Loeb and Leopold Trial did not suggest to me: "Nietzsche is advocating for the interests of the bourgeoisie," but rather that the latter has a certain strong affinity for elements of Nietzsche's thought. There is a difference between making Nietzsche a prophet of capitalism and making him a useful thinker for certain strains within the culture that emerges from capitalism.

In some respects, I think Nietzsche actually does align with many influential liberals quite well though. Consider Mill's distain for custom as a limit on the exceptional individual, or the strain in liberalism that abhors the influence of tradition and religion in politics.

This is a fundamental misreading. Nietzsche is the philosopher of **immanence**, not transcendence. The will to power is not a metaphysical entity "inside" us (a ghost in a machine); it is the genetic and differential principle of forces in the world itself. The body is not a vessel for a spirit; it is a complex, dynamic arrangement of forces.

I didn't read "material" as implying "immanent" here. Rather, the material motivation for crime is in a sense the "petty;" it is crime committed for economic (material) motives. It is thus, in a sense, denigrating as "the pursuit of economic labor/capital investment by other means." This is the framing in the Leopold case as well. So, when he says that Hannibal rises above the "material" what he means is that he has moved beyond a brute response to his appetites, or a ressentiment related to status, to a higher, aesthetic form of violence that represents a purer expression of power, not that he is oriented towards transcendence (quite the opposite, his power is his own end). I'll save that section for later, but I think it is an excellent example of the way Calvinism has had a profound effect on this thread in modern culture.

The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression. It is the feeling of a force being equal to its concept. It is the feeling of the artist wielding the chisel, the philosopher wielding the concept, the warrior wielding the sword perfectly. To reduce this to a psycho-pathology of "bloodlust" is to completely miss its aesthetic and ontological dimension.

Isn't Landa's point precisely that it is aesthetic? That seemed to be the point he is driving home with the Leopold Trial and Hannibal. At any rate, he seems to keep separate Nietzsche's actual philosophy and the bourgeoise appropriation of it, e.g., "I have so far maintained that bourgeois laudation of crime should not be understood literally, as an approbation of actual transgression, but rather metaphorically, as a social fantasy, supplying the unique individual with the (imaginary) passport out of the herd’s territory." Landa sees class antagonism driving this. Maybe that's a factor, but I think Flaubert's bourgeoise boredom (e.g., Emma Bovary), which affects the working class just as much, is the bigger culprit. What Flaubert gets is the bourgeoise's own self-loathing. So, when we get to American Psycho, that might be something Landa misses.

Anyhow, I am familiar of readings of all of Nietzsche's more "brutal" passages as a sort of allegory for peaceful self-development. I don't really buy it though. For instance:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....

There is the reading of this as "the weak and botched will perish because they will all be made strong." This seems unsupported by the context though. But anyhow, when Nietzsche does speak in more concrete terms about particular public policies, the welfare state, socialism, and democracy, it is clear that he has a sort of profound revulsion for progressivism. And it is at least this particular thread in Nietzsche that can and has been mobilized in defense of a particular view of capitalism and life within capitalism. So too, progressivism gives the herd grounds to resist the strong (they can comfortably say "no"), which acts counter to the ability of the higher man to act as "law giver."

Anyhow, I think this is a point of significant tension for Nietzschean fiction and specifically for Nietzschean heroes. The triumph of the strong over the weak ("the weak should fear the strong") is, for many audiences at least, not appealing. Yet fiction generally can't attain to the same level of distance, abstraction, and ambiguity as Nietzsche's aphoristic and bombastic style. Any victory of the strong over the herd will necessarily be more concrete and visceral. Hence, there is a crossroads for authors where either the Nietzschean hero will fail to be truly Nietzschean or else risks becoming repugnant.

The way this tends to play out in explicitly Nietzschean fiction is that the author feels compelled to make the antagonists of the Nietzschean hero grotesquely, almost comically evil and disgusting, or else the "herd" that is overcome is abstracted and anonymized (e.g., we never see the victims of the random acts of violence in Fight Club). Kentaro Miura's Berserk is a fine and influential example of the latter path. R. Scott Bakker resorts to a similar framing for his Overman. The irony with this second solution is that a sort of implicit utilitarianism that runs counter to the point of the hero ends up coming to the fore; the hero gets justified merely as the "lesser of two evils."



Probably, although this might have more to do with the fact that:

A. He seems to be the most widely read philosopher, judging from bookstore shelves.

B. His philosophy touches on key cultural fault lines, such that different camps have reason to try to lay claim to the "true Nietzsche." This sort of thing happens with Hegel, but I think it's become less relevant to politics, and so less aggressive, since the fall of the USSR.

Personally, I think it's because there are also real, unresolved conflicts in Nietzsche.

Have you ever reflected on Nietzsche’s initial identification of Wagner as a kind of “great hope,” followed later by his disillusionment and condemnation? You can almost see the need for an Übermensch as a kind of antidote for the sorts of transformative cultural heroes who promise renewal but will eventually will let you down.

Yes, and there is also the love triangle with Cosima, a sort of psychological witch's brew there. But I think Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner reflects a more general pattern that is evident in the psychology of our time. In alt-right circles heavily populated by disgruntled young men, as well as the "Manosphere/incel" space, there is a similar sort of phenomena. There is a fetishization of the "alpha male" or "Chad" as a sort of higher man in the ideal, and then an estrangement from this figure when its concrete instantiations instead tend towards boorishness and a parochial chauvinism and moralism.

Hence, these scenes progressed beyond the "alpha male" to an obsession with the mythical "sigma male" who is aggressive, successful, and assertive like the "alpha" but who sits outside the social hierarchy and openly defies it. I think it's a desire for a sort of idealized masculine hero who will nonetheless identify with the "outsider." But such a figure is contradictory to the extent that the ideal is in part defined by being successful, having a high degree of status, being desired by women, admired by other men, etc., which itself seems to preclude being fully "outside."

I hadn't, but I think it's a good example of the sort of left-ward glorification of crime. Now, in one sense, that case simply represents the enduring (and ancient) appeal of the outlaw who challenges unjust power structures. That isn't particularly "Nietzschean," but it is a "glorification of crime." The two are sometimes paired in pop culture though. Often, the traditional outlaw role is used to justify a more Nietzschean character to the audience (e.g. Batman's Joker in many variants).

But I do think there is a Nietzschean(or ish) dimension in hyper-partisan, conspiratorial circles' view of revolutionary crime. Generally, though, it is the adversary who is lauded in Nietzschean terms. That is, the adversary (e.g., the "Wall Street CEO") has gone beyond good in evil in service to their pursuit of powers, and is in some sense admirable in this way.

For example, Immortal Technique's "Rich Man's World" a sort of gangster rap parody of the "real gangsters" (the "CEOs") can be read in an almost laudatory light. It is these masters of capital who are, in fact, the true masters of self-assertion.

And sometimes (of course not always) this plays out as: "but we, the 'good guys,' are hamstrung by a commitment to a defunct morality and lack of realism." This isn't just on the left of course, you see it in antisemitism all the time. I also saw it in some of the younger Egyptians I taught, who had a sort of respect for Mossad that seemed to cross over into a fetishization ("at least they keep their eye on the ball and pursue power effectively").

