About political responsibility

The difficilties to which German idealism was exposed gave rise to the third wave of modernity-of the wave that bears us today. This last epoch was inaugurated by Nietzsche. Nietsche retained what appeared to him to be the insight due to the historical consiousness of the 19the century. But he rejected the view that the histrical process is rational as well as the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modren state is possible. He may be said to have returned, on the level of the historical consiounses, from Hegel's reconciliation to Rousseau's antinomy. He taught then that all human life and human thoughts ultimatly rest on the horizon-forming creations which are not suscepitble of rational legitimization. The creators are great induviduals. The solitary creator who gives a new lamp unto himself and who subjects himself to all its rigors takes place of Rousseau's solitary dreamer. For Nature has ceased to appear as lawful and merciful. The fundamental experience of existence is therefor the experience, not the bliss, but the suffering, of emptiness, of an abyss.

Nietzsche's creative call to creativity was adressed to induviduals who should revolutionize their own lives, not the society or his nation. But he expected or hoped that his call, at once stern and imploring, questioning and desirous to be questioned, would tempt the best men of the generations afther him to become true selves and thus to form a new nobility which would be able to rule the planet. He opposed the possibility of a planterary aristocartie to the alleged necessity of a universal classless and stateless society. Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, he preached the sacred right of "merciless extinction" or large masses of men with as little restraint as his great anatgonist has done. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustable power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialsim and communism, but conservatism, nationalism and democracyy as well.

Afther having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way toward political responsability. He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of will to power. The difficulty inherent in the philisophy of the will to power led afther Nietzsche to the explicit renunciation of the very notion eternity. Modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest seld-consiouness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicity condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity. For obilivion of eternity, or in other words, enstrangement from mans deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.

L. Strauss
What is Political Philosophy?