Nietzsche and Friendship 9781350047341, 9781350047372, 9781350047358

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Editions of Texts Used with Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Nietzsche’s Literary Gift of Friendship: Reading Nietzsche as a Joyful, Agonistic, and Bestowing Friend
2. Nietzsche’s Re-evaluation of Friendship
3. On Becoming What One Is: Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Concept of the Self
4. Nietzsche and Aristotle on Character, Virtue, and the Limits of Friendship
5. Women, Love, and the Gendered Troubles of Friendship in Nietzsche and Irigaray
6. Abducting Woman? An Agonistic Reception of Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) Gifts
Conclusion: Further Re-evaluations
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Nietzsche and Friendship

Also available from Bloomsbury Foucault and Nietzsche, Alan Rosenberg and Joseph Westfall Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond Interpreting Nietzsche, Ashley Woodward Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, Anthony K. Jensen and Helmut Heit The Nietzsche Dictionary, Douglas Burnham Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Teaching, Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland Nietzsche and Political Thought, Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, Jeffrey Metzger Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Nietzsche and Friendship Willow Verkerk

Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Willow Verkerk, 2019 Willow Verkerk has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Silent Colour Meditation by Mark Cazalet / St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4734-1 PB: 978-1-3501-7717-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4735-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-4736-5 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my mother Penelope, my greatest agonistic friend, who continues to remind me of the importance of philosophical honesty.

Contents Acknowledgements Editions of Texts Used with Abbreviations Introduction 1 Nietzsche’s Literary Gift of Friendship: Reading Nietzsche as a Joyful, Agonistic, and Bestowing Friend 2 Nietzsche’s Re-evaluation of Friendship 3 On Becoming What One Is: Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Concept of the Self 4 Nietzsche and Aristotle on Character, Virtue, and the Limits of Friendship 5 Women, Love, and the Gendered Troubles of Friendship in Nietzsche and Irigaray 6 Abducting Woman? An Agonistic Reception of Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) Gifts Conclusion: Further Re-evaluations Notes References Index

viii ix 1 9 29 67 99 125 153 163 169 181 187

Acknowledgements Early versions of chapters and sections of chapters of this book have been given as papers and talks at the University of Cologne, Kingston University, Chelsea College of Arts, University of Iceland, Simon Fraser University, Maison Gai Saber, the Nietzsche Circle, London Graduate School Summer Academy, Radboud University, and KU Leuven. I am thankful for the invitations and the feedback that I received from participants at these conferences, workshops, and events. A modified section from chapter 1 has appeared in the online journal of the New York Nietzsche Circle special issue, The Agonist X.II, Spring 2017 as ‘Nietzsche’s Joyful Friendship: Epicurean Elements in the Middle Works’. Chapter 2 uses material that was first published as ‘Nietzsche’s Goal of Friendship’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45.3, Autumn 2014 and other material published as ‘Nietzsche’s Agonistic Ethics of Friendship’, Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 20.2, Fall 2016. Chapter 5 contains material that was published as ‘On Love, Women, and Friendship: Reading Nietzsche with Irigaray’, Nietzsche-Studien 46.1, 2017 and other material published in Philosophy Now 104 called ‘Nietzsche on Love’, 2014. Chapter 6 contains material first published as ‘Transgendering Nietzsche: Male Mothers and Phallic Women in Derrida’s Spurs’, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 7.1, Winter 2017. I would like to express my gratitude to those who have helped me develop this research into its current form. I am thankful to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Stella Sandford, Paul van Tongeren, Herman Siemens, Carol Diethe, Babette Babich, Lawrence Hatab, Samir Gandesha, Steven Taubeneck, the reviewers of this manuscript, and the blind reviewers of the journal articles on Nietzsche that I have published. A special thanks to Horst Hutter my MA supervisor at Concordia University who introduced me to reading Nietzsche as a therapeutic philosopher. Thanks are due to my family and friends, Sophie Verkerk, Jane Brown, Steven Lane, Dilja Ivarsdottir, James DiFrisco, Jiho Kongo, Kat Staples, Nancy Lanthier, Liesbeth Schoonheim, Niki Lambros, Pierre Black, Noah Becker, and Leo Scott-Francis, who have supported me during the process. You are the people who have made me want to be a better friend.

Editions of Texts Used with Abbreviations Aristotle EE

The Eudemian Ethics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

NE

Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999).

Kant LE

Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Nietzsche AC

The Antichrist, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

AOM

‘Assorted Opinions and Maxims’, in Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

BGE

Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966).

D

Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

EH

Ecce Homo, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

GM

On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

GS

The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).

x

Editions of Texts Used with Abbreviations

HAH

Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

HC

‘Homer on Competition’, in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

KSA

Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Guyter, 1980).

KSB

Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, 8 vols, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter; Munich: dtv, 1986).

WS

‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, in Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Z

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Introduction

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: ‘I and Me are always too zealous in conversation: how could it be endured if there were no friend?’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’) For Nietzsche, we require friendship to endure life, to experience its joys more fully, and to heighten our learning capacities. Friendship has several therapeutic purposes in Nietzsche’s writings. It provides rest and repose for suffering, pushes one towards self-overcoming, and supports shared and individual creative generation. Nietzsche draws on the received canon of Western philosophy, on thinkers such as Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, and Kant, to formulate his reflections on friendship. We know that Nietzsche read these thinkers and was influenced by them by looking to his published works, his notebooks, as well as his library. These accounts, notably European and androcentric, are nevertheless the accounts of friendship which underlie and most often structure discourses on friendship in the history of philosophy, as well as in many contemporary philosophical discussions on friendship. As a thinker of friendship, Nietzsche can be located both within and at the boundaries of this androcentric tradition because he subscribes to masculinist qualities of friendship while concurrently illuminating the gender inequalities pervasive in culture and how they disproportionately influence women. His illumination of these conditions which uses hyperbolic styles and conceptual provocations can be read as excessive and Dionysian which means they are both deconstructive and destructive. However, it should not be missed that Nietzsche is also giving us a constructive account of friendship because he writes to re-evaluate the meaning of friendship and the role it has in individual and cultural formation. Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of friendship is closely related to his critique of nihilism and his concern that with the death of God people lack faith. Nietzschean friendship, founded in the methodologies of the free spirit, is conceived by him to provide new pathways for people to gather strength and test out their convictions so that they can refine their beliefs and ascertain new

