Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State (1909)

Author: Nikos Kazantzakis · Doctoral dissertation, University of Athens · Written in Paris 1907–1909 Ο Φρειδερίκος Νίτσε εν τη Φιλοσοφία του Δικαίου και της Πολιτείας

The Argument in One Paragraph

Modern Europe is a civilization poisoned by its own inherited table of values — Judeo-Christian morality, democratic egalitarianism, the metaphysics of free will and the immortal soul — and is therefore drowning in nihilism. The cure, Kazantzakis argues through Nietzsche, is neither pessimistic resignation nor a return to old faith, but a radical transvaluation of values. The natural law of life is the will to power (Wille zur Macht), which shows us that humans are not equal, that rights do not descend from God or reason but are expressions of the strong’s capacity to impose form, and that “right flows from might itself, whose boundaries are called laws.” The political-ethical goal is the Übermensch — the human being who has shaken off the old values and creates new, life-affirming ones, who builds his “house at the foot of Vesuvius” and accepts pain as “the great educator of humanity.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is therefore a “final and dangerous medication”: it destroys the weak, but it cures the strong and teaches them to face suffering with tragic-Dionysian joy.

What the Book Is About

This is the dissertation the young Kazantzakis wrote in Paris between 1907 and 1909, submitted to the University of Athens, and later revised for publication. It is the first serious reception of Nietzsche in the Greek language, and it is still one of the clearest short expositions of the political-legal side of Nietzsche’s thought — the side that [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Zarathustra]] dramatizes and [[beyond-good-and-evil|Beyond Good and Evil]] and [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]] argue but that Nietzsche himself never wrote as a system. Kazantzakis builds the system the mature Nietzsche declined to write, and tries to do so without betraying the spirit of the refusal. The “resolutive method” — patient analytic dismantling — is followed by what Kazantzakis himself calls a “lyrical expansion,” an “objectification of subjectivity” in which the dissertation tips over into prophetic advocacy.

Six chapters organize the book.

Chapter 1 (“Prolegomena”) sets the stage. Nietzsche cannot be understood apart from the nineteenth-century European crisis — the death-agony of Christianity, the rise of science, the collapse of absolute values. “Having destroyed the Temple in three days, Science is to this day unable to raise another one in its place,” Kazantzakis writes; the modern era is a period of “spiritual anarchy” between two tables of values. He traces Nietzsche’s own intellectual-biographical arc from Lutheran piety to Schopenhauerian pessimism to the discovery of the tragic Greeks, and shows how each move was a stage in forging the mature philosophy. Already in this chapter the Übermensch is sighted on the horizon as the work’s terminus, and the imperative is laid down in cadenced prose: “Build your homes at the foot of Vesuvius… Send out your ships to the distant, unexplored seas.” Live dangerously. The grocer’s welfare is exactly what must be refused.

Chapter 2 (“Nihilism”) is the diagnosis. Nihilism, Kazantzakis writes, is “the condition that is produced in us as soon as we realize that there exists an implacable and irreconcilable disparity between the real and the ideal.” It is not a philosophical position one argues into; it is a psychic event one suffers. “The contemporary table of values is the sole cause of the nihilism we observe in Europe today.” Modern humanity worships ideals — God, equality, objective morality — that do not correspond to anything in reality, and this disparity, once exposed, produces despair. The response is an ultimatum: “Either he must destroy the reigning table of values; or he must himself suffer destruction.” Kazantzakis then makes his most influential distinction: nihilism splits into a Pessimistic form that consumes the weak and a Dionysian form that the strong wield as a hammer to clear the old ground. “Contemporary European nihilism has become a drug of critical importance; administered to the diseased pessimists, it gives death to some and life to others.” The same medicine, two opposite outcomes.

Chapters 3 and 4 (“Negative Aspect”) carry out the clearing. Kazantzakis systematically dismantles the central ideas of modern ethics and politics. Human nature, properly understood through the will to power, contains no “soul” and no “free will.” The instinct of domination is primary; altruism and cooperation are secondary adaptations. “There is no free will any more than there is unfree will. There are only weak wills… and strong wills.” From this follows what Kazantzakis calls “the innocence of becoming”: “Everything flows from necessity, so proclaims the new wisdom. Everything is innocent.” “One is born vicious as inexorably as he is born sickly. Malice is not a cause, it is a consequence.” Without free will the entire architecture of guilt collapses; with it collapses the moral apparatus that has dominated Europe for two millennia.

