Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Autonomy and Oligarchy

In the Genealogy of Morals II, 2, Nietzsche suggests that a hierarchy obtains between those who possess a "right to make promises" and those who do not, i. e. between those who are autonomous and those who are not.  However, that abstract distinction entails no necessary actual quantity of membership in either class.  Thus, it is not impossible that every member of a society is autonomous, in which case the society is not hierarchical.  In other words, the concept of Autonomy does not necessarily entail that of political Oligarchy, and could, in fact, be consistent with political Democracy.  Thus, Nietzsche's assertion that "our organism is an oligarchy" (GM, II, 1) is not as systematically significant as he seems to take it to be, not so much because that specific political classification is inaccurate, but because no political metaphor is appropriate to the internal structure of the human organism.  Thus, the venerable ancestor of that assertion, Plato's Individual-Polis analogy, similarly flounders on the contingency of how many Rational beings actually exist, i. e. if more than one, then neither a well-ordered Individual nor a well-ordered Polis is necessarily a Monarchy.

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