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values as foundational for life. The methodologies of the free spirit that can be found in Nietzsche’s oeuvre include honesty (BGE 227), the relinquishment of certitude (GS 347), the destruction of habituated beliefs (HAH 225), and the pursuit of one’s ‘own source of experience’ (HAH 292). Although Nietzsche has more often been thought of as an individualist, rather than a thinker with an ethics of friendship, a growing body of research on Nietzsche has shown him to be a thinker interested in therapeutic, ethical, and political problems, such as self-identity, friendship, and gender. In Nietzsche’s texts one finds an agonistic account of friendship that is goaloriented because it aims to provoke self-reflection and passionate knowledgeseeking in those who take part in it. One can also find in his texts, and in particular those of the middle period, a notion of joyful friendship which focuses precisely on sharing joy (Mitfreude). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one reads about another kind of friendship associated with the bestowing virtue (der schenkenden Tugend), namely the friend who bestows to others from a position of power and understanding. Like Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship: of utility, pleasure, and virtue, Nietzsche delineates friendship into three kinds, albeit much less explicitly. Nietzsche’s types of friendship – the joyful friendship, the agonistic friendship, and the bestowing friendship – are investigated in this book both philologically and philosophically. Philologically, it is asked whether these types of friendship are period specific, namely whether they pertain to different periods in his writing (early, middle, late) or if they have a sustaining presence in his oeuvre. Philosophically, the following questions are pursued: How does Nietzsche characterize friendship and what kinds of friendship does he value? How does friendship differ from love for Nietzsche? What kinds of gender-based challenges do friends experience according to Nietzsche? What is the relationship between friendship and self-overcoming in Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy? Does Nietzsche’s notion of the self allow for conscious self-overcoming? Are there certain kinds of people who are incapable of friendship? What does Nietzsche have to contribute to studies on friendship in the history of philosophy? What is the relevance of Nietzsche for political and feminist reflections on friendship, love, and gender? How do Nietzsche’s writings on friendship help us to rethink the meaning of friendship today? The importance of returning to philosophical studies on friendship is evidenced by its shifting meanings. Whereas becoming a ‘friend’ in the virtual world today may be as simple as clicking on an ‘accept’ button, more people

Introduction

3

live alone, work longer hours, and have limited physical interactions with other human beings. We suffer from loneliness. To have many of the experiences associated with everyday friendship – intimacy, mutual caring, and shared activities – many turn to virtual experiences that mimic the interactions of what has been traditionally construed as friendship. There is a fundamental tension at work between the maintenance of embodied human relationships and being part of a market-driven society that reifies the subject as a commodity power. As Nietzsche points out, we have become ashamed of rest and even leisure, suspicious of our everyday joys. Soon, Nietzsche writes, ‘we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience’ (GS 329). Instead of questioning the meaning of friendship, we tend in modern democracies to concentrate on issues of liberty and autonomy. This kind of focus allows for vital critique to be brought to power relationships between the individual and different institutional regimes, yet it most often overlooks how the shifting meaning of friendship impacts individual and communal identities. Nietzsche thinks that we suffer from great fatigue due to our perpetual business. ‘Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others. … If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that slaves, weary of their work, devise for themselves’ (GS 329). Nietzsche had some early insight into what we are facing today. Friendships which contribute to psychological and physical health, intellectual understanding, and artistic development are increasingly being replaced with economized services that perpetuate the contractual relationship and the reification of the subject as a worker and a consumer. If we take Nietzsche’s claim seriously that friendship needs to be re-evaluated, it is important to also consider what can be learnt from earlier philosophical treatments of friendship. Earlier accounts of friendship can help us to question whether its virtues remain relevant to us today. Aristotle, for example, considered pleasure and play part of friendship, but he also thought that we need friendship to cultivate excellence and support human flourishing. After reading Aristotle and Nietzsche, one is compelled to ask whether contemporary culture, which focuses on the more enjoyable aspects of friendship (as means of escape from the difficulties of life), has lost the ancient understanding of the ethical value of friendship and its connection to philosophical and practical well-being.

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Nietzsche and Friendship

At a time when many of the cultural changes that define our age were first starting to emerge, Nietzsche was critiquing modern versions of friendship and seeking alternatives to invigorate individual and cultural health. Nietzsche’s philosophical questioning of friendship arose out of a strong dissatisfaction with the effects of modern industrialization on individual character, interpersonal relationships, and cultural intelligence. Disappointed with consumerism and concerned with the loss of values, Nietzsche spoke of the creation of new values and new forms of human relationships to replace those in disrepair. Nietzsche asks us to consider how a society of perpetual busyness and consumerism encroaches upon our abilities to engage with and learn from one another. He brings enmity and spiritualized cruelty into his philosophy of friendship to make human relationships a location for knowledge-seeking, healing, and creativity. He invites his readers to turn to friendship as a selffortifying practice that can challenge one’s beliefs, sublimate one’s emotions, and create community for future projects. Nietzsche attempts to bring value back to the abilities of human beings to destroy, affirm, and transform in the immanent world without requiring religious approval. His therapeutic approach to friendship aims to re-invigorate human relationships with the kind of combative energy that he believes is necessary for challenging the apathetic mood of a nihilistic age. Chapter 1, ‘Nietzsche’s Literary Gift of Friendship: Reading Nietzsche as a Joyful, Agonistic, and Bestowing Friend’, outlines how to read Nietzsche as a therapeutic thinker who performs an ethics of friendship to teach it to his select readers. It argues that Nietzsche is a psychological thinker who utilizes a genealogical method to build an account of friendship which celebrates contest and joy. Nietzsche provides critical diagnoses of collective and individual malaises to educate and pursue potential remedies for change. To his free spirits, those who have liberated themselves from tradition, and to the philosophers of the future, Nietzsche writes to incite self-questioning in all areas of their lives. This chapter begins by asking what kind of a writer Nietzsche is and outlines a method of reading his texts that emphasizes Nietzsche’s ideas on friendship and self-overcoming. Justification is provided for the choice to concentrate on texts from the middle to late periods with an introduction on how the relevant texts contribute to Nietzsche’s ethics of friendship. Nietzsche’s agonistic voice, that challenges and struggles against the reader, is situated within his larger psychological approach to doing practical philosophy. I argue that at the heart of Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship, and the polemics associated with, is a

