Friedrich Nietzsche Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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At 25, Nietzsche was granted his doctorate from the University of Leipzig, without completing a dissertation, and was appointed to a position in classical philology at the University of Basel. His philosophical writing was brilliant, unorthodox, and controversial. He dispensed with formalities of academic writing and systemic philosophizing. Nietzsche was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Richard Wagner’s music. Service as a medic in the Franco-Prussian war helped stir his critique of the state and patriotic fervor as the bane of all genuine culture. After ten years of teaching, poor health forced Nietzsche to leave academe. He wrote his major philosophical works in obscurity, but his fame grew meteorically shortly after madness ended his writing in 1889. Nietzsche’s impacts are not easy to trace for they have been multifarious and diffuse. However, he has had enormous impact on many of the twentieth century’s top writers, philosophers, cultural critics, and social theorists. Max Weber purportedly declared that Nietzsche, along with Marx, changed social thought so profoundly that all serious social theorists must engage the two thinkers, either directly or indirectly.

Although mostly indirect and unrecognized, Nietzsche’s contribution to sociology and social theory is multifaceted and basic. His critique of Enlightenment rationality and arguments about modern science’s limits have contributed to thought about the relation of facts to values, science and disenchantment, and meaning in post-traditional cultures. His stress on aesthetic, emotional, bodily sensibilities as a source of value and pivotal element in interpersonal relations counters overly rational, cognitive, conformist theories of socialization. His perspectivist critique of truth and connection of knowledge and values to situated cultural interests and, especially, his ”genealogy of morals” contributed to the rise of the sociology of knowledge, critical theories, and standpoint theories. His views about the primacy of culture and its pivotal role in the formation and perpetuation of enduring civilizations anticipated the rise of comparative civilizational studies and cultural sociology. His argument about western ”decadence” influenced widely later twentieth century critiques of Eurocentrism and postmodern cultural theories.

However, Nietzsche’s argument about the entwinement of morality and power is arguably his greatest contribution to social theory; it provokes fundamental questioning of the taken for granted identity of the moral with the good. This core sociological facet of his ”antisociology” has stimulated theorists to ponder the normative directions of social theory and modern culture and politics. Nietzsche held that moral claims often call for unreflective obedience and justify manipulation and violence. What Nietzsche feared came true; the twentieth century was marked by fanatical politics, fundamentalism, ethnic and religious struggles, blood-baths, and genocide. Its mass warfare killed and maimed tens of millions of people, including enormous numbers of innocent noncombatants. Globalization, 9/11, resurgent fundamentalism, and rampant political invocation of the good versus evil make Nietzsche a most timely twenty-first century theorist. Nietzsche’s linkage of morality to power stimulates provocative sociological questions.

Bibliography:

Antonio, R. J. (1995) Nietzsche’s antisociology: subjectified culture and the end of history. American Journal of Sociology 101: 1-43
Nietzsche, F. (1966) [1886] Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. W. Kaufmann. Vintage Books, New York.
Nietzsche, F. (1969) [1887] On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, and [1888] Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, New York.