This is normally paired with ascriptions of power to the adversary that require a bit of imagination, e.g., Mossad or the CIA running all of world history, everything being a plot dreamed up in some Wall Street boardroom, etc. The conspiratorialness isn't the point here of course, but rather a sort of admiration for the rival as in some way a clarified example of a pursuit of desirable power, which could be contrasted with views that tend to see the adversary, temporally powerful in some ways as they might be, as essentially a flawed and miserable figure (e.g. Saint Augustine's "the wicked man, though a king, is a slave, and what is worse, he is a slave to as many masters as he has vices."), or one who is simply deserving of straight condemnation (e.g. Sauron in The Lord of the Rings).

:up:

Anyhow, I am familiar of readings of all of Nietzsche's more "brutal" passages as a sort of allegory for peaceful self-development. I don't really buy it though. For instance:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.... — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're not mistaken that he very much means what he says.

Joy is the feeling of increase in power — Spinoza

With Spinoza Nietzsche considers this a physiological and psychological truth. Denying it leads to bad conscience, the will to power turned inward, and all the negative consequences that come with that.

He doesn't see this as a moral evaluation, but as descriptive of how we work and the consequences that come with it.

The way to address this would be to show that he is factually wrong about this.

Thus says the scarlet judge: ‘Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to steal.’ But I tell you: his soul wanted blood not booty: he thirsted for the joy of the knife! But his simple mind did not understand this madness and it persuaded him otherwise. ‘What is the good of blood?’ it said. ‘Will you not at least commit a theft too? Take a revenge?.’ And he hearkened to his simple mind: its words lay like lead upon him—then he robbed as he murdered — Count Timothy von Icarus

His instinct, his will is for blood, his reason leads him to justify what he instinctually wants to do in terms of what is commonly considered to be 'reasonable' or useful.

The point I think Nietzsche is trying to make here is simply that reason or conscious thought is often only rationalisation or justification after the fact (and thus falsification) of things we just want to do out of some instinctual or a-rational drive.

Check out for instance aphorism 354 of the gay science, 'The genius of the species' to understand how Nietzsche thinks about conscious thought, and I think this passage will make more sense.

Anyhow, I think this is a point of significant tension for Nietzschean fiction and specifically for Nietzschean heroes. The triumph of the strong over the weak ("the weak should fear the strong") is, for many audiences at least, not appealing. Yet fiction generally can't attain to the same level of distance, abstraction, and ambiguity as Nietzsche's aphoristic and bombastic style. Any victory of the strong over the herd will necessarily be more concrete and visceral. Hence, there is a crossroads for authors where either the Nietzschean hero will fail to be truly Nietzschean or else risks becoming repugnant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If what you’re really interested in focusing on in this OP is a psycho-sociopolitical analysis of the reception of Nietzsche’s work among specific demographic strata of contemporary culture, that’s fine, but Im not particularly interested in another discussion of fascism among the unwashed and their superficial readings of great philosophers. if you’re seriously interested in understanding the work in itself, let me know because then we can discuss what Nietzsche means by such concepts as egoism , individuality, power, the weak and the strong, and the Overman. My aim is not to secure the ‘right’ Nietzsche in order to rescue him from terrible misreadings. It is to avoid repeating the usual cliches about Nietzschean power, strength and egoism recycled from Marxist and Christian thought, so that another Nietzsche can be made to appear. This would not simply be a ‘kinder, gentler’ Nietzsche, as though we could use the same cliches and position him on the ‘right’ side of them. I dont know ether he is kind and gentle. Whether he is or not, I want to show to what extent this other Nietzsche has been obscured by the preconceptions imported from traditional philosophical thinking about the self, the community, power and ethics.

It is to avoid repeating the usual cliches about Nietzschean power, strength and egoism recycled from Marxist and Christian thought, so that another Nietzsche can be made to appear. This would not simply be a ‘kinder, gentler’ Nietzsche, as though we could use the same cliches and position him on the ‘right’ side of them. I dont know ether he is kind and gentle. Whether he is or not, I want to show to what extent this other Nietzsche has been obscured by the preconceptions imported from traditional philosophical thinking about the self, the community, power and ethics. — Joshs

For a non-philosopher, this is interesting to read. I find Nietzsche difficult to understand, not because the words are hard, but because the meanings have multiple possibilities. I don’t have the time or inclination to unpack and study this material. That said, I’m somewhat tired of young men using Nietzsche as a justification for bumptious narcissism.

But Nietzsche's "individual" is not the liberal subject. It is a transindividual site of forces. The "Will to Power" is not what an individual *has*; the individual is what the will to power becomes in a specific configuration. The Overman is not a super-powered individual. The Overman names a process, a going-across, a transformation of the human into something else. It is about the creation of new possibilities, new ways of being, new values. It is not about the triumph of one individual over others but about the emergence of a new form of life that transcends the current human economy of ressentiment and bad conscience. His purpose is not to glorify any specific crime or social order but to provide the tools for a ruthless critique of all values, especially the moral ones we hold most dear. He doesn't offer a new system to believe in but a method for questioning, — Joshs

This is a particularly illuminating and helpful perspective.

This is a particularly illuminating and helpful perspective. — Tom Storm

Some interpreters treat Nietzsche as an existentialist. You’ve probably read some of their work. They talk about him like he’s a self-help guru trying to get us in touch with ourselves so that we can actualize our highest potentials. Notice that this way of talking assumes there’s a subject sitting inside a body, and this subject continues to be itself as it decides what it wants and needs to fulfill its desires. Now compare this to the language Nietzsche uses in the following quotes, where he says there is no ‘egoism’ and no ‘individual’.

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”.

“That man is a multiplicity of forces which stand in an order of rank, so that there are those which command, but what commands, too, must provide for those which obey everything they need to preserve themselves, and is thus itself conditioned by their existence. All these living beings must be related in kind, otherwise they could not serve and obey one another like this: what serves must, in some sense, also be an obeyer, and in more delicate cases the roles must temporarily switch so that what otherwise commands must, this once, obey. The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable; the continual generation of cells, etc., produces a continual change in the number of these beings. And mere addition is no use at all. Our arithmetic is too crude for these relations, and is only an arithmetic of single elements.”

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.”

Thanks. Not sure I can make much sense of the quotes but I appreciate the context above. Cheers.

The point I think Nietzsche is trying to make here is simply that reason or conscious thought is often only rationalisation or justification after the fact (and thus falsification) of things we just want to do out of some instinctual or a-rational drive.

Right, and I can see where @Joshs is coming from because I think Landa's thesis is somewhat obscured here because we are starting with Chapter 6. The earlier parts of the book are all on Nietzschean heros. This section is specifically on villain characters who are nonetheless embraced in some sense. The thesis is not that Nietzsche supports villains above heroes, but rather his relationship to a certain sort of response to a certain sort of villain that has evolved in Western culture.

I think, to your point, this insight, a sort of self-knowledge and self-respect vis-á-vis one's own (and the world's) arationality and amorality underscores the admiration for a sort of villain: the "insane" villain who is merely being honest about the greater insanity of their own context, and is thus in a sense performing an act of self-mastery and yes-saying, affirming the world-that-is and not the imagined moral world-that-ought-to-be that is ultimately mere delusion. The Joker is a sort of paradigmatic case here.