Introduction

5

bestowing energy that utilizes dissonance and dialectics in the interest of raising the reader up into self-overcoming. Nietzsche brings together his psychological style of thinking with his genealogical method to build an account of friendship that includes joy, agon, and generosity. Chapter 2, ‘Nietzsche’s Re-evaluation of Friendship’, examines the qualities that Nietzsche consistently recognizes and values in friendship. The progression that occurs in Nietzsche’s writings on friendship between Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil is addressed with emphasis on those passages in which Nietzsche outlines a goal-oriented concept of friendship. This chapter examines the structure of Nietzschean friendship and argues that it has the goal of refining the intellectual conscience in the interest of passionate knowledgeseeking and self-overcoming. I begin by explaining Nietzsche’s warning about the dangers of friendship. An analysis is provided of the relationships that Nietzsche considers to be a threat to human flourishing for being repressive of self-development and freespiritedness. Next, Nietzsche’s positive accounts of friendship are separated into three higher kinds in order to clarify what types of friendship he esteems most. This classification demonstrates that the values of agonistic friendship can be found in the middle works along with those of joyful friends. The development of Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship is examined to gain evidence for the proposal that friendship remains important to Nietzsche into his later works. Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship is situated in secondary literature on Nietzsche’s agon and ‘Homer’s Contest’. I ask what Nietzsche considers to be some of the challenges that friendship faces on an interpersonal level. This helps to elucidate Nietzsche’s view that friendship is fundamental to psychological health and also explains why Nietzsche considers healing to be one of the functions of friendship. Finally, I argue that the goal of Nietzschean friendship requires the development of the intellectual conscience to support overcoming and ultimately the coming of the Overhuman. Chapter 3, ‘On Becoming What One Is: Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Concept of the Self ’, examines Nietzsche’s descriptions of the self and questions what self-transformation means for Nietzsche. In his reflections on identity and self-knowledge, Nietzsche portrays the self as both predetermined and open to transformation. The Nietzschean self has biological components associated with the physical body and social elements that psychologically impress upon the subject structuring beliefs. Nietzsche’s notion that the self is formed both biologically and socially is complicated by his ontological account of the

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will to power in which the self is constituted by the activity of its drives. The interpretative challenge for one who is reading Nietzsche as a philosopher of self-cultivation becomes, how can a self that is the product of conflicting inner drives that are themselves shaped by a great variety of forces have the reflective agency required for conscious overcoming? This is an important question to ask in a study on Nietzschean friendship which argues that shared self-overcoming is one of the goals of higher friendship for Nietzsche. In addition to Nietzsche’s foundational claim that life consists of will to power, he writes at length about the need for people to practice self-overcoming and pursue what they are. The move to dismiss any kind of Nietzschean agency as an epiphenomenal expression of the forces of the will to power overlooks a great number of Nietzsche’s writings. This chapter proposes that the ontological thesis of the Nietzschean self is consistent with his project to offer new hypotheses about the self. Contrary to some deterministic readings of the Nietzschean self, it is argued that Nietzsche’s biological, social, and ontological descriptions of becoming are open-ended and allow for a notion of the subject that is precarious, shaped by external and internal forces, and the individual’s intellectual conscience. This reading of the Nietzschean self supports the argument that friendship can transform the self. It demonstrates how vital an accurate understanding of Nietzsche’s notion of the self is for coming to terms with his therapeutic account of friendship. Chapter 4, ‘Nietzsche and Aristotle on Character, Virtue, and the Limits of Friendship’, turns to an analysis of Nietzsche’s bestower in comparison with the great-souled man of Aristotle to explore their concepts of self-love, nobility, and friendship. One of the key differences between Nietzsche and Aristotle is how flourishing is conceptualized by them. Yet they also have some surface compatibilities: for example, both appear to view self-love as vital to friendship rather than a threat to it. In addition, Nietzsche’s praise of Greek wisdom and his idea that friendship involves striving for a higher goal suggest that the pursuit of excellence in Aristotle’s account of virtue friendship and his characterization of the great-souled man influenced Nietzsche. After examining Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of the concept of virtue through his notion of bestowing and how it relates to his ethics of friendship, the role that self-love plays in friendship is explored. Although both Nietzsche and Aristotle maintain that generous self-love enriches friendship, they also have exceptions to this supposition. Those of high virtue, the bestower for Nietzsche and the great-souled for Aristotle, who excel in self-love and have the most to give, have great difficulty finding friends. This chapter turns to an analysis of Aristotle’s