Equality is refuted as both biological fact and moral norm. “Justice commands me to declare that ‘men are not equal.‘” Egalitarian society produces a paradoxical regression — “the average form is more valuable than the above-average, and the below-average is more valuable than the average” — because the mediocre triumph by numbers and the superior is ground down. The family, the state, democracy, socialism, feminism — all are diagnosed as symptoms of decadence. The state, in particular, gets the harshest diagnosis: it is “the coldest of monstrosities,” a hospital for the superfluous many; “this State has been invented for the sake of the superfluous… ‘I, the State, am the People’: This is a lie!” A nation that has lost its predatory instinct is “mature and ripe for democracy and rule of the grocers.”

Christianity comes in for the hardest blow. It is the single most successful slave revolt in morals, the one that took noble Greco-Roman values and systematically inverted them, turning “the blond beast” into “a domesticated and harmless animal.” Kazantzakis is willing to cite Plato’s Callicles approvingly: “Those who set the laws are the weak and many… they say that it is disgraceful to have more than others… but nature indeed shows… that it is right that the better rules over and has more than the worse.” Modern secular descendants — Kantian duty, democratic equality, humanitarian pity — are the shadows of the dead God still falling across Europe’s moral landscape. “Success is the necessary material externalization of the idea of Right,” Kazantzakis writes, fusing Hegel’s verdict on history with Nietzsche’s verdict on power.

The decisive point in Chapter 4 is the definition of right. “Right flows from might itself, whose boundaries are called laws.” Law is not the expression of divine justice, nor of rational consent, nor of a social contract freely entered into. Law is the provisional form that power takes when it settles into institutions — and when those institutions stop expressing power, they have already started to die. The state is therefore not a moral community; it is, as Zarathustra says, “the coldest of monstrosities,” a consolidation of power that presents its own interest as universal value.

Chapter 5 (“Recapitulation”) confronts modernity’s secular religions — socialism, democracy, humanitarian pity — under the heading of the “religion of human sorrow.” Their demand for universal welfare is the slave revolt’s last respectable form. Against them Kazantzakis sets the principle that gives Chapter 5 its lyrical center: “Pain is the great educator of humanity, and to pain are owed almost all noble acts and great drives.” The grocer’s morality wants to abolish pain; tragic morality knows that pain is the chisel by which strong souls are carved.

Chapter 6 (“The Positive Aspect”) pivots from destruction to construction. Having cleared the rubble, Kazantzakis turns to the values Nietzsche proposes as replacements — what he calls the New Decalogue. “Life is an intense longing for an externalization… life perpetually tends to transcend itself.” This is the will to power not as cynicism but as cosmological law: every living thing wants to exceed itself, and the species that forgets this dies. Egoism — properly understood, not as petty selfishness but as the drive to prevail — is “the positive foundation of the new values.” The human being’s task is to relentlessly overcome itself. “The creators need to be hard, like diamonds, or like the sculptor’s chisel.”

The ultimate goal is the Übermensch: “the one who is able to heroically shake off the present table of values and develop harmonically, to the utmost degree, all human attributes; one who once again posits as the purpose of his life to eternally tend to become higher than himself.” The masses, meanwhile, are not invited to the climb — “the fish have an interest, and indeed a vital organic need, to remain in their water-bound captivity.” Whether one finds this realism or apologia is the question Kazantzakis lets the reader carry. He himself does not flinch: “May the weak be destroyed — here is the first step in [expressing] my love for humanity.” This is the sentence that has dated worst, and it is the sentence the book most needs the reader to confront rather than evade. Kazantzakis presents Nietzsche’s philosophy as a trial — “a final and dangerous medication” — that “either cures or kills,” and accepts the verdict on those terms.

