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This is not the first commentary in which I have seen Nietzsche associated with postmodernism. I see daylight between him and the core ideas of postmodernism, as represented by the likes of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan etc, such as negation of objective reality, oppression of power structures, and radical skepticism to the extent of moral confusion.
Is there a missing link I don't see?
So statements like "We have yet to esteem the power of the lie." and "Even the physicist has his mythology. Your atoms, they are not real." are not about the lack of objective reality? His notion of the domination of the herd over thought is not about the fact that history is continual oppression of everybody else by a succession of hegemonic collectives? And 'The Genealogy of Morals' is not all about the inescapability of social control? The notion that one must "devalue and revalue all transcendent values" is not about radical skepticism to the point of moral confusion?
We see these themes in Neitsche because they are there. His aesthetic notion of morality and his aim at 'Perspectivism', where no viewpoint can be completely wrong, are pretty much modern post-truth.
But he is hostile to Christianity and its aftermath, and thus is not moved by the Left. So he was not as self-destructively caught up in rendering his entire worldview political and converting everyone. But that is not a real aspect of postmodernism anyway, it is just paranoid overreaction to its internal instability and our clinging to the products of our own culture unconsciously whenever we advance relativism.
Moving away from guidance by simple rules toward personal experience is postmodernism, morphing the anti-rule rules into a domineering dogma of guilt for ever having profited from artificial clarity, and pounding the table about it, is leftover Christianity. Recognizing the pervasive mechanisms of social control is postmodernism, seeing almost all social control as oppression and hating it beyond measure so that you feel obligated to trash privilege and worship victimology is leftover Christianity. Knowing that morality naturally eats itself is postmodernism, creating an internally inconsistent yet excessively ardent politics out of the idea is leftover Christianity. In each case, Nietzsche espouses the former and omits the latter.
Is there a missing link I don't see?
Postmodernism came about mostly as poststructuralism. Structuralism at first was taken to be about some inner logic (that of binary opposites). It was seen as overtly anhistorical, so its critics insisted that structuring occurs just because there is some driving factor. The three names Marx-Nietzsche-Freud became a kind of mantra endlessly repeated to protect against its attraction. Althusser and Lacan attempted to cast Marx and Freud as structuralists but Foucault was among the first who thought it better to surrend and became a postructuralist. Actually he added Nietzsche to Marx and Freud and started talking about hermeneutics and interpretations. Deleuze was following close by and openly demonstrated that all three of them strongly advocated some kind of materialism.
Materialism is the background which made most of traditional philosophy appear then as an illusion or eventually, as Nietzsche would have it, as a lie. It is not hard to see a contrast in how the three topics broached by Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, wealth, power and sex, are treated by christian ideology. From Nietzsche Deleuze took the slogan about "overcoming platonism" while everybody remembered the quip from Beyond Good and Evil "christianity is platonism for the masses".
Refs: Foucault Nietzsche-Freud-Marx; Deleuze, Difference et repetition, Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
I am by not quite a philosopher And there's a good deal of Jordan Peterson in what I say 😇
Generally Nietzsche is misunderstood as follows:
God is dead
is not a celebration but a warning of what it means to do
Likewise society/polity without absolutes.
Whereas postmodernism is a foray in exactly that direction... Sometimes careful and ginger, sometimes brazenly conscience-less.