Introduction

7

great-souled man to question Nietzsche’s bestowing friend and the tensions between individual virtue and generous friendship. In Chapter 5, ‘Women, Love, and the Gendered Troubles of Friendship in Nietzsche and Irigaray’, I examine Nietzsche’s writings on love, women, and the gender roles that he highlights shape friendship.1 Nietzsche claims that the drives that underlie love are tyrannical and possessive and it is only through their cultural articulations that love comes to be viewed with a sense of splendour or beauty. Nietzsche also writes that the differences between the genders are a product of instinctual forces that cause men and women to love distinctively and, as such, we cannot expect egalitarian reciprocity in love relationships. Nietzsche’s writings reveal a thinker who is reflecting on the differences and inequalities between the genders without explicitly suggesting any solutions. As such, we may ask whether Nietzsche can approach the problem of sex/gender with the same critical distance that he suggests is necessary for a re-evaluation of values. Is the man/woman distinction ‘a faith in opposite values’ (BGE 2) that he is unable to overcome? Nietzsche claims that in love relationships there is a power disparity between men and women (due to a lack of generosity from men) and this disrupts the possibility of friendship. This chapter engages with Luce Irigaray to critique the assimilating character of love that Nietzsche presents. These analyses help us to recognize how Nietzsche’s thinking has contributed to the development of feminist thought. Additionally, they point towards the direction which Nietzsche was unable to take and suggest new routes for investigating the relationships between love, friendship, and gender identity. In Chapter 6, ‘Abducting Woman? An Agonistic Reception of Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) Gifts’, I give a new feminist reception of Nietzsche by looking to how our reading of him has changed over time in conjunction with theoretical developments in postmodern, feminist, and transgender studies. I examine feminist responses to Derrida’s text Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles and then consider how the critical category of gender has shifted the ways in which we understand the concept of ‘woman’ today. By returning to a selection of Nietzsche’s aphorisms on woman and women that have been important both to Derrida and to feminist analysis of Nietzsche, this chapter shows the limitations of Nietzsche’s writings about woman/women while concurrently revealing the emancipatory potential of his analysis of the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘woman’. I examine how Nietzsche’s two performatives stances, the first as a masculine lover who attempts to become feminine and the second as an agonistic friend who seeks a response from the reader, impact his and Derrida’s rewritings of the figure of woman.

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This book ends by considering more conclusively what Nietzsche has to offer on the philosophical problem of friendship from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics which includes an analysis of the presumed oppositional status of binaries such as good/evil, truth/error, and man/woman applies to the friend/enemy distinction as well. Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibility of friendship, but rather so that he may challenge its conceptual integrity and open it up to new variations. These variations are connected to Nietzsche’s larger project of overcoming and to his hope that some of his readers will become his prospective friends, inheritors of his thought who will allow for cultural change to occur and new kinds of friendship to emerge through friendly striving. Although this re-evaluative project has what Nietzsche considered to be noble aims, it is also one which cultivates values which themselves need to be questioned. By returning to some of the objections raised during the book, I reconsider the Nietzschean principle of agon for friendship from both ethical and political perspectives.

1

Nietzsche’s Literary Gift of Friendship: Reading Nietzsche as a Joyful, Agonistic, and Bestowing Friend

‘When I imagine a perfect reader, I always think of a monster of courage and curiosity who is also supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer’. —Ecce Homo: ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, 3 How does one read Nietzsche? This has become a routine question in texts about Nietzsche, one that inevitably turns to the issue of style. Nietzsche himself declares that ‘I have many stylistic possibilities – the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man’ (EH ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’ 4). He is not only a scholar who aims to be demonstrative with his texts. Nietzsche is a skilled writer who employs a variety of tropes to communicate both exoterically and esoterically. He is a philosopher who has expectations of his reader. One must, as Nietzsche recommends, ruminate with his texts to practice ‘the art of reading’ (GM P8), and acknowledge the temporal quality of that reading. Nietzsche is a thinker whose genealogical method examines ‘the descent of our moral prejudices’ (GM P2) to learn more about human nature and its historical and cultural development. He distinguishes his genealogical method of investigation by rejecting the assumption that a concept has a clear and continuous trajectory of progression that can be followed back to an anticipated origin. Regarding the investigation of moral values, he states: ‘We need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed (morality as result, as symptom, as mask, as tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison)’ (GM P6). For Nietzsche, genealogy probes into that which lies in the ‘grey’ (GM P7), that which is most ambiguous, searching out the unexpected roots of a concept and the

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modifications it has undergone over time. His genealogical method calls forth the reader’s suppositions about the concept while concurrently illuminating the values associated with it that he seeks to question. Although Nietzsche admits the difficulty in penetrating his work, he advises the use of exegesis to contemplate his aphoristic style (GM P8). Nietzsche employs aphorism and poem because they require consideration and, as forms of writing, reflect the style of inquiry that he believes is important for his students. As Gilles Deleuze points out, in their very constitutions, the aphorism represents the art of interpretation and the poem the art of evaluation. In such forms paradox, word play, metaphor, and disguise invite the reader into thought. Thus, when one reads aphorism and poetry, they have no choice but to attempt an interpretation and an evaluation of the words that are being said (Deleuze 1983: 31). Nietzsche is also to be understood as a psychologist, following his own claims that he is ‘the first psychologist’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 6). Nietzsche provides critical diagnoses of collective and individual malaise to educate his readers and pursue potential remedies for change. To his free spirits, those who have liberated themselves from tradition (HAH 225), and to the philosophers of the future, Nietzsche is an agonistic friend offering a gift to incite self-questioning. He philosophizes with a hammer, employing rhetorical cruelty using strong and cutting words to provoke greater probity (Redlichkeit) in those passionate knowledge-seekers who are his select readers. Nietzsche thinks psychology is ‘the path to the fundamental problems’ (BGE 23) and he employs it as a diagnostic, no-saying method to expose the ideological structures that govern human relationships. However, Nietzsche is also a re-evaluative thinker whose deconstructive works are building blocks for his yes-saying therapeutic philosophy. At the heart of Nietzsche’s ethics of friendship and the polemics associated with it is a bestowing energy. Nietzsche is a critical thinker who aims to change the moral values, psychological constitutions, and human relationships of his readers through his agonistic philosophy.