Key Concepts

Nihilism. Pessimistic (destroys the weak) vs. Dionysian (the strong’s hammer for clearing false values). The signature distinction of the book and the move that makes the rest of the argument possible: the same diagnosis can produce either suicide or Amor fati, and the difference lies in the constitution of the diagnosed.
Will to power (Wille zur Macht). “The fundamental law of life… the will to prevail and dominate.” Not a drive among drives; the drive beneath all drives. Kazantzakis develops it as the political-legal ground of everything — even the apparent obedience of the servant turns out to be a covert appetite for power, exactly as in [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Zarathustra]]‘s “Of Self-Overcoming.”
Übermensch (Overman). The concrete political-ethical goal, not a Darwinian outcome but a chosen self-overcoming. The human being who creates new values from strength. Read against [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Zarathustra]] §3 of the Prologue: “the Superman shall be the meaning of the earth.”
Ressentiment. The psychological engine of slave morality and democratic socialism; the weak’s inverted aggression, disguised as moral virtue, “a conspiracy by the weak instincts against the strong and proudly egotistical.” The diagnosis Kazantzakis draws straight from [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]].
Right flows from might. The political thesis: rights are not derived from God, reason, or contract, but from the capacity to impose form on the world. Laws are the boundaries of power that has crystallized into institutions. The strongest direct contrast in our network is [[the-leviathan|Hobbes’s Leviathan]] — same starting realism about the state of nature, opposite verdict on what to do about it.
Table of values (Decalogue). The settled hierarchy of moral-political concepts by which a civilization lives. Every civilization has one; periodically, the table must be smashed and rewritten. The “New Decalogue” of Chapter 6 is the deliberate parodic title for what should replace the old Mosaic one.
The “shadow of the dead God.” The Kantian moral law, humanitarian pity, democratic equality — moral imperatives that survive Christianity’s theological collapse. Conscience itself, in Kazantzakis’s reading, is one such shadow — and the longest-lasting one.
The blond beast (blonde Bestie). The aristocratic-predatory human type before Christian domestication. Kazantzakis uses the metaphor as Nietzsche did — as a diagnostic contrast, not a racial program — though he does not soften it for the modern reader.
Decadence. “Symptoms… not decline’s offspring but its parents… the consequence of physical decadence.” For Kazantzakis decadence is not metaphor; it is physiology, and it is contagious.
The innocence of becoming. Once free will is removed, blame is removed too: “Everything is innocent.” The aim is not to license cruelty but to cut off the ressentiment loop in which the weak punish the strong by inducing guilt.

Key Quotations

“The fundamental characteristic — and gravest malaise — of our times is Nihilism.” — Chapter 2. The opening diagnosis.
“The contemporary table of values is the sole cause of the nihilism we observe in Europe today.” — Chapter 2. The diagnostic thesis.
“Either he must destroy the reigning table of values; or he must himself suffer destruction.” — Chapter 2. The ultimatum.
“Contemporary European nihilism has become a drug of critical importance; administered to the diseased pessimists, it gives death to some and life to others.” — Chapter 2. The two-edged medicine.
“Having destroyed the Temple in three days, Science is to this day unable to raise another one in its place.” — Chapter 1. The bankruptcy of secular science as replacement religion.
“Build your homes at the foot of Vesuvius. Send out your ships to the distant, unexplored seas.” — Chapter 1. Live dangerously.
“The average form is more valuable than the above-average, and the below-average is more valuable than the average.” — Chapter 3. The paradox of egalitarian selection.
“There is no free will any more than there is unfree will. There are only weak wills… and strong wills.” — Chapter 3. The refutation of moral responsibility.
“Everything flows from necessity, so proclaims the new wisdom. Everything is innocent.” — Chapter 3. The innocence of becoming.
“One is born vicious as inexorably as he is born sickly. Malice is not a cause, it is a consequence.” — Chapter 3. Physiology over morality.
“Justice commands me to declare that ‘men are not equal.‘” — Chapter 3. The rejection of democratic egalitarianism.
“The submission of the weak under the strong is a law of nature.” — Chapter 3. Political realism.
“This State is the coldest of monstrosities… ‘I, the State, am the People’: This is a lie!” — Chapter 3. The state as the new idol.
“A nation that instinctively rejects war… is a people that is mature and ripe for democracy and rule of the grocers.” — Chapter 3. The vitalist critique of bourgeois pacifism.
“Right flows from might itself, whose boundaries are called laws.” — Chapter 4. The political-legal thesis of the book.
“Those who set the laws are the weak and many… but nature indeed shows… that it is right that the better rules over and has more than the worse.” — Chapter 4 (citing Plato’s Gorgias). The ancient antecedent.
“Success is the necessary material externalization of the idea of Right.” — Chapter 4. The Hegel/Nietzsche fusion on history and power.
“Pain is the great educator of humanity, and to pain are owed almost all noble acts and great drives.” — Chapter 5. Against the secular religion of compassion.
“All there is in the depths of a healthy human being is egoism — an unrestrained driving force to prevail…” — Chapter 6. The positive foundation.
“Life is an intense longing for an externalization… life perpetually tends to transcend itself.” — Chapter 6. The vitalist law.
“The creators need to be hard, like diamonds, or like the sculptor’s chisel.” — Chapter 6. Cruelty as artistic-political necessity.
“May the weak be destroyed — here is the first step in [expressing] my love for humanity.” — Chapter 6. The book’s most uncomfortable line, and the test it asks the reader to face.
“The Übermensch… is the one who is able to heroically shake off the present table of values and develop harmonically, to the utmost degree, all human attributes; one who once again posits as the purpose of his life to eternally tend to become higher than himself.” — Chapter 6. The defining goal.

