Animals Sick with Language: From Syntax to Socialism in Nietzsche

While some have argued that a reappraisal of Nietzsche’s politics needs to be anchored around his conception of social power and hierarchy, I will argue that a focus on Nietzsche’s basic metaphysics can be fruitful. I will be exploring Nietzsche’s ‘identity metaphysics’, his monism, his determinism, his dismissal of traditional cause-effect dichotomies, his anti-Aristotelian rejection of a fundamental distinction between objects and processes. It may appear peculiar to try and draw principled connections between Nietzsche’s hatred of socialism and his view that tables and chairs are fundamentally indistinguishable from their qualities. However, many such relations can be drawn, largely by understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy of language, potentially opening new avenues for understanding the origin of Nietzsche’s seemingly variable, and often contradictory, positions about social relations and political hierarchies. For example, the more politically inflected readings of the will to power can be grounded in Nietzsche’s assumptions about how objects intrinsically relate to their dispositions and qualities (their ‘powers’). I begin with a brief survey of Nietzsche’s ‘system’, his philosophy of mind and language, before progressing to forms of ideological terrain that appear to be inter-related with his fundamental beliefs about the structure of reality. I will conclude in a standardly Nietzschean way—by not really concluding at all.