Stace's famous 1948 "Man Against Darkness" is basically taken a step further. For Stace there is no God or transcendence for man, so he must stand "against the darkness" and must form a moral order of kindness, truth, and justice. For the Joker-type hero, Stace is still clinging to delusion. Such a villain isn't admirable because they do evil, but precisely because they recognize Stace's remaining delusion for what it is, slavery to old ideas. The violence isn't the point. It's that the violence is used creatively to transcend the old order and to create a Miltonian creative whole out of the inchoate chaos, overthrowing the shadowy corpses of the old gods.

Contrast this with earlier visions of the good life and self-mastery, where logos (reason) must order the lower appetites and passions. Logos has authority here precisely because it is:

A. Capable of knowing and desiring the Good.
B. Is itself a participation in a sort of greater Logos that perfuses and goes beyond the world.

In later modern narratives, there is first suspicion and the a denial that human logos can actually perform this function. This makes the old sort of narrative a sort of delusion and slavery that the villain exposes and transcends. The violence can be seen as destructive creation in this context.

but Im not particularly interested in another discussion of fascism among the unwashed and their superficial readings of great philosophers.

Sure, but I don't think that's a particularly fair classification of Landa's work.

Same with:

Landa links Nietzsche to Sade, arguing that his philosophy is essentially sadistic, advocating the infliction of pain for the pleasure of mastery. It uses the figure of Hannibal Lecter as an exemplar of this Nietzschean sadism. This is a moralistic and psychological reduction. Nietzsche's interest in hardness, suffering, and cruelty is ethical, not psychological. It is about the conditions for artistic and spiritual creation. The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression.

Your counterpoint to Landa is, in fact, exactly what he himself argues. For Landa, what you have said is precisely the reason why Hannibal is "great" and the other killers in the novels/films are not. If sadism was the point, the other killers would be Hannibal's equal instead of being pathetic.

Re fascism, Landa cites Primo Levi:

Nietzsche’s message is profoundly repugnant to me; . . . yet it seems that a desire for the sufferings of others cannot be found it. Indifference, yes, almost on every page, but never Schadenfreude, the joy in your neighbour’s misfortune and even less the joy of deliberately inflicting suffering.The pain of the hoi polloi, of the Ungestalten, the shapeless, the not-born-noble, is a price that must be paid for the advent of the reign of the elect; it is a minor evil, but still an evil; it is not in itself desirable. Hitlerian doctrine and practice were much different.

Levi’s argument is significant for our purposes since, precisely by implying that Nietzsche did not relish cruelty as such, the social functionality of his brand of sadism is highlighted. It suggests that its ultimate rationale was not a mere psychological condition or aesthetical predilection, but rather a hardened recognIf the essentially gentle hearted Nietzsche had to embrace sadism, in a sense against his own psychological and emotional inclinations, this attests all the more the structural, objective necessity to inflict pain which Nietzsche acknowledged and which, however reluctantly, he was bound to affirm and uphold.ition of the social necessity of inflicting suffering. It also stands to reason that, actually to enact such sadism as a social practice as opposed to merely commend it as a necessary evil, would require the agency of natures far less squeamish than Nietzsche’s.

Landa's point is not that Nietzsche is offering an apologia for the excesses of capital per se, but rather that this same strand can be coopted for such an apologia fairly easily.

Notice that this way of talking assumes there’s a subject sitting inside a body, and this subject continues to be itself as it decides what it wants and needs to fulfill its desires. Now compare this to the language Nietzsche uses in the following quotes, where he says there is no ‘egoism’ and no ‘individual’.

But for the existentialists it doesn't imply this. They don't ignore the sorts of passages you quoted, but build on this idea of the self in flux to construct a particular sort of framework for "self-mastery" to live up to Nietzsche's admonition to: "Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself."

So, a specific view of the self as a sort of artistic project that is always in via emerges from passages such as:

Thus, in the ideal of the philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, the hardness and ability to make long-range decisions that must be part of the idea "greatness"...

By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe is the only one who attains and distributes honours, when "equality of rights" all too easily can get turned around into equality of wrongs - what I mean is into a common war against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and mastery - these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one's own initiative - these are part of the idea "greatness," and the philosopher will reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes "The man who is to be the greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is simply what greatness is to be called: capable of being as much a totality as something multifaceted, as wide as it is full." And to ask the question again: today - is greatness possible?

Beyond Good and Evil - 212

One thing is needful. -- To "give style" to one’s character-- a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed -- both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!

It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.

The Gay Science - 290

But this "self-creation" doesn't ignore the denial of any static or metaphysical subject, it rather uses this fact as the ground for the notion of "being an artist of oneself." Just as existentialists like Solomon don't ignore Nietzsche's fatalism but instead make it part of their existentialist project. The "self" here isn't the liberal given individual, and this is precisely why these readings are often hostile to liberalism, socialism, and democracy in the way Nietzsche was.

I bring this up because I think these readings of Nietzsche have tended to be more influential on popular culture, and particularly the area we are discussing.

Edit: on a side note, one difficulty here is the tendency to view the unconscious as a primitive "lizard brain." It is often described as appetitive and perhaps emotional, but lacking in structured content and logos. This is perhaps the legacy of Freud, or Freud over Jung. But, I had written before about how the unconscious could be considered much more broadly, and as much more "capable." But it is also conditioned by the conscious mind in this respect. "Self-artistry" is, in part, made possible through this conditioning; just as Aristotle sees a path to greater freedom despite our inability to achieve constant, complete mindfulness, through our intentional choice of habits.

the glorification of crime is a very real phenomenon, particularly among young men. In my experience, the posters hanging on the walls of college dorms will generally be of either famous musicians (the poet archetype) or various Hollywood villains (e.g., Tony Montana of Scarface seems to have enduring popularity, Tyler Durden of Fight Club and Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix's Joker as well). A Batman poster is the sort of thing you have your parents buy for you as a kid. As a teenager or young adult, you get a poster of the Joker. Having recently browsed through two different poster stores in flea markets, this trend still seems to be very much a thing, with horror movie characters also featuring heavily (athletes, of course, also remain popular). We could also consider the appeal of crime-focused video games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Hitman), gangster rap, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Skipping the Nietzsche debate for a more general comment relevant to this: It seems the way the “glorification of crime" often functions ideologically is as a kind of destructive substitute for creative self-recoding, that is, actual resistance to the socio-symbolic / Big Other or however you want to put it. The urge to resist gets channeled towards legible functionalities that are unthreatening on the meta level because they are a) by their nature identifiable and punishable by the overwhelming forces of state security (and even offer the state potentially welcome opportunities for the marginalization, ghettoization and reproduction of underclasses); and b) transformatively consumable and therefore self-neutralizing—the fantasy of being a criminal as an accepted social practice becomes a form of entertainment within which the impetus to actual deviancy is dissolved. This is not to suggest all crime follows this route, as genuine resistance such as it is may also be criminal, but to point to a kind of social defence mechanism that serves to redirect opportunities for resistance.

