Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Ressentiment, Legislators, Commanders

In I, 13 of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the concept of a subject that abstracts from its degree of strength is a product of Ressentiment.  Now, to legislate is to conceive a set of entities as independent of their differences in strength.  In contrast, a military organization is constituted by a hierarchy based on and codifying the relative strengths of its members.  Accordingly, that passage in GM seems to require a reconsideration of the conflation, in Beyond Good and Evil #211, of "legislators" and "commanders".

No comments:

Post a Comment