A well-being out of nihilism
on the affinities between Nietzsche and anarchist thought
pp. 208-225
in: Benjamin Franks, Matthew Wilson (eds), Anarchism and moral philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
Friedrich Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, 1967) polemically deconstructs the history of Western moralisms and demonstrates much of their underlying hypocrisies and implicit power plays. In this measure, at least this part of Nietzsche's philosophical project can be seen as anarchistic, and analogous to the critique which Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, 1977c) puts forward of the residual power relations in the Marxist attempt at an emancipatory project. For Nietzsche, the incongruity is that the philosophies which most claim to be virtuous and moral are those which precisely most emasculate their own hidden and malevolent will-to-power (Nietzsche, 1967); Bakunin, Proudhon (Proudhon, 1877) and Goldman (Goldman, 1977) would say exactly the same of the self-proclaimed "revolutionary" philosophies.