We might consider this a second order “grammatization”---to repurpose a coinage of Bernard Stiegler—the means by which the social order makes reality legible, predictable, and controllable. First order grammatization could be seen as applying directly to phenomena which are, in perception, individuated as functionally / aesthetically / practically categorized and conceptualized coherencies relativised by our human umwelt / life world (as opposed to the unconceptual functional coherencies of an animal’s umwelt). Being a socialized individual, I can’t see a tree or a lamp without seeing the concept of a tree or a lamp and that comes intertwined with the direct sensory phenomena to form the recognizable object etc. Second order grammatization then would be this process applied to concepts themselves, of e.g. resistance as criminality, and this happens through a controlled process of overcoding that is in its nature limiting, just as first order grammatization is limiting—the difference being that first order grammatization is aimed at creating (recognizably human) sociality whereas second order grammatization (ideological imprinting) is aimed at protecting/sustaining it.

Also, consider how these “deviant” messages are nowadays primarily delivered through the anaesthetising information machine of mass media where the audience is pre-conditioned into passivity from the get-go.

There's a lot I want to reply to in your post there, I'll see if I can tie it all together somewhat.

Right, and I can see where Joshs is coming from because I think Landa's thesis is somewhat obscured here because we are starting with Chapter 6. The earlier parts of the book are all on Nietzschean heros. This section is specifically on villain characters who are nonetheless embraced in some sense. The thesis is not that Nietzsche supports villains above heroes, but rather his relationship to a certain sort of response to a certain sort of villain that has evolved in Western culture.

I think, to your point, this insight, a sort of self-knowledge and self-respect vis-á-vis one's own (and the world's) arationality and amorality underscores the admiration for a sort of villain: the "insane" villain who is merely being honest about the greater insanity of their own context, and is thus in a sense performing an act of self-mastery and yes-saying, affirming the world-that-is and not the imagined moral world-that-ought-to-be that is ultimately mere delusion. The Joker is a sort of paradigmatic case here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The insanity or madness Nietzsche is often talking favorably about in his works is not the insanity of a nihilistic Joker or some of these unhinged villains you see in Western Culture. It is rather a kind of noble man, the man of passion. He calls it madness because passion is juxtaposed to being reasonable, to being concerned with utility (The conscious mind reasoning with language, is using concepts that are common to the group in origin, and therefor often concerned with utility for the group). The passionate man is mad or unreasonable in the sense that he isn't concerned with utility.... he spends himself in pursuit of that passion, often to the detriment of himself.

But note, this is far from nihilistic, or some kind of random disordered madness, It is directed at achieving what he is passionate about. That ruling passion serves as an ordering principle of his instincts, whereas a villain like the Joker would be more of an example of someone where anarchy in the instincts rules, a degenerate in Nietzsches view.

Something else that comes to mind when thinking about these villains in Western Culture, it seems to me, is that the grotesqueness of some of these villains in part comes out of common tropes in Christian culture. In Nietzsches view the inversion of orginal noble values of good and bad into Good and Evil is not merely an exact inversion of these values but also a distortion. Moralising is distorting. Good didn't merely became Bad, but Evil.... a kind of demonization if you will.

What I think might be happening here with this sympathizing with these villains in Western culture is on the one hand a sense that we want to fantasize about setting free some of these impulses that have been suppressed in a Christian culture. But in doing so we still end up using these exaggerated distorted Christian tropes because that is what we are familiar with... because Good and Evil is the distorting binary we are used to thinking in.

Contrast this with earlier visions of the good life and self-mastery, where logos (reason) must order the lower appetites and passions. Logos has authority here precisely because it is:

A. Capable of knowing and desiring the Good.
B. Is itself a participation in a sort of greater Logos that perfuses and goes beyond the world.

In later modern narratives, there is first suspicion and the a denial that human logos can actually perform this function. This makes the old sort of narrative a sort of delusion and slavery that the villain exposed and transcends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've read your excellent thread on "Arguments From Underdetermination and the Realist Response", and I was planning to react to it but couldn't find the time... but I think what I had in mind is relevant here.

When you talk about "pre-modern" thinkers viewing things this way, I would want to say you are really talking about pre-modern thinkers after Socrates. In Nietzsches view Socrates and Plato were a break from what came before. Pre-Platonic Greece was Sophist, and reason was seen predominantly as another tool for convincing people, not necessarily to find universal truth... rhetorics rather than dialectics was the name of the game. The idea that we can arrive at truth by conscious reasoning, by dialectics was alien to most Greeks. At the time that was the radical idea, and the start of a complete re-evaluation of values (later picked up and spread by Christianity).

The logos is indeed often translated as 'reason' or 'the word', certainly in Christianity, but I think pre-socrates (and thus pre the Socratic re-evaluation of values) it had another meaning. In Heraclitus for instance is seems to me the Logos is more a kind of regularity, patternedness in nature that we can sense or intuit. Heraclitus was the opposite of a dialectician, not writing in arguments but aphoristically. He was very much advocating being more attuned to the logos, but reason was clearly not the way to do that. I think, with Heraclitus and Nietzsche, that we recognize patterns (the logos) by sensing and observing, not necessarily by conscious reasoning.

The danger for Nietzsche (and also someone like Adorno) is not necessarily that we are in the process of losing faith in reason in an absolute sense, as something that is necessary for every good functioning society, but that that happened to be a core part of the myth our particular civilization believed in, be it still under Christianity or after Christianity with the enlightenment. Because typically after the faith wanes, you get barbarism. Anyhow, Nietzsche believed all of this is more or less inevitable, because reason is a dissolvent for myth and faith, and so a civilization based on that will eventually eat its own tail. Realizing this, he felt compelled to become sort of an accelerationist, wanting to clear the old to make space for the new.

But for the existentialists it doesn't imply this. They don't ignore the sorts of passages you quoted, but build on this idea of the self in flux to construct a particular sort of framework for "self-mastery" to live up to Nietzsche's admonition to: "Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself — Count Timothy von Icarus

The existentialists (Sartre, Kierkegaard) don’t build on Nietzsche’s radical idea of the self in flux, they miss the point of it by retaining certain traditional metaphysical presuppositions about subjectivity. While existentialists look like they take Nietzsche’s idea of selfhood-in-flux seriously, they actually smuggle in older metaphysical assumptions about the subject that Nietzsche was working to dismantle. For Nietzsche, there is no stable, enduring self beneath the flux of drives, affects, and perspectives. The “self” is really a multiplicity of competing forces (wills to power) that sometimes achieve a temporary organization. To “become who you are” is not to find or realize some essential self, but to actively shape and reconfigure these forces, sculpting from chaos. There is no deep subject that “has” experiences; instead, the “I” is a grammatical fiction that masks the play of forces.

Although Sartre denies a pre-given essence, he still posits a transcendental subjectivity, consciousness as “nothingness” that transcends facticity and projects meaning. The self is not fixed, but there is still an agent-subject doing the projecting. For Kierkegaard, the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, grounded in relation to God. There is still a metaphysical anchor, a responsible, singular subject that must confront despair, faith, and authenticity. In both cases, even though the self is described as evolving or free, there’s an underlying metaphysical subjectivity, a core “I” or relational structure that guarantees its unity.

That's an interesting thought. But what do you think then about the fact that a lot of this stuff springs organically from economically marginal communities as mentioned above:

I am not wild about the "Marxist" framing either. The part that originally grabbed my eye when skimming it on Hannibal Lecter didn't fall into this as much. I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think it causes Landa to miss some pretty obvious counter examples. For one, the spiritual, artistic, and economic home of gangster rap is America's urban ghettos, just as the home of the cult of prohibition gangsters was low-income working-class neighborhoods. Likewise, the fetishization of evil (or at least its outward, macabre symbols) in the horror movie scene, and groups like Korn, or Rob Zombie (who crosses over into film) issues more from the trailer parks of economically marginal areas in the South, Appalachia, and the Midwest than from bourgeois suburbs (so too for the hardcore punk stream of horror fetishization, which comes from working class urban neighborhoods. Hence Dickies and Carhart work clothes being an enduring part of that style; it's what young mechanics and factory workers showed up in to shows after work).