Metaphors That Carry the Argument

Metaphor	What it signals	Where
The table of values	The civilizational hierarchy of moral-political concepts that must periodically be broken.	Throughout; introduced Chapter 2
The Temple destroyed and not rebuilt	The bankruptcy of science as replacement religion: it can demolish but not consecrate.	Chapter 1
Vesuvius	The imperative to live dangerously; the refusal of the grocer’s safety.	Chapter 1
The blond beast	The aristocratic-predatory type before Christian domestication — an image of pre-moral vitality.	Chapter 3
The shadow of the dead God	The moral imperatives (Kant’s duty, democratic equality, humanitarian pity) that survive after theological belief collapses.	Chapter 4
The fish in their water-bound captivity	The masses, constitutionally adapted to obedience, would suffocate under the creator’s freedom.	Chapter 6
The mask	The philosopher’s suspicion that “truth and falsehood are perhaps equally worthy”; even his unmaskings are themselves masks.	Chapter 1
Zarathustra	The prophetic herald of the Übermensch, descending from the mountain — Kazantzakis’s recurring stand-in for the entire constructive program.	Chapter 1 and throughout

Who the Book Is Arguing With

The Judeo-Christian tradition. The slave revolt in morals; the inversion of aristocratic values; the invention of guilt and sin. Christianity is the archetypal table of values that must be smashed.
Democratic-socialist egalitarianism. “The religion of human sorrow.” The modern continuation of the slave revolt, wearing the secular clothing of natural rights and political equality. Its endpoint is the Last Man of [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Zarathustra]] — the comfort-seeker who can no longer despise himself.
Kantian moral philosophy. The categorical imperative as conscience operating without its theological backstop — a shadow of the dead God. Kant’s epistemology gets called a “Chinese wall,” his intellect “geometric.”
Schopenhauer’s pessimism. The diagnosis is accepted (life is suffering, the Will is blind) but the prescription is rejected. “Pessimistic Nirvana” is just another renunciation, another priest’s drug. Kazantzakis’s Nietzsche refuses renunciation and chooses Dionysian affirmation.
Spencer and the altruistic-evolutionary tradition. Adaptation to the herd is mistaken for the deepest law of life. The deepest law is exceeding the herd, not joining it.
Darwinism’s teleology. “Survival of the fittest” is not the deepest truth about life; the discharge of strength is. Mediocrity often survives best, and the strong are constantly being ground down by the egalitarian pressures of mass society. “Progress” is not inevitable; it has to be willed.
Modern science as substitute faith. “A human being — a certain kind of over-stimulated animal that, luckily, dies quickly.” That is the verdict science delivers when it is honest, and it is precisely because this verdict is unbearable that humanity needs new values rather than no values.
[[the-leviathan|Hobbes’s Leviathan]] (implicit). Both books begin with realism about power and the state of nature. Hobbes’s verdict: build the absolute state to escape the war of all against all. Kazantzakis-via-Nietzsche’s verdict: the absolute state is itself the war, organized by the weak against the strong. Same premise, opposite institution.