On how to read Nietzsche There are many divides regarding how one decides to read Nietzsche, such divides that Nietzsche scholars face philosophical impasses due to their methodological disagreements. To name a few differences, there remains a lack of consensus as to whether Nietzsche’s text should be read with strict separations

Nietzsche’s Literary Gift of Friendship

11

between his periods or all together as an oeuvre; whether his notebooks should be considered as important to or more important than his published works, and still which books are the most significant or ‘philosophical’. On the Genealogy of Morality continues to be the most popular text in English-speaking philosophy departments, although Beyond Good and Evil is gaining in popularity. Texts of the middle period, also known as the free spirit texts, namely Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, have become increasingly written about by Nietzsche academics, yet they remain understudied in the classroom. The controversial history of Nietzsche’s notebooks, specifically their appropriation by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche into The Will to Power, a text compiled and modified by her, made the use of Nietzsche’s notebooks problematic, particularly in the English-speaking world where there is still no complete translation of Nietzsche’s notebooks in chronological order.1 The Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari edition, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (KSA) has standardized Nietzsche’s works in German, discrediting the notion that Nietzsche ever intended to complete or publish a major work called The Will to Power (KSA 14, 383–400). Today, thanks to the philological research of Colli and Montinari, we can cite the notebooks compiled in the KSA and be confident that Nietzsche, not his sister, was the author. But, the question remains as to whether using a notebook, which can be considered at best the rough draft of later work (Nietzsche’s notebooks include book plans and thoughts but also laundry lists and train schedules), is the best source for studying the philosopher’s arguments. My approach to reading Nietzsche is one that prioritizes the published over the unpublished works but only if one includes Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a text that has been much too overlooked especially by philosophers. The notebooks as well as Nietzsche’s letters are helpful to consult when one faces the inevitable challenges of interpreting Nietzsche’s writings, but they should be considered as secondary references. The works Nietzsche published during his lifetime were not simply, as Heidegger surmises, ‘foreground’ for his ‘philosophy proper’ to be found in his unpublished works (Heidegger 1979: 9). Although reading Nietzsche’s writings does require skill, one can find his central philosophical concepts such as the will to power, his theory of perspectivism, the Overhuman, and his account of friendship in his published works. To draw out of his many aphorisms, speeches, and essays an account of Nietzschean friendship and its connected ethical and political problems, one must read and analyse Nietzsche’s texts relationally. Nietzsche’s key writings on

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friendship are scattered throughout Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil and must be pieced together to gather a relational understanding of what friendship involves according to him. Relational is meant in three senses: First, it has a methodological meaning. Since Nietzsche does not provide anything close to a treatise on friendship, the changes and continuities that occur in his writings about friendship and associated topics like love and self-overcoming must be carefully traced through his middle to later works. Second, relational has a conceptual meaning. Namely, it is useful in examining how his comments on topics such as egoism and cruelty (topics that seem incompatible with and even oppositional to friendship at first glance) contribute to a fuller understanding of his belief in the opportunity for shared learning and self-overcoming between friends. Third, relational has a stylistic orientation because Nietzsche writes as both a ‘no-sayer’ and a ‘yes-sayer’ in his texts. His voices and rhetorical devices are to be studied closely in relation to the content of his writings. This includes consideration given to his aphoristic form and the structural arrangement of the aphorisms. Nietzsche is often defined as having specific periods: early, middle, and late; this is certainly important because his focus shifts both in style and content. However, the consequence of a relational approach means that this study looks to all of Nietzsche’s works and how they can assist in coming to understand Nietzsche’s philosophy of friendship. Lou Salomé introduced the notion of reading Nietzsche in periods as a practical way in which to connect his personal development with his writings and explain the diversity of his reflections (Salomé 2001). It has since become a popular method in Nietzsche research. In general, the periods are understood in the following way: the early period consists of Nietzsche’s works from 1872 to 1876; the middle period is from 1878 to 1882; and the later works are those from 1883 to 1888. This book concentrates on texts from the middle and late periods starting with, in chronological order, Human, All Too Human and ending with Beyond Good and Evil. It also turns to what may be considered Nietzsche’s autobiographical works (which are part of his late period), to receive guidance about both the stylistic and conceptual intentions of his books: these include all of his prefaces and Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.2 It remains important, and especially for thematic studies in Nietzsche, to approach his work as an oeuvre because, as Horst Hutter points out, Nietzsche’s writings have a ‘living entelechy, in which later stages recuperate earlier ones and earlier ones hold in themselves all grounds of future unfolding’ (Hutter 2006: 4). There are numerous examples in Nietzsche’s texts that support this supposition; one such example can be found in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality:

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My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876-7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? (GM P2)

What is also important to note is that in the same preface, Nietzsche states that to understand On the Genealogy of Morality, one must have read his earlier texts (GM P8). These declarations of Nietzsche demonstrate that he considers his works to have an overarching project, one which this book argues is to provoke change in his readers through encouraging self-questioning and agonistic friendship. From the above quotation one might argue that there is a refinement of ideas that occurs in Nietzsche’s later works; however, this should not discount his earlier writing specifically because Nietzsche considers his yes-saying work, characteristic of the middle period, to be just as important as his later no-saying work for achieving a transformation of culture. Nietzsche writes that his formula for happiness is ‘a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal’ (AC 1). This pithy statement compresses what Nietzsche describes in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s chapter, ‘On the Three Transformations’ as the steps for self-overcoming, but it also refers to him having both affirmative (yessaying) and deconstructive and destructive (no-saying) texts. Chronologically speaking, the works of the middle period pre-Zarathustra are largely affirmative,

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whereas the post-Zarathustra texts are destructive (no-saying)3 with Thus Spoke Zarathustra merging the no-saying and yes-saying into one struggling synthesis that indicates how one become what one is. Nietzsche also attempts to perform the self-affirmative act of the tragic philosopher who negates in the interest of affirmation in Ecce Homo. In both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche creates a voice that enacts his Dionysian ideal of the tragic philosopher. It involves, Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I understood as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to escape fear and pity, not in order to cleanse yourself of a dangerous affect by violent discharge – as Aristotle mistakenly thought – : but instead, over and above all fear and pity, in order for you yourself to be the eternal joy in becoming, – the joy that includes even the eternal joy in negating. (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 3)