For instance, Jack Kerouac didn't write On the Road to convince a generation of impressionable Baby Boomers that freedom and authenticity lay in a sort of expressive hedonism, he did it because he believed in and loved it (even as it led down a pretty sad road). Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is likewise trying to capture the excitement of a particular moment. The corporate world absolutely tries to commercialize this sort of thing, to cash in on it, but they don't drive it (even though the media itself is sort of exactly the sort of media Aldous Huxley predicts totalitarian states will try to create in his 1946 forward to A Brave New World; he particularly mentions sexual liberty as a sop to counter declines in other forms of liberty).

So, on the one hand we might have an explanation for why the larger system countenances and helps to promote the phenomenon, but I don't think this explains its organic development and appeal, particularly because any remaining "elite" is largely digesting and embracing the same exact popular culture in the Neoliberal era, and buys into it as much as anyone else (e.g., for someone like Musk, such media hardly seems to be a tool of influence, but rather it is what influences him—many billionaires seem to desire to become "e-celebs" as much today's tweens).

He calls it madness because passion is juxtaposed to being reasonable, to being concerned with utility (The conscious mind reasoning with language, is using concepts that are common to the group in origin, and therefor often concerned with utility for the group). The passionate man is mad or unreasonable in the sense that he isn't concerned with utility.... he spends himself in pursuit of that passion, often to the detriment of himself.

:up:

And this is precisely how Landa frames why Hannibal is attractive and the other killers that surround him in the narrative are pathetic or somehow sick/weak.

But note, this is far from nihilistic, or some kind of random disordered madness, It is directed at achieving what he is passionate about. That ruling passion serves as an ordering principle of his instincts, whereas a villain like the Joker would be more of an example of someone where anarchy in the instincts rules, a degenerate in Nietzsches view.

Yeah, I suppose I should have been more specific here since the Joker is very different across different portrayals. I was thinking largely of The Dark Night and even more so related portrayals in less popular media. In The Joker, Joker is more of a classic socialist victim-turned-criminal. In others, he is purely anarchic. But in The Dark Night, he has a particular aesthetic ethos. He is shining a light on Gotham's internal corruption, but not to because he believes it should be made to reflect some sort of moral absolute, or principle of civil virtue, but because he thinks it is false, shallow and hollow. Gotham deserves a "better class of criminal," the sort who does it for the fun of it, for the artistry. The way they did Bane was sort of similar here too; Nolan didn't show a ton of range in motivation.

And Landa's idea (which I agree with) is not that the criminal is some sort of Nietzschean ideal. The Joker doesn't need to be the Ubermensch or a hero to aspire to. The point is rather than there is something laudable and worth glorifying. Hence is point early on about the criminal representing a sort of half step towards the ideal. But this is still a step beyond the herd. Hannibal though, represents a better sort of icon, because I agree, there is a sort of uncontrolled anarchy in most Joker depictions.

What I think might be happening here with this sympathizing with these villains in Western culture is on the one hand a sense that we want to fantasize about setting free some of these impulses that have been suppressed in a Christian culture. But in doing so we still end up using these exaggerated distorted Christian tropes because that is what we are familiar with... because Good and Evil is the distorting binary we are used to thinking in.

That makes sense to me. Especially since such norms are increasingly unanchored in a largely secular popular culture and imagination. And even within the realm of religion, there was a huge movement in popular theology towards making morality either merely the result of divine command (sheer "thou shalt" because it says so) or making morality entirely an emotional/affective drive. On either view, there is ultimately nothing to understand. One obeys or one doesn't (and there is an extrinsic punishment or reward or there isn't), or else one feels the morality or one doesn't. If one doesn't fear the punishment or feel the "proper" feelings, what else is there to say? All that's left is oppressive social forces to force us in line.

Anyhow, Nietzsche believed all of this is more or less inevitable, because reason is a dissolvent for myth and faith, and so a civilization based on that will eventually eat its own tail. Realizing this, he felt compelled to become sort of an accelerationist, wanting to clear the old to make space for the new.

Yes, so to bring this back down to the criminal, this is part of what they do that is laudatory. They might be unsavory or even evil in some respects, but they are tearing down something that has to go.

But on the bolded part, I would simply disagree with this. It's correct in the context of the 19th century, where notions of causation, reason, etc. have already been drastically deflated. I would go as far as to say that notions of the Good, reduced from limitless fecundity, a presence is all that even appears desirable, to "universal maxims" or a "moral calculus," already amount to a conceptual castration of the Good. Reason too loses all its erotic elements and become wholly discursive and calculative, lacking all appetite, and is thus disqualified from any sort of leadership role except as a sort of "hired executive," acting in the service of the appetites.

Against this though, even if one accepts the thesis that a broader view starts with Plato (and I think this is false, you can see threads in Homer, in the Hebrew wisdom literature, etc.), it became the dominant thread in Pagan and Christian thought by late antiquity and survived over a thousand years, finding ample space to flourish in Judaism and Islam. It was the Reformation, an upswell of fideism and the efforts of figures who were decidedly critical of reason and who wanted to invert the old narrative that unseated it. Not until the Enlightenment, when all the terms of the narrative have already radically changed, does reason start to eat itself (and I'd say this is because it loses its erotic elements, but that's a bit off topic). Things like Plato's Socrates exploding into ecstatic dithyrambs on love have essentially been excluded from the deflated "logos" of the Enlightenment; it is closer in some ways to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, although it is more a union of the two.

Let's get the story straight with Nietzsche, the only Hero to Nietzsche was the tragic hero. He repudiates Carlyle's Hero cult. Further still, Nietzsche doesn't glorify crime for the sake of crime, and thirdly, the Aristocratic and Slave are Typologies not Hierarchies.

But more importantly what is missed here is that Nietzsche advocates for all of human nature, and details that the systematic killing off of the Dionysian instincts in man is what has made man sick through cherishing cowardly compromise and lazy peace.

We can see from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy onward that Nietzsche has this idea of the dual orbit of opposites that overcomes each other in their opposite inciting each other to higher and higher births, reconciling the worst of the destructive properties of both forces in a dual orbit over a mutual bridging. This becomes the very framework of Nietzsche's philosophy.

heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term...

the Delphic god [(Apollo)], by a seasonably effected reconciliation, was now contented with taking the destructive arms from the hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconciliation marks the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn our eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from this event. It was the reconciliation of two antagonists, with the sharp demarcation of the boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by each — Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy

This is how Nietzsche details the height of Greek culture, through equal parts Apollonian and Dionysian forces. And the Height of the Human in general...

