Shaping the Future:
Nietzsche’s New Regime
of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices
By Horst Hutter
Reviewed by Rachael Sotos
(New School University)
Horst Hutter’s Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime
of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices is the wise work
of a serious disciple. Notwithstanding the irony
such a term immediately connotes in relation to an anti-foundational
thinker such as Nietzsche, “disciple” is indeed the appropriate
term. First let us recall the origin meaning of the Latin
“discipulus:” “a student,” “a member of a school,”
for Hutter indeed understands his primary task to be the reincarnation
of Nietzsche as a philosopher in the ancient style. Inspired
by the groundbreaking approach of Pierre Hadot, Hutter’s own
teacher, Hutter’s Nietzsche emerges from the libraries of
modern commentary as a philosopher in the mold of the preSocratics
and the Hellenistic schools, a sage whose imitable manner
of life rather than doctrinaire philosophy proves to be valid
or invalid. As Hadot has taught us, “discourses were never
more than tools to facilitate the striving for self-perfection…the
‘doctrines’ actually contained in the writings of ancient
philosophers are hence frequently contradictory and appear
to be entirely provisional and subject to refutation”(i).
According to Hutter, this is precisely how Nietzsche intended
us to read his “suffering logos”: the life of the sage that
inspires our own (vxi).
| page
up |
“Disciple” is also an apt description for Hutter given that
the word inevitably denotes the later development in western
culture, the spread of Pauline Christianity. This can be viewed
in several aspects. On the one hand, as Shaping the Future
is a work which addresses the question of political culture,
Hutter concerns himself with Nietzsche’s great ambition in
confronting the eviscerating decadence he perceived in Christianity,
from his youthful discovery of Dionysus – who remains ever
present for Hutter– to Zarathustra, “the ‘fifth gospel’
intended to replace St. Paul and the evangelists”(6).
Paul appears in another important aspect because Shaping
the Future is emphatically a work of political theory
and Hutter explicitly situates Nietzsche’s therapeutic project
(to “heal” nihilistic-modernity) in relation to the historical
accomplishment of Paul. Albeit with an inverted order of revaluations,
“Nietzsche provides a way of repeating in modernity what St.
Paul accomplished at the origin of Christianity; he is hence
perhaps as important politically as was St. Paul.(xiii)”
On the other hand, and although the elegance of Hutter’s
writing and the modesty of his tone do not betray this (except
perhaps when he momentarily bristles at flippant “postmoderns”
who do not read Nietzsche with appropriate seriousness), the
reader might recognize a bit of the saint in Hutter himself.
But again: I mean this in the best sense of the term “disciple,”
for Hutter indeed appears as one of Nietzsche’s hoped-for
future readers, one who patiently “reads with ears.” Unlike
the monster progeny of politics (Hitler, Mussolini) who took
the first facile justification Nietzsche’s text makes available,
Hutter insists that we read Nietzsche with “dialectical subtlety,”
that we take up the challenge to reeducate ourselves, to wrestle
with all our conceptions, “conscious and unconscious”(10).Unlike
many academic commentators who read Nietzsche with the cold
view of a vivisectionist, dividing his oeuvre into the early
and the late, the “properly” philosophical and the “poetic
post-philosophical” (e.g. Genealogy v. Zarathustra),
Hutter takes his inspiration, “from all periods of his philosophical
writings,” narrating a consistent “healing” project throughout
(4).
This is not to say that Hutter does not draw upon a range
recent Nietzsche studies in his positive reconstructive, he
does and when appropriate he generously acknowledges
his debts. As a critical reference point, however,
it well for the purposes of this review to mark one recent
commentator in particular, Alexander Nehemas. Nehemas is of
obvious importance to Hutter as his Nietzsche: Life as
Literature goes beyond the predominant philosophical
concern with epistemology and metaphysics in order to narrate
the “existential coherence” of Nietzsche the self-created
literary character. From Hutter’s view, Nehemas accomplishes
something important, but “he does not go far enough” (xiii).
In the first place, while Nietzsche certainly did write himself
into existence, this was much more than the production
of a cultural artifact; “the whole trajectory of his work
aims beyond this tradition [life as literature]…his literary
effort is a way of destroying his own ‘identity,’ a way of
recording this self-overcoming.” And as Hutter insists, this
self-overcoming is an invitation to our own self-overcoming,
“we,” are the “future ‘selves’ in whom he would then ‘live
posthumously’ (117-8).” For Nehemas, there may be “life as
literature” but few exempla to be incarnated, there is primarily,
“the vanity of a deeply disturbed ‘miserable little man’ (p.234
[Nehemas]).” For Nehemas, Hutter explains, there is only “personal
pain;” “no political dimension,” “no wish to revolutionize
society and culture” (xiii).
Hutter, the true “disciple,” if you will forgive this playful
attribution, proves himself in contrast to Nehemas (and to
other readers who take comfort in the armchair of the analyst)
as he does not waste his energy diagnosing Nietzsche, for
Nietzsche did that well enough himself. Rather, Hutter allows
Nietzsche to be the master, to be the therapist, to be the
one who helps us pronounce the diagnosis on ourselves. And
what is more, in speaking through and with Nietzsche from
the standpoint of the therapist of culture, Hutter offers
us concrete advice in our own projects of self-overcoming
and autopoeisis, and more specifically, five Nietzschean
“techniques:”
The practices of solitude; the cultivation of agonistic friendships;
writing and reading the self; a nutritional askesis that involves
extreme care in regard to the ingestion of the various kinds
of ‘food,’ including not only what one drinks and eats, but
also what one breathes, reads, watches, and listens to; and
finally, learning again how to dance with one’s feet as well
as with concepts. (25)
In the six chapters which unfold these “techniques” (as well
as a remarkable concluding discussion of the ‘eternal recurrence’)
Hutter indeed brings Nietzsche into posthumous existence as
he seamlessly moves from sophisticated scholarly appropriations
of Nietzsche’s works to phenomenological reflections on the
practices and pathologies of our contemporary world. Reading
Shaping the Future one has the sense that Nietzsche
would be pleased indeed to see his penetrating analysis of
slave morality transposed in a diagnosis of the technological
culture of the twenty-first century. He would be no less fascinated
to see himself vindicated, not only in his dark premonitions
of the coming centuries, but in practices of resistance and
self-transformation, at least among those “few” presently
concerned with transformative life practices, e.g. with yoga,
mindfulness meditation, martial arts, egalitarian personal
relations, ecology, etc. But what really stands out in this
seamless interweaving of the text and contemporary reality,
and would no less please Nietzsche, is what I am playfully
naming Hutter’s Pauline political ambition, for he continually
and consistently exhorts us to think of the self-work that
we do, not as “self-overcoming” that merely allows
us to function in the pressures of a stressful life, but as
that which contains transformative potential and is essential
to political responsibility:
| page
up |
Continue| Reading | top right
column
|