For Nietzsche, his no-saying philosophy is just as important for life-affirmation as his yes-saying philosophy because to decide what one values, one must also discover what one dislikes and wants to destroy. To find the ethical connections that Nietzsche makes between friendship, agon, and self-overcoming, it is necessary to read Nietzsche’s free spirit texts (Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science) in conjunction with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. In Zarathustra and Beyond, Nietzsche brings enmity into friendship not to deny the possibilities of friendship that he celebrates in the free spirit books. Instead, he aims to transform friendship into an exercise of therapeutics that continues to promote the free-spiritedness and self-reflection introduced in the middle period with greater tenacity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche challenges the life-denying practices embodied by the last human (ZI P5) who he explains has reacted to the death of God and the commercialization of culture by living a contrived happiness of uniform values, sedated emotions, and small comforts. By taking the path of the least resistance, the last human enacts wretched contentment, a nihilist attitude to life in which one has relinquished striving (ZI P5). According to Nietzsche this path is far worse than the one who is a nay-sayer and has the potential to literally burn themselves out through their destructive acts. Nietzsche becomes more confrontational and more severe in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil because he wants to puncture the nihilistic escapism of the last human who represents Nietzsche’s concept of weak nihilism.4 To every question posed,

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the last human’s only response is to blink (ZI P5). They have given up on pursuing life challenges; they seek small comforts and safety; apathy is their all-pervasive choix de vie. Zarathustra is the one who reveals to us and teaches us about, as Heidegger states, the one ‘who it behoves us to overcome’ (Heidegger 1984: 33).

The central texts on friendship In Nietzsche’s middle works one finds an Epicurean mood in which Nietzsche seeks out the persons, situations, and events that will suit his contemplative irritability (GS 306). Nietzsche’s life during the free spirit texts of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science was punctuated by illness and the need for convalescence which was then followed by periods of recovery in which Nietzsche wrote his texts. Although Nietzsche’s struggles with sickness never left him, these experiences were relatively new to him during the middle period and allowed for a sensitivity to emerge in his work in which his writings become a search for moderation and companionship. One reason why the Nietzsche of the middle works has been too often neglected is that this Nietzsche is one who does not fit with the provocateur of the late period who performs cold rationality and active nihilism. In his own words, the late Nietzsche may be considered to have grown, through prolonged suffering, ‘a hard Stoic hedgehog skin’ (GS 306). The first volume of Human, All Too Human was completed in 1878, the first part of the second volume Assorted Opinions and Maxims in 1879, and a second part of the second volume The Wanderer and His Shadow in 1880. They were published together as Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits in 1886 along with new prefaces for both volumes. Human, All Too Human is considered the start of Nietzsche’s middle period because it signifies his initiation into aphoristic writing and his own declaration that with it, he freed himself from ideals that were no longer meaningful to him. He writes, Human, All Too Human is the monument to a crisis. It calls itself a book for free spirits: almost every sentence is the manifestation of a victory – I used it to liberate myself from things that did not belong to my nature. Idealism is one of them: the title says ‘where you see ideal things, I see – human, oh, only all too human!’(EH ‘Human, All Too Human’ 1)

Nietzsche is referring to his disenchantment with and disconnection from Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as his move away from Romanticism towards a more scientific approach to knowledge-seeking inspired by Paul Rée. In

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Human, All Too Human Nietzsche problematizes morality for being unegoistic and, in doing so, writes to demonstrate the impossibility of this kind of morality. He invents the notion of the free spirit as a therapeutic model for life and a replacement for those persons and ideals he has abandoned.5 Nietzsche states that he conceives of free spirits to act as his imaginative companions during difficult times. He views free spirits as his future friends and writes about them with the intention of bringing them into existence (HAHI P2). The two spiritual objectives of Human, All Too Human are made explicit by Nietzsche during his later reflections on the book when he states that Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and his Shadow are ‘a continuation and redoubling of a spiritual cure, namely of the anti-romantic self-treatment that my still healthy instinct had itself discovered and prescribed for me against a temporary attack of the most dangerous form of romanticism’ (HAHII P2). He states that these texts contain principles for those inclined towards self-discipline and spiritual health (HAHII P2). In addition to providing an early analysis of our collective moral prejudices that is developed in Daybreak and On the Genealogy of Morality, Human, All Too Human is a text that is profoundly therapeutic with the aim of transforming both the author and its readers through its constructive, yes-saying ethics of the free spirit. To become free, however, one must experiment with conflicting beliefs (HAHI P4), employ the ‘almost cheerful and inquisitive coldness of the psychologist’ (HAHII P1), and be prepared to suffer and renounce former things that were once highly valued (HAHI P4, P6). Nietzsche states that this process includes periods of convalescence and it is very painful, but one is propelled onward by ‘a tenacious will to health’ (HAHI P4). Although Human, All Too Human is a yes-saying book, Nietzsche enacts the no-saying voice when he undermines the values associated with the Christian–Platonic moral heritage. This is because, for Nietzsche, no-saying is an implicit part of yes-saying required for re-evaluation to occur. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche avoids a destructive atmosphere, more characteristic of his later no-saying texts like Beyond Good and Evil, by his notion of the free spirit who becomes the figure of possibility for a more individuated ethical approach to life. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality was published in 1881 and its preface was added in 1886. It is a more enthusiastic yes-saying text than Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche writes that Daybreak supports a contradiction that he is unafraid of, ‘faith in morality is withdrawn’ but this very withdrawal is motivated by a moral perspective. What is occurring is ‘the self-sublimation of morality’ (D P4). In Daybreak (and the free spirit texts in general) Nietzsche is