After Nietzsche's early experimental writing phase, Nietzsche sets up the Framework of his philosophy in this very manner which he details in

Ecce Homo:

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL:"THE PRELUDE TO A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE"

1

My work for the years that followed was prescribed as distinctly as possible. Now that the yea-saying part of my life-task was accomplished there came the turn of the negative portion, both in word and deed: the transvaluation of all values that had existed hitherto, the great war,—the conjuring-up of the day when the fatal outcome of the struggle would be decided. Meanwhile, I had slowly to look about me for my peers, for those who, out of strength, would proffer me a helping hand in my work of destruction. From that time onward, all my writings are so much bait: maybe I understand as much about fishing as most people? If nothing was caught, it was not I who was at fault There were no fish to come and bite. — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

In Nietzsche's yea-saying period he attempts to make the penultimate in yea-saying... In Nietzsche's nay-saying period he attempts to create the penultimate in nay-saying. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the Chord that intertwines both periods into a Dionysian Dithyramb.

We can see Nietzsche detail the typeology of the higher and lower types in Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil Genealogy of Morals, and more...

The ignoble nature is distinguished by the fact that it keeps its advantage steadily in view, and that this thought of the end and advantage is even stronger than its strongest impulse: not to be tempted to inexpedient activities by its impulses—that is its wisdom and inspiration. In comparison with the ignoble nature the higher nature is more irrational:—for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person succumbs in fact to his impulses, and in his best moments his reason lapses altogether. An animal, which at the risk of life protects its young, or in the pairing season follows the female where it meets with death, does not think of the risk and the death [>>this is why mankind is sickened on lazy peace and cowardly compromise too afraid of the risks it takes to discover something new, to be that bridge to the future, to be that bridge to strange new vista<<]; its reason pauses likewise, because its delight in its young, or in the female, and the fear of being deprived of this delight, dominate it exclusively; it becomes stupider than at other times, like the noble and magnanimous person. — Nietzsche, Gay Science

Continuing with these quotes we come to 260 in BGE where we can see Nietzsche detailing the two types of morality that rises from the two different types of man, but also that the higher and mixed civilizations arise from an attempt of reconciliation between the two types... there's that bridging through reconciliation again...

In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is MASTER-MORALITY and SLAVE-MORALITY,—I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities, but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed sometimes their close juxtaposition—even in the same man, within one soul.... The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis "good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and "despicable",—the antithesis "good" and "EVIL" is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars:—it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. "We truthful ones"—the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves. It is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral value were at first applied to MEN; and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to ACTIONS; it is a gross mistake, therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like, "Why have sympathetic actions been praised?" The noble type of man regards HIMSELF as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "What is injurious to me is injurious in itself;" he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a CREATOR OF VALUES. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Below from Genealogy 10, we can see that Nietzsche details yet again that the Noble type of man maintains a BRIDGE to his love... while the weak cherish the onslaught of their enemies.

...the vindictive hatred and revengefulness of the weak in onslaughts on their enemies....
What respect for his enemies is found, forsooth, in an aristocratic man—and such a reverence is already a bridge to love! He insists on having his enemy to himself as his distinction. He tolerates no other enemy but a man in whose character there is nothing to despise and much to honour! On the other hand, imagine the "enemy" as the resentful man conceives him—and it is here exactly that we see his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the evil enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea from which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good one," himself—his very self!

11

The method of this man is quite contrary to that of the aristocratic man, who conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material then creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred — Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

The word "Superman," which designates a type of man that would be one of nature's rarest and luckiest strokes, as opposed to "modern" men, to "good" men, to Christians and other Nihilists — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

For Nietzsche the Highest type of man comes from acknowledging all of their human nature, not trying to kill off half of it, which is the aim of morality... to kill off half of our human nature.

This is why Zarathustra doesn't come down from the mountain and begin murdering his enemies... because he maintains that bridge to love for a possible reconciliation with his enemies. And it is in this that Nietzsche only ever details the Superman becoming a reality...

See how Zarathustra goes down from the mountain and speaks the kindest words to every one! See with what delicate fingers he touches his very adversaries, the priests, and how he suffers with them from themselves! Here, at every moment, man is overcome, and the concept "Superman" becomes the greatest reality,—out of sight, almost far away beneath him, lies all that which heretofore has been called great in man. — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Why? Because as Nietzsche details in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING. — Zarathustra

It’s quite obvious this Ishay Landa doesn't really have a deep grasp on Nietzsche's works.

So as we can see Nietzsche creates two distinct opposing periods because both of these periods are the totality of Nietzsche himself... as Nietzsche details in BGE 2 that two opposing forces are intertwined with each other through a chord that ties them together, making them all fundamentally one in the same as whatever creates the two values... these two values do not exist as an antithesis of values, one value grows out of the other value.

We can see this notion in the Gospels of The Bible, even with John 15:5 "I am the vine. You are the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing."

And just like John 15:5 the dual orbit is nothing without the other to overcome in their opposite and insite each other to higher and higher births. The branches of Nietzsche's works are those two Yea-saying and Nay-saying periods, the Vine that weaves them all together is his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Just as MAN is the ROPE between the ANIMAL and SUPERMAN.

The Gospels is one of the greatest influences on Nietzsche's philosophy. It is where he gathers his concept of the Overman and Amor Fati from. From the example of Jesus Christ and his psychology of The Glad Tidings that Nietzsche details in AC 33 and AC 39.

Let's get the story straight with Nietzsche, the only Hero to Nietzsche was the tragic hero.

The "Nietzschean Hero" isn't a "hero as per Nietzsche," it's a fictional hero inspired by Nietzsche. And we might suppose that pop culture versions will tend to stray from the original vision. "Inspired by" does not need to entail "slavishly dependent upon" either, just as a "Byronic hero" need not be a hero Lord Byron himself would have written (or even liked; Batman is sometimes an example here and Byron might have found him silly).

To see Landa's point, it's worth considering why Max Stirner's more audaciously egoistic view wouldn't be as widely attractive to artists and audiences. It's unlikely to suit many in the same way that the image of the criminal as a sort of lion trapped inside a cruel zoo is:

What [the criminal] lacks is the wilderness, a certain freer and more perilous nature and form of existence in which all that is attack and defence in the instinct of the strong human being comes into its own. His virtues have been excommunicated by society . . . It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a human being raised in nature, who comes from the mountains or from adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal.

Forget crime for a moment, I feel like this definitely is a strain of romanticism heavily present in post-apocalyptic media (and increasingly, collective fantasies). The person contained by norms and customs (morality, but also the whole bourgeois environment, including its distractions) is in a sense liberated to become something more (and more "real").

Now cynically, we might chalk this up to "bourgeois boredom" (and I even think there is a good case to be made that Nietzschean suffered from this, one symptom being his paeans to historical greatness). But I would say the problem is broader than how dismissive that phrase might sound. I suppose it's a sort of nihilism that is being grappled with.

The "Nietzschean Hero" isn't a "hero as per Nietzsche," it's a fictional hero inspired by Nietzsche. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair enough, another recent one that people have been worshipping then is Judge Holden from Blood Meridian.

And yeah, I can see what you're talking about now. Let me go back through the OP with that in mind.

@Joshs

Having read further, I now agree that as the chapter wears on Landa seems to have difficulty with conflating the philosopher and the broader cultural phenomenon that shares some similarities (and influence, Pulp Fiction is covered and IIRC Tarantino claims direct influence). I get using a name as a sort of adjective, in that there isn't really a better word to use, but he is at the very least being ambiguous, and at times I think explicitly conflating to get his Marxist view hammered down. The funny thing is that I don't think the polemical part of his analysis even needs this. Indeed, it's weakened by it. Isn't one of the indictments of mass culture that it butchers all subtle thought?