How It’s Written

A hybrid of academic dissertation, biographical study, and philosophical poem. Kazantzakis begins in the third person, expounding Nietzsche’s life and thought, but frequently slips into first-person translation of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, producing something closer to passionate advocacy than to detached scholarship. The tone is highly polemical, prophetic, and earnest. Kazantzakis describes his own approach as a “resolutive method” of analysis grounded by “lyrical expansion,” and he is candid that he treats Nietzsche’s life and thought as an “objectification of subjectivity” — that is, the philosopher’s own struggle for health is part of what the philosophy means. This is not a dry academic gloss; it is the first major Greek Nietzschean text, written by a twenty-six-year-old who is already thinking of Nietzsche as the key to his own artistic-philosophical program. (The Athens faculty almost certainly rejected it the first time around for exactly this reason: too much advocacy, not enough scholarly distance.)

The book’s philosophical content owes as much to the young Kazantzakis’s synthesis as to Nietzsche himself. Where Nietzsche speaks in polemical aphorisms and refuses system, Kazantzakis builds the system Nietzsche implied — and this is both the book’s strength (clarity of exposition) and its departure (Nietzsche’s own anti-systematic method is sometimes lost in the systematizing). The strongest chapters — Chapter 2 on nihilism, Chapter 4’s definition of right, Chapter 5’s defense of pain — are also the most lyrical. The weakest — the abrupt jump in Chapter 3 from individual physiology to political tyranny, the arbitrary class division of Chapter 6 with no sociological mechanism for selection — show where the dissertation form strains under its prophetic ambitions. Later, in his mature work (Ascesis / The Saviors of God, 1927), Kazantzakis will synthesize this Nietzsche with Henri Bergson’s élan vital into his own philosophy.

Connections

Kazantzakis — the intellectual foundation. Every philosophical move in Zorba the Greek, Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the whole novelistic corpus is tracked back to the Nietzsche of this dissertation.
Nietzsche — the subject. Reads best alongside the primary works it expounds.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — the most direct primary source. Kazantzakis treats Zarathustra’s prophetic descent as the book’s structural icon and quotes from it throughout.
Beyond Good and Evil — the source of the master/slave-morality framework Kazantzakis takes as given.
On the Genealogy of Morals — the source of ressentiment, ascetic ideal, and the genealogical method Kazantzakis applies to political institutions.
Human, All Too Human — the methodological ancestor of Nietzsche’s psychological-historical critique that Chapter 3 extends to politics.
The Dawn of Day — the patient psychological digging whose conclusions Chapters 3–4 systematize politically.
Schopenhauer — the shared predecessor Nietzsche inverts and Kazantzakis follows Nietzsche in inverting.
Kant — the enemy-behind-the-enemy; Kantian moral law as the shadow of the dead God.
Leviathan — the great political counter-template. Hobbes legitimates the absolute state as escape from the war of all against all; Kazantzakis-via-Nietzsche reads the absolute state itself as the war’s institutional disguise. Read together, the two books frame two opposite Western answers to the same realist starting point.
Power and Morality — the theme page where the book’s political-legal thesis belongs most directly.
Sartre — the contemporary on the other side of the Nietzschean inheritance. Sartre’s existentialist freedom and Kazantzakis’s Nietzschean Übermensch are cousins; the translator of the dissertation notes its “prophetic anticipation of twentieth-century existentialism and Heideggerian ontology.”
Camus — the gentler heir. Camus inherits the Dionysian “yes” without the apparatus of master/slave hierarchy; “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” is Amor fati with the political teeth pulled.

Lineage

Predecessors: Nietzsche’s own works above all; [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Zarathustra]] in particular as the constructive icon; [[the-genealogy-of-morals|Genealogy of Morals]] as the analytic engine; Schopenhauer (the pessimism inherited through Nietzsche); Kant (the critical target); Plato’s Callicles in the Gorgias (the ancient strong-rule thesis); Hobbes (the realist political ancestor whose verdict is being inverted); Darwin (whose teleology is being refused); Henri Bergson (the contemporary vitalist whose élan vital is the next synthesis Kazantzakis will undertake).
Successors: Kazantzakis’s own mature philosophy (Ascesis / The Saviors of God, 1927 — which fuses this Nietzsche with Bergson); his novels (Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, Odyssey: A Modern Sequel); modern Greek Nietzsche scholarship; the broader twentieth-century reception of Nietzsche as a political rather than only aesthetic or moral philosopher; the existentialist line through Sartre and Camus; later “philosophies of life” that take vitalism as their organizing principle.

Renodus

Tree of Ideas

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State