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attempting to make the ethical life more joyful. Although self-becoming involves much discipline and habituation, Nietzsche aims to transform morality into an Epicurean ethics of self-cultivation in which the individual enjoys the process of becoming what one is.6 Nietzsche is a ‘subterranean man’ (D P1) in this text who destabilizes moral precepts, but he does so with a style that celebrates a future in which values will be re-written (EH ‘Daybreak’ 1). In fact, with this text he is already introducing the notion that there are many moralities, that there need not be one overarching unegoistic morality (Ansell-Pearson 2011: 182). Nietzsche encourages his readers to experiment with different kinds of life practices which are self-affirmative (D 453) and to test out new variations of moralities (D 164). One of the central goals of Daybreak is to help individuals recognize the ‘morality of custom’ that indoctrinates them into collective systems of values in which their individual needs are subsumed by the interests of society. This is certainly a continuation of the earlier project initiated in Human, All Too Human to help ‘fettered spirits’ become free. Regarding the project of Daybreak Nietzsche writes, ‘The loss of a centre of gravity, resistance to natural instincts, in a word “selflessness” – this is what has been called “morality” so far. … In Daybreak I first took up the fight against the morality of “unselfing’’’ (EH ‘Daybreak’ 2). In this text, Nietzsche develops his assertation that an ethical life is one which is self-concerned and involves the practice of a healthy selfishness. Nietzsche states that just as Daybreak is a yes-saying book, so is The Gay Science, but to the ‘highest degree’ (EH ‘The Gay Science’). He uses the words ‘triumph’, ‘gratitude’, ‘hope’, and ‘intoxication’ to describe the ‘rejoicing of strength’ of this book (GS P1). The Gay Science was first published in 1882, but without the fifth book which was later added, in addition to a new preface and an appendix of poems in 1887. In this text, Nietzsche’s voice as a passionate and affirmative knowledge-seeker is most vibrant. He approaches philosophical problems from the perspective of a physician of culture7 who wants to help both individual and cultural development. In the preface he states that he is ‘waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the word – one who has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race, or of humanity’ (GS P2). It is this rather large task that he takes up in this book when he attempts to examine the meaning of health and its relationship with suffering. Nietzsche situates himself as a psychologist in the preface of The Gay Science when he states that a psychologist is fascinated by the relationship between health and philosophy. He writes that when a psychologist becomes ill they will

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adopt a scientific curiosity towards that illness from which they suffer (GS P2). Nietzsche places a value on the learning potential that comes out of suffering and illness and even claims that one who has suffered will pursue knowledge with less reservation.8 Out of suffering arises a person with more questions and a will to question more severely: ‘The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy’. In fact, Nietzsche thinks that a philosopher who has suffered much and practised self-mastery to endure is likely to become more attracted to that which is most problematic and unknown, to become open to trying out and even enjoying multiple perspectives (GS P3). Having recently come out of an illness prior to the writing of this book, in The Gay Science Nietzsche is attempting to think about how truth is shaped by health/ illness and also by what is useful (GS 110). Nietzsche claims that what is needed for the pursuit of knowledge is a ‘philosophical physician’ that will inquire as to what is ‘at stake’ in the philosophy in question, not the naïve objectivity of ‘truth’, but instead an awareness of how ‘health, future, growth, power, life’ (GS P2) shape our belief systems. The very title of this book points to the connection between truth and artistry. Nietzsche’s goal is to make the pursuit of knowledge as a life practice more joyful and to teach his free spirits about the construction of truth so that they can understand it and learn to employ these practices for the creation of their own values. The first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None9 were published separately in 1883, Part III was published in 1884, and Part IV was privately printed in 1885 and distributed to a small group of Nietzsche’s friends. This text is affirmative, deconstructive, and destructive. Nietzsche writes that Zarathustra is a Dionysian character who ‘says no and does no to everything everyone has said yes to so far’ but is also ‘the opposite of a no-saying spirit’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 6).10 Nietzsche turns to the figure of Zarathustra, the Persian prophet, to communicate his philosophy because he believes Zarathustra was the first person to consider the fundamental struggle between good and evil and to transform these concepts into a morality. As such, Nietzsche believes that the figure of Zarathustra must return to question and re-evaluate good and evil (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 3). Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains the most fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as the Overhuman and the will to power, as well as key writings vital for a study on friendship and self-overcoming. It also demonstrates in the figure of Zarathustra one pathway into the transformation of values that Nietzsche recommends. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche states that he shares many

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of the same goals and interests of Zarathustra: ‘I have not said anything that I would not have said five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 8). Nietzsche makes a strong connection between himself and Zarathustra suggesting that in the text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra we can find his most essential thoughts (Lampert 1986: 5). Zarathustra is a text at the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophy which shows a character who attempts to enact Nietzsche’s psychology of the tragic poet in which one destroys in the interest of affirmation (EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ 3). Zarathustra is representative of a human type who has the ‘great health’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 2). However, in Nietzsche’s own words, he is one to be studied, but not copied because there is not one health, it is different for everyone (GS 120). Nietzsche describes the great health as ‘a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health’ (GS 382). He associates it with adventure and curiosity, experimentation and detachment, stating that it is something that will need to be given up and reacquired (GS 382; EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 2). This ‘great health’ is something that Zarathustra embodies through his repeated efforts to share his gifts and to become what he is again and again. Through the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the adventures of Zarathustra, we can see Nietzsche attempting to inspire his readers to begin the process of self-overcoming and the accumulation of ‘health’ that he thinks is necessary for individual and cultural transformation, and for future generations.11 Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary gift of friendship that Nietzsche wrote for his free spirits and future philosopher friends. It is the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy of friendship which shows a character who acts as a joyful, agonistic, and bestowing friend. Through the speeches and songs of Zarathustra, Nietzsche performs and communicates his agonistic ethics, an ethics that engages directly and provocatively with the select reader. The title that the book is ‘for all and none’ appears to be a contradiction; however, it is also a clue. His text is available to all that can read it (some will benefit from his therapeutic teachings and some will not), but it is for none because Nietzsche did not think he had found his free spirits and philosophers of the future yet. Is it correct to contend that during the reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘a selection will be made between those who can and those who cannot be healed, although it will be a strange selection: all may try, but none will succeed’? (Van Tongeren 2000: 11) Perhaps it is correct to state that all may try, but it seems inaccurate to suppose that Nietzsche is stating that none will succeed; instead