Also, the Marxist theses seem to wear particularly thin during the commentary on Pulp Fiction. I guess I'll complain about that in a few days when I have time to summarize it lol.

well, I do agree with you that there is a sort of "hero worshipping" going on that elevates a criminal archetype. And Nietzsche does give a sort of hard praise to criminals in a sense that they are often well equipped to survive harsh conditions that occur once they get extradited from society. Conditions that would generally break a weaker man.

I've done some studying on Hip Hop and the Nihilism which can be found in Rap music. I've checled it from the academic side and straight from KRS-One's mouth.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238086364_I_See_Death_Around_the_Corner_Nihilism_in_Rap_Music

I'll have to go over some of this stuff again but like theres a bit of a nuance to what Gangsta Rap is all about, which is like they sing about the Nihilism they live and it resonates with others, but the whole goal is to go from Ganster to Rapper, to become a Master of Ceramonies... been pukled in multiple directions since rereading the initial post. But I'll try to keep up and delve back into some of the research I have done in the past.

It's my hypotheses that humanity is tired of being shackled, this existence we live... the historical pathway in which humanity developed... isn't divine providence... we live in a falsified world controlled by a few through codified bunk and manipulating of the masses in subtle ways.

Does anyone remember how easy it was to get laid when the internet became semi mainstream? I was a teenager, and it was like the anonymity of online and just asking up front you had 75% chance of a yes... a certain oppression that caused a repression of our own humanity was uplifted.

There are still places where polycules and the Dionysian orgies happen like The Crucible in DC. There was a sexual Renaissance that occured for nearly a decade, and then all the horror stories caught up to the collective unconscious of all the people gone missing and crazy shit that happened. The whole LGBTQ+ stemmed from that Renaissance.

The criminal represents a part of humanity that's taboo. And for some it represents a sort of freedom from the metaphysical chains that bind them.

Yes, so to bring this back down to the criminal, this is part of what they do that is laudatory. They might be unsavory or even evil in some respects, but they are tearing down something that has to go.

But on the bolded part, I would simply disagree with this. It's correct in the context of the 19th century, where notions of causation, reason, etc. have already been drastically deflated. I would go as far as to say that notions of the Good, reduced from limitless fecundity, a presence is all that even appears desirable, to "universal maxims" or a "moral calculus," already amount to a conceptual castration of the Good. Reason too loses all its erotic elements and become wholly discursive and calculative, lacking all appetite, and is thus disqualified from any sort of leadership role except as a sort of "hired executive," acting in the service of the appetites.

Against this though, even if one accepts the thesis that a broader view starts with Plato (and I think this is false, you can see threads in Homer, in the Hebrew wisdom literature, etc.), it became the dominant thread in Pagan and Christian thought by late antiquity and survived over a thousand years, finding ample space to flourish in Judaism and Islam. It was the Reformation, an upswell of fideism and the efforts of figures who were decidedly critical of reason and who wanted to invert the old narrative that unseated it. Not until the Enlightenment, when all the terms of the narrative have already radically changed, does reason start to eat itself (and I'd say this is because it loses its erotic elements, but that's a bit off topic). Things like Plato's Socrates exploding into ecstatic dithyrambs on love have essentially been excluded from the deflated "logos" of the Enlightenment; it is closer in some ways to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, although it is more a union of the two. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes just blaming it all on reason is maybe a bit vague and not all that helpfull... I'll try to clarify what I meant.

If I understand Nietzsche correctly, it's not reason exactly that he sees as the problem, but the use of language in conscious thought to get to (universal) truth.... 'rationalism' rather than 'reason' if you will.

He thinks there is reason, even prior to consciousness and language, in the instincts. And these are typically not directed at discovering universal truth, but have 'reason' to them in that they serve life, particular biological organisms... they are perspectival.

The issue he has with the dialectics of Socrates and Plato's forms, is that it abstracts away to lived context and tries to get at some ideal universal conception, and consequently does away with perspective.

And Christianity, with the 'word of God' and its universalism, he sees as a continuation of that. He also thinks the reformation was a shame, not because it deforms Christianity in some way, but because it turns back the renaissance which was allready a first attempt to get away from Christianity.

I don't think you get the enlightenment and this turn to scientific materialism without the idea that there are universal truths to be discovered. It seems to me it happened in the West, and not in say China, for a reason.

As an aside, Plato famously wanted to do away with the influence of the poëts because they led people away from the Truth in his view. But poëtry it seems to me is precisely the way in which eros gets conveyed in language. It works not only on the rational intellect, but also 'moves' the whole body and the affects with it rhyming, meter and use of imagery. So I probably agree with you that part of the issue it the loss of Eros in the use of language, though I suspect I might have another conception of eros.

Birth of Tragedy 12

Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment in order to recall our own impression, as previously described, of the discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Æschylean tragedy. Let us think of our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic hero of that type of tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our practices any more than with tradition—till we rediscovered this duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things—such is the tendency of Euripides which now reveals itself to us in a clear light.

In a myth composed in the eve of his life, Euripides himself most urgently propounded to his contemporaries the question as to the value and signification of this tendency. Is the Dionysian entitled to exist at all? Should it not be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; his most intelligent adversary—like Pentheus in the "Bacchæ"—is unwittingly enchanted by him, and in this enchantment meets his fate. The judgment of the two old sages, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the aged poet: that the reflection of the wisest individuals does not overthrow old popular traditions, nor the perpetually propagating worship of Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display at least a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of such strange forces: where however it is always possible that the god may take offence at such lukewarm participation, and finally change the diplomat—in this case Cadmus—into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long life—in order finally to wind up his career with a glorification of his adversary, and with suicide, like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy—the Bacchæ—is a protest against the practicability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already been put into practice! The surprising thing had happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency had already conquered. Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. What if even Euripides now seeks to comfort us by his recantation? It is of no avail: the most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What avails the lamentation of the destroyer, and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a punishment by the art-critics of all ages—who could be content with this wretched compensation?

Let us now approach this Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated and vanquished Æschylean tragedy.

We must now ask ourselves, what could be the ulterior aim of the Euripidean design, which, in the highest ideality of its execution, would found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian? What other form of drama could there be, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in the mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatised epos: in which Apollonian domain of art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It does not depend on the subject-matter of the events here represented; indeed, I venture to assert that it would have been impossible for Goethe in his projected "Nausikaa" to have rendered tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being with which he intended to complete the fifth act; so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian representation, that it charms, before our eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in appearance and in redemption through appearance. The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely blend with his pictures any more than the epic rhapsodist. He is still just the calm, unmoved embodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see the picture before them. The actor in this dramatised epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist: the consecration of inner dreaming is on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.

How, then, is the Euripidean play related to this ideal of the Apollonian drama? Just as the younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes his own character in the Platonic "Ion" as follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my eyes fill with tears; when, however, what I am saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands on end through fear, and my heart leaps." Here we no longer observe anything of the epic absorption in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is wholly appearance and joy in appearance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart, with hair standing on end; as Socratic thinker he designs the plan, as passionate actor he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is he an artist pure and simple. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning; it is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian, effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has severed itself as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and now, in order to act at all, it requires new stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The stimulants are cool, paradoxical thoughts, in place of Apollonian intuitions—and fiery passions—in place Dionysean ecstasies; and in fact, thoughts and passions very realistically copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of art.

Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able to approach nearer to the character æsthetic Socratism. supreme law of which reads about as follows: "to be beautiful everything must be intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposition, "only the knowing is one virtuous." With this canon in his hands Euripides measured all the separate elements of the drama, and rectified them according to his principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgic structure, and the choric music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression, which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the most part the product of this penetrating critical process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidian prologue may serve us as an example of the productivity of this, rationalistic method. Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the course of the play, would be designated by a modern playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandonment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is about to happen is known beforehand; who then cares to wait for it actually to happen? —considering, moreover, that here there is not by any means the exciting relation of a predicting dream to a reality taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite differently. The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards: but rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which the passion and dialectics of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever was not arranged for pathos was regarded as objectionable. But what interferes most with the hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous history. So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, his complete absorption in the doings and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-fearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy employed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes to place in the hands of the spectator as if by chance all the threads requisite for understanding the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is approved, which as it were masks the inevitably formal, and causes it to appear as something accidental. But nevertheless Euripides thought he observed that during these first scenes the spectator was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the problem of the previous history, so that the poetic beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted: some deity had often as it were to guarantee the particulars of the tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to the public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle there is the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper.

Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his own conscious knowledge; and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such a notable position in the history of Greek art. With reference to his critico-productive activity, he must often have felt that he ought to actualise in the drama the words at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: "In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came the understanding and created order." And if Anaxagoras with his "νοῡς" seemed like the first sober person among nothing but drunken philosophers, Euripides may also have conceived his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar figure. As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primitive mess;—it is thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus he was obliged to condemn the "drunken" poets as the first "sober" one among them. What Sophocles said of Æschylus, that he did what was right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the mind of Euripides: who would have admitted only thus much, that Æschylus, because he wrought unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and reason has deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic principle that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said, the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known." Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that second spectator who did not comprehend and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy; in alliance with him Euripides ventured to be the herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that æsthetic Socratism was the murderous principle; but in so far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels against Dionysus; and although destined to be torn to pieces by the Mænads of the Athenian court, yet puts to flight the overpowerful god himself, who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean—namely, in the mystical flood of a secret cult which gradually overspread the earth.

The whole point behind Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that it's a Dithyramb, which means you self-abnegate and don the masks of the many characters within, experience the rhyme and rhythm, flow, and tempo of its style, experience the tone of the scene and how they shift throughout the symbolic imagery of the entire constellations of thought throughout it.

The true power of the Dionysian way of life is that it's capable of donning the masks of many through the process of self-abnegation, whereas the Apollonian is the individuation of these masks through a certain tyranny in self-mastery.

Just reading a sterilized analysis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is missing the point.

All things profound love the mask, and this is why Nietzsche declares the Greeks were Superficial out of their Profundity.

The Disembodied Criminal:

This is the last section of background before we get to the media analysis.

Landa argues that Nietzsche and Stirner exclude most ordinary, property-related offenses from their "glorification" of crime. I think "glorification" might be a bit too strong a term here though. The notion is more that there is something laudable in a certain sort of crime. Landa identifies the "proper" motivations as "non-material." By this he simply means that the crimes are not motivated by a petty desire for wealth, goods, etc., nor for out of desperate biological need. Stirner puts it this way: the covetous criminal is a failure, since they are grasping after what is not truly their own.

So, what is valorized is strictly a sort of “Dionysian crime," that is an expression of the will to power. This frames the "right sort" of crime as an aesthetic and symbolic revolt against mediocrity and mass society. This stands in contrast to socialist-humanist (and often Victorian Christian) views that linked crime to poverty or inequality.

For Nietzsche, the criminal largely served a metaphorical purpose. They are a figure embodying rebellion and strength, not a literal model for social reform. Landa argues that this selective glorification of crime was ultimately coopted by bourgeois ideology. Property crimes could be seen as "petty" while the reimagining noble criminal served as a sort of cultural rebel archetype to use against egalitarianism. Hence, the trend inadvertently reinforces the sanctity of private property and serves to justify the social hierarchy, in that the successful capitalist, if accused of crime/immorality, can adopt a similar sort of archetype.

I will skip the next section and the one on M because it is probably less well known. Moving on:

Thrill Versus Self-Preservation

Landa uses the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924 to illustrate how Nietzschean ideas about crime infiltrated public discourse. For those unfamiliar with the case, it involved two wealthy youths who murdered a younger boy, after allegedly being inspired by Nietzsche’s rejection of herd morality and call to revalue all values. During the trial, the motive for the crime became a major area of focus.

The defense focused heavily on arguing that the murder was not committed for personal gain, but rather for the thrill of the crime itself. That is, it was a Dionysian act; perhaps evil, but more "purely" motivated. The defense worked to portray Leopold’s reading of Nietzsche as evidence of stifled intellectual brilliance in order to suggest that the crime stemmed from lofty rumination, not base greed. Indeed, the defense even tried an anti-egalitarian tactic, arguing that the defendant's wealth had made them an unfair target of ire.

By contrast, the prosecution, in hoping to secure a heavier penalty, insisted that money was the true motive, portraying the killing as an afterthought to protect the robbery. That is, as a practical act of self-preservation, not passion. At one remarkable point, the prosecutor actually criticizes the boys for not killing for passion or pleasure, but only out of calculated greed.

An interesting point here is that, in classical Western ethics, it would be "killing for pleasure" and particularly "killing because of lofty ruminations" that would be considered the worse sort of sin. For instance, Dante puts crimes of incontinence and uncontrolled desire in the upper level of Hell, where punishments are less severe. Below that lies the realm of violent crimes, and in the deepest pits of Hell we see sins that corrupt the intellect. The idea here is that a person is more culpable for willed, intellectual vice than for mere incontinence, but also that sins of the intellect are more dire precisely because they represent the corruption of the very faculty that would allow us to know and pursue the good (i.e., the intellect and will) instead of evil. On this view, the worst sorts of sins involve the will becoming its own object (as opposed to the Good, the proper target of the will). This is the maximal form of the Augustinian curvatas in se, where the soul curves inward on itself like a black hole. But Dante's architecture is essentially copied over from Aristotle and St. Thomas; and parallels an area of wide consensus.

Personally, I think this shift would seem to stem from a larger shift towards volanturism in modern thought, and the tendency to define freedom in terms of potency/power.

At any rate, Landa argues that this implies that both sides implicitly accepted a "Nietzschean" hierarchy of motives. Passionate, “Dionysian” crime appears to have seemed more excusable than material, utilitarian crime. The court transcripts reveal a convergence between Nietzsche’s valuation of “beautiful crime” and bourgeois legal norms, where profit-driven crime (the corruption of the market) is considered to be the gravest variety. For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. Certainly, such attitudes might have helped promote capitalism, but I think that is probably an ancillary effect.

For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with your conclusion. Landa's interpretation, not only of Nietzsche, but also of its cultural reception and effects, seems forced. If anything one would expect it to shift opinions away from bourgeois ideology, because it's an ideology based precisely on utility.

Nietzsche devaluates utility and that somehow gets co-opted to strengthen an ideology based on utility?