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 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. Nietzsche’s philosophy is therefore a dangerous but necessary medicine: it destroys the weak, but it saves the strong and teaches them to face suffering with tragic-heroic 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 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 never wrote as a system. Kazantzakis builds the system the mature Nietzsche declined to write, and does so without betraying the spirit of the refusal.
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. Kazantzakis 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. Zarathustra — the “thundering figure” who descends from the mountain to proclaim the religion of the Übermensch — is already sighted as the book’s terminus.
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 its cause. 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 distinguishes two kinds of nihilism — a pessimistic Nihilism that consumes the weak, and an optimistic, Dionysian Nihilism that the strong use as a hammer to clear the old ground.
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.” Equality is refuted as both a biological fact and a moral norm — “the average form is more valuable than the above-average, and the below-average is more valuable than the average” is the paradoxical result of an egalitarian society, where 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. 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, and its modern secular descendants (Kantian duty, democratic equality, humanitarian pity) are the shadows of the dead God still falling across Europe’s moral landscape.
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. 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.
Chapters 5 and 6 (“Positive Aspect”) pivot from destruction to construction. Having cleared the rubble, Kazantzakis turns to the values Nietzsche proposes as replacements. Pain, far from being the enemy of civilization, is “the great educator of humanity, and to pain are owed almost all noble acts and great drives.” 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 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.”
Kazantzakis does not disguise the danger of the position he is expounding. The new table of values will destroy those not strong enough to live under it. He accepts this as the price of the cure. The alternative — letting European civilization die of its own sickness under the soothing narcotics of the ascetic priest — is, in his reading of Nietzsche, worse.
Key Concepts
- Nihilism. Pessimistic (destroys the weak) vs. Dionysian (the strong’s hammer for clearing false values).
- Will to power (Wille zur Macht). “The fundamental instinct that propels every individual organic entity — the instinct to dominate.” Not a drive among drives; the drive beneath all drives. Kazantzakis develops it as the political-legal ground of everything.
- 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.
- Ressentiment. The psychological engine of slave morality and democratic socialism; the weak’s inverted aggression, disguised as moral virtue.
- 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.
- 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 “shadow of the dead God.” The Kantian moral law, humanitarian pity, democratic equality — all are moral imperatives that survive Christianity’s theological collapse. Conscience itself, in Kazantzakis’s reading, is one such shadow.
- 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.
Key Quotations
- “Never before have there been times like ours — so fecund when it comes to creating, reversing, and nervously seeking after a stable ideal…” — Chapter 1. The modern-European crisis context.
- “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.
- “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.
- “One of the most useful conquests of the human spirit is the rejection of the existence of an immortal soul.” — Chapter 3. Liberation from the backstop of guilt.
- “There is no free will any more than there is unfree will. There are only weak wills…” — Chapter 3. The refutation of moral responsibility.
- “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.
- “Right flows from might itself, whose boundaries are called laws.” — Chapter 4. The political-legal thesis of the book.
- “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.
- “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 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. |
| Zarathustra | The prophetic herald of the Übermensch, descending from the mountain. | 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.
- Democratic-socialist egalitarianism. The modern continuation of the slave revolt, wearing the secular clothing of natural rights and political equality.
- Kantian moral philosophy. The categorical imperative as conscience operating without its theological backstop — a shadow of the dead God.
- Schopenhauer’s pessimism. The diagnosis is accepted (life is suffering, the Will is blind) but the prescription is rejected. Kazantzakis’s Nietzsche refuses renunciation and chooses Dionysian affirmation.
- Darwinism’s teleology. The “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” in this book is not inevitable; it has to be willed.
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. 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 book’s philosophical content owes as much to the young Kazantzakis’s synthesis as to Nietzsche. 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). Later, in his mature work (Ascesis, 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, 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, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals.
- 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.
- Power and Morality — this theme page is where the book’s political-legal thesis belongs most directly. Until the English tree has a dedicated page for Machiavelli’s Il Principe, Kazantzakis’s exposition supplies part of the Realist political argument.
- 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.”
Lineage
- Predecessors: Nietzsche’s own works (above all); Schopenhauer (the pessimism inherited through Nietzsche); Kant (the critical target); Darwin (whose teleology Nietzsche refuses).
- Successors: Kazantzakis’s own mature philosophy (Ascesis / The Saviors of God, 1927 — which synthesizes this Nietzsche with Bergson’s élan vital); his novels (Zorba, The Last Temptation, 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.