Considérations politiques sur le sentiment de puissance

David Simonin (1)

1 ITEM – Nietzsche - Équipe Friedrich Nietzsche et son temps

The feeling of power is a key concept in Dawn, Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality (1881), and it is omnipresent in the preparatory manuscripts of the preceding year. The study of these manuscripts makes it possible to highlight textual and thematic links that remain implicit in the published work and to show its strong internal coherence. The genetic analysis of §188 ("Intoxication and nourishment") and §189 ("On grand politics"), for example, shows that they were not initially conceived as two successive paragraphs, but as a single movement of thought. Their common object is the feeling of power, whose intoxicating character is approached from a political point of view, and whose different facets are gradually redistributed into two complementary paragraphs. Through this process of philosophical thought and writing, Nietzsche applies his more general critique of a false feeling of power, which the individual would only obtain by sacrificing himself to a higher power: in this case, the nation or the political ruler. Four editorial stages structure the development of the philosophical theses underlying the two published paragraphs, which, in the end, present alternately the feeling of power of peoples who turn to a strong ruler (§188) and the use of the ruler to satisfy his own by feeding the people's (§189).

Domaines: Philosophie

David Simonin. Considérations politiques sur le sentiment de puissance : une genèse des paragraphes 188 et 189 d’Aurore, de Friedrich Nietzsche. La Critique génétique comme processus, A paraître. ⟨hal-04034471⟩