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Nietzsche is proposing that none have succeeded so far. Van Tongeren claims that Nietzsche’s communication styles lead to the selection of specific kinds of readers, namely those who are willing to do more than read the text, namely to ‘unravel it, complete it, interpret it, apply it’ (Van Tongeren 2000:11). We can take this further and consider that the statement that ‘it is for none’ is meant as a provocation. This provocation is an invitation to those potential free spirits, those with the will to interpret Zarathustra’s words and respond to them. The response Nietzsche wants is to unravel the words of Zarathustra: this must be done through questioning, challenging, and ultimately responding as an agonistic friend to the text. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future was published in 1886 and it is an attempt by Nietzsche to present many of the same philosophical ideas he expressed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a new confrontational style which he considered to be more accessible to his readers and timelier for a nihilistic age. Nietzsche explains that after the yes-saying stage of his work, he turned to the ‘the no-saying, no-doing half: the revaluation of values so far, the great war, – summoning a day of decision. This involved slowly looking around for anyone related to me, for anyone who, out of strength, would give me a hand with destruction’ (EH ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ 1). This text is warlike and destructive because it aims to abolish the notions of good and evil that Nietzsche associates with slave morality (BGE 260) and more broadly with what he calls the grounding beliefs of metaphysicians, namely ‘the faith in the opposition of values’ (BGE 2). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche directly attacks the Christian–Platonic dualistic systems of values that he believes structure the modern European spirit such as ‘truth’, ‘virtue’, and ‘nobility’. However, in doing so, he not only conducts war against these concepts, but also re-evaluates them by connecting them to his character of the free spirit and a philosophy of the future. Nietzsche is writing to recruit companions to help him with this feat, even if it be posthumously. To convince the appropriate readers to join him in this act, Nietzsche writes with a deconstructive aim which involves a reformation of his project to undermine moral concepts. Although the project to undermine moral concepts is shared by earlier works, what differs in Beyond Good and Evil is that Nietzsche’s ideas are communicated with a level of cruelty that was not previously employed. Nietzsche is frustrated with being unable to attract those readers that he believes will understand him and do something with his ideas to promote change.12 By writing in a more openly confrontational style, Nietzsche

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aims to catch those interested in agonistic struggle and engage them in his philosophical therapeutics.

Nietzsche’s expectations of the reader Reading Nietzsche well requires an understanding of the expectations that he has of the reader. First, one must read slowly and live with his texts. Nietzsche advises to ‘read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and figures. … My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!’ (D P5). This sentiment, expressed about reading Daybreak, is repeated numerous times when Nietzsche offers advice about how to read his works. He is particularly concerned with an absence of leisure time and the obsession that modernity has with always being busy. Nietzsche points to the necessity of disconnecting from the demanding pace of the financial market and a world in which people seek out endless productivity.13 He wants his reader to slow down and spend time with his text (GM P8). Time and solitude are necessary for intellectual contemplation, as well as for the reader to engage sufficiently with the text. Nietzsche wants the entire person, not only the intellectual self to react to his work. He explains that one cannot understand his Zarathustra if one has not been ‘both profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it’ (GM P8). Nietzsche admits that reading his texts requires considerable effort (if done correctly) because the process will challenge one’s values. Since moral, religious, and political values shape characters, a philosophy that questions such values will also evoke an emotional response in the reader. For Nietzsche, being emotionally provoked by a text indicates that one has engaged more fully with it. The reader who is forced into self-questioning by Nietzsche because they have intellectual, emotional, and even physical responses to his philosophy is likely to become a more suspicious thinker. Nietzsche wants his reader to cultivate a selfreflective attitude and admits that his ‘writings have been called a schooling in suspicion’ (HAHI P1). Nietzsche states that passionate knowledge-seekers who are becoming free spirits will have to experience loneliness, renounce things that were once revered, and become suspicious of their virtues (HAHI P6). One must develop probity (Redlichkeit) to seek liberation from those values that are not one’s own and this involves casting a light into the ‘underworld of the ideal’ as

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Nietzsche does in Human, All Too Human (EH ‘Human, All Too Human’ 1). A reader who reads Nietzsche well will question their beliefs and the beliefs of others, including Nietzsche. The role of self-questioning is related to Nietzsche’s claim that knowledge is shaped by the perspective of its knower. The aim of knowledge-seeking is not to become neutral or to attempt to view the world from a remote and objective standpoint because ‘here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something’ (GMIII 12). Nietzsche thinks that we must be cautious of the fantasy that people can be disconnected from their interests, needs, and desires. In fact, Nietzsche states that if one was able to shut down one’s emotions it would also ‘castrate’ the intellect (GMIII 12). For Nietzsche, knowledge is invariably bound up with the perspectives of its holder and this includes the emotions and the instincts. If one wants to become a more skilled knowledge-seeker, one must experiment with different perspectives and, in doing so, exercise one’s ability to approach philosophical problems from a greater plurality of perspectives, or in Nietzsche’s terms, with more eyes. Philosophy is not only demonstrative; it is always motivated by individual tastes and Nietzsche thinks that we should admit to this instead of pretending otherwise. There is no disinterested knowledge of any kind. In fact, Nietzsche’s perspectivism means that even his own claims are ones among many interpretations open to reinterpretation. Nietzsche wants his readers to decide which claims are better than others through developing a second-order selfawareness which can help one to test out their own tastes and convictions to make them more precise. Nietzsche calls this practice the development of the intellectual conscience (GS 2).14 Nietzsche writes to both teach and inspire. He expresses his hopes for future philosophers and free spirits who will pluck at his wreath (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 3), take his concepts, and re-formulate them to make them their own. However, Nietzsche does not want his ideas to be misinterpreted as Zarathustra’s ape does when he fulminates endlessly on Zarathustra’s teachings without giving them fair representation (ZIII ‘On Passing By’). In such instances, adequate time is not given to the working over of Nietzsche’s texts, his suggestion of ‘rumination’ (GM P8) is neglected, and Nietzsche