Primarily, I would use my time at the IWM to continue to write my doctoral dissertation, a commentary on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. Secondarily, I hope to have a chance to continue to read broadly in the history of political philosophy and early modern metaphysics, and continue to improve my facility with the German language.

In writing on any Nietzschean work, one most give an account of both Nietzsche's political and philosophical concerns. However, the latter cannot be understood without the former, in so far as Nietzsche always writes as both philosopher and rhetorician. Nietzsche's philosophy, an extended examination of the problem of articulating the difference between a base and a noble character, cannot be understood unless we understand the manner in which he writes, and the motivation behind writing in such a manner. Such hermeneutical sensitivity can only be cultivated, I believe, through a close examination of a single work. However, in what follows I can only sketch my broader philosophical concerns.

As in all of Nietzsche's works, there is a deep tension in the Genealogy. It can be summarized briefly as a tension between Nietzsche's claim to know the difference between the noble and the base (or the healthy and the sick) and his account of nature as, fundamentally, chaos. It is my contention that these tensions can be partially, although not fully, resolved by understanding Nietzsche's political interests. Nietzsche describes these most succinctly in the Twilight of the Idols as the attempt to "dam and gather up degeneration" by accelerating our age further into decadence. I believe that Nietzsche has successfully achieved this effect through the rhetorical strategy of delivering his philosophical doctrines, broadly speaking, in an overexcited, seductive, and dangerous form. A significant part of the seductive appeal of this rhetoric is its proximity to a genuine philosophical problem. Of special concern is the problem of perspectivalism. I take it to be Nietzsche's view that a truly philosophical character is a rare gift whose higher "perspective" cannot be made public in any dialectical fashion. There is no mathematical element to philosophical discursivity in Nietzsche. Therefore, the public character of philosophy is radically undermined. However, this comes close to undermining the distinction between the noble and the base at all, and therefore leveling all perspectives. The difference between the base and the noble, then, can be misrepresented as an (ultimately) leveling doctrine of radical creativity, as an exhortation by which those perspectives that stand between the noble and the base are urged to pridefully use the rhetoric of the destruction of wisdom by creativity to attempt to reduce the difference between the base and the noble. I note in passing that the particular problem of the danger of demotic pride runs throughout modern political philosophy.

Nietzsche's purpose in employing this rhetoric is to undermine the myth that what I will call the social and cultural elite (Aristotle's gentleman or Hegel's bureaucrat) can participate in the highest good through virtuous citizenship. Rather, what we participate in once seduced by Nietzsche is a hidden version of the ethos of nihilism, but a version that still retains an element of participation in the highest good in so far as it is a radicalized version of the highest good for Christianity as accelerated by science. The cultural elite, formerly stabilized by the myth of participation in the good by virtue of good deeds and participation in civic institutions, are separated from wisdom and thereby divided and destabilized. The deeds are done, but the means by which they can be called good is covered over. Thereby, the city is destroyed. A better future may or may not emerge from the wreckage (and may or may not have a noble legislator to found a new culture). This is Nietzsche's gambit.

In short, Nietzsche popularizes the rhetoric that nihilism leads to liberalism, or sets us free. By contrast, the tradition from Heroditus to Hume has been that the practical political stance fitting for a nihilist is a clever conservatism, or the transformation of custom into nature. I cannot examine this position here, but a think it is the sounder response should chaos obtain. Nietzsche's bold rhetoric has reversed this doctrine, and thereby accelerated our decay. But behind this, and really, not so hidden, is a deep understanding of the questions of philosophy, to be found if only there is a little sobriety in all the madness.

My own view of Nietzsche is that he is dangerous, if philosophically (and not just rhetorically) compelling. that his gambit is not worthwhile, and that 'modern liberalism,' despite all of the spiritual dangers that Nietzsche observes with such subtlety, must be supported in many of its practical applications both for the sake of politics and for the sake of philosophy, even if that support must be, at times, clever. In the modern world liberalism can be, if couched properly, useful to excellence of the human soul. The problem, of course, lies in how to couch it properly, something with which the 20th century has had tremendous difficulty, and only occasional success.