ABSTRACT
CONTROL There is something in Nietzsche’s description of the methods of the new tyrants, with which I just ended Chapter 4, that might strike one as surprising. One thinks of tyrants as using weapons much less ethereal than the “whips of scorn” used by Nietzsche’s tyrants. These rulers are apparently not tyrannical in the modern sense of using brutal methods, but in the Greek sense of lacking a legitimate right to rule. In the context in which the concept of tyranny originally had its home, true monarchs were thought of as ones who could base their right to rule on a criterion of value that was external to their own thoughts and desires: namely, their royal birth. A tyrant was one who lacked this sort of legitimacy. In an extended sense, Plato’s philosopher-kings were true monarchs, since they could claim that they ruled by right of objective values which they discovered and did not invent. Nietzsche’s philosophers develop their “law-giving moralities” as instruments for the creation of a new and higher type of human being. They do not discover these values, they create them for this purpose. Thus these values cannot provide them with the legitimacy that Plato’s philosophers gained from the morality to which he appealed. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s philosophers are not philosopher-kings, but philosopher-tyrants.
