ok!

I guess I will probably never write that post reflecting on having taught Nietzsche. Instead I am reduced to noting two of the many things that bothered me in reading the secondary literature (both, oddly, involving Aaron Ridley). One is a bit from Ridley's Nietzsche's Conscience in which he quotes GM III.27, "in the end the call always goes forth to the lawgiver himself: submit to the law you proposed", to describe (and support his description of) the taming and interiorizing of the warlike nobles—they become administrators, which means less time to release their untoward urges in battle etc., and this comes to involve the promulgation of codes of law rather than one-off decisions, and eventually they too must submit to the law. But the context of the quotation is quite different: in the context in which he says what I've just quoted, Nietzsche is giving voice to an oft-repeated theme of his, that Christianity brought itself down. Immediately prior to mentioning the call that goes forth he quotes a long passage from GS 357 to that effect; immediately after he reiterates it: "Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish."

The second comes from "Nietzsche on Art and Freedom", which makes much of BGE 188, using it to support the claim that for Nietzsche freedom means something like the mastery under constraint (under the tyranny of capricious laws!) characteristic of great artists, virtuoso musicians, and, as Ridley notes, fluent speakers of a language. I think there are various problems with the positive thesis and the argument, but Ridley uses the passage in a way that abstracts from its context in an odd way. Consider this claim of his:

My quotation from section 188 picked it up at the point at which Nietzsche mentions language, and speaks of ‘the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm’. But we needn’t appeal to poetry to see what he means. A person who insisted, for example, that ‘submitting abjectly’ to the ‘capricious’ rules of grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguistic expression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was

Perhaps so! But Nietzsche speaks of languages—he doesn't speak of speakers. In fact in that passage he is very much unconcerned with individuals. The "long unfreedom of the spirit" isn't the means by which those spirits became free, it's the means by which the European spirit became strong, ruthless, and subtle. The "obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction" gives rise to such things as virtue, art, music, and dance—not virtuous persons, artists, musicians, or dancers, though certainly also them (how not?). And it ends quite explicitly:

"You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself"—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither "categorical" as the old Kant would have it (hence the "else") nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man.

188 is in part five, "Natural History of Morals"; it makes sense that it wouldn't discuss the individual but, instead, what sort of process led to the customs we now have—a long process of shaping, perhaps not disanalogous to, but on a much larger and generic scale than, artistic training. The very next section, 189, starts off mentioning "industrious races"; the closing four sections are explicitly general. And one might wonder what Nietzsche means by "art" in these sections, anyway—§192 (and others on a similar theme elsewhere) suggest that the bar for being an artist is really quite low.