How to Read Nietzsche Badly: by Calling him an Individualist

It's perfectly understandable that people want to see Nietzsche as an individualist.  After World War II, Nietzsche was widely either seen as a fascist or blamed for the rise of fascism.  Nietzsche scholars hated fascism - and rightly so - and desperately sought to rehabilitate Nietzsche's (and, by extension, their own) reputation, and so they tried to disassociate him from it by any means possible.  They reflexively countered: "Nietzsche wasn't a fascist!  He was an individualist!"  And they were able to find quite a bit of textual support for their claim.  

And to be sure, in many ways, Nietzsche was an individualist.  People who call Nietzsche an individualist aren't even exactly wrong, but they completely miss the point.  If they were flat-out wrong, I would have more respect for them.  It takes a kind of strength, a power of conceptualization, to be wrong.  But it's perfectly possible to say that Nietzsche was not a fascist - and he certainly was not - and at the same time understand that he wasn't exactly an individualist.  (I'm an individualist - not Nietzsche.)  Nietzsche was something more complex than an individualist.

Like most of the ways you can interpret Nietzsche badly, there is an atom of truth to the idea that he was an individualist, but it is uninsightful, boring, and reductive.  If you're the type of person who reads this way, I'm sure you can do your homework, dutifully line up several passages and lay them out in a linear argument, in 3 paragraphs, each with a topic sentence, several points, and a conclusion.  And there are authorities out there who would give you a gold star, because it's the nice way of reading Nietzsche.  But it makes you an uninspired reader and a boring person.  It's a way of de-fanging Nietzsche, making him pleasant and reasonable.  It's the conformist way of reading Nietzsche.  In these late capitalist times, where individualism is a group of commodities that are sold to us, in everything from punk t-shirts to graduate degrees - the culture of distinction, which depends on a group of rules and prohibitions, where we all must celebrate difference and respect each others' personal space - this reductive reading of Nietzsche that shoehorns him into doing nothing but repeating the ruling ideology is a downright bureaucratic reading. 

Zarathustra would have looked down in a gentle, understanding contempt upon those who, in his name, strive endlessly for uniqueness, originality, individuality.  When we say of a person, "Isn't he unique?" doesn't this leave a taste in your mouth reminiscent of calling them cute, or quaint, or quirky?  Perhaps it even involuntarily expresses that one feels a bit sorry for them?  Nietzsche laughed at pity.

This is one of the many ways in which Nietzsche's thought is a thousand miles away from that of Kierkegaard, for Kierkegaard was indeed an individualist (his individualism was derived, undoubtedly, from his devout Christianity), who sought his uniqueness with a fierce determination bordering on fury and leaving his naked ressentiment exposed in (what should have been) the most embarrassing ways.  And he achieved it.  Indeed, he worked out his individualism into an arcane labyrinth of a system, an ideology as dogmatic and opaque in its own way as that of any church or political party.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  One wants, at the end of all of his striving, to pat him on the head and say, "Good job."

(With Stirner it is different: Stirner did not strive for uniqueness, he simply accepted it as an unavoidable fact, with a certain bemused, semi-ironic equanimity.)

Not that Nietzsche renounced all strife (that would be Schopenhauer, ironically enough).  Not at all.  He simply chose more carefully what to strive for, and rather than individuality, he chose to strive for power.  This meant, first of all, power over oneself, expressed in self-overcoming - which may look to the untrained eye like individualism but is in fact the very opposite of it.

Nietzsche could have a great deal of appreciation for society.  In Nietzsche's early work, he exalts certain societies, especially ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy.  He was keenly interested in the way that social influence, silent and invisible in the background, could form the people in it, molding them to be great or otherwise.  He was also interested in the reverse of this, the way that an individual - a leader of some kind - could mold and change society.  Remember that for him, everything must be judged aesthetically.  "Only as aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified."  For him, great politics - grosse Politik - could be a kind of artform, with human beings as its medium (in this he resembled Schiller, who earlier had his own thoughts about the "statesman-artist").  Nonetheless, he despised what he called "petty politics."  The difference is that great politics, like great art, creates and asserts a new value.  He admired Napoleon, whom he called "a synthesis of Unmensch and Übermensch."  (Übermensch, sometimes translated "superman" is of course Nietzsche's central idea; Unmensch, literally "un-human" can mean something like "brute" or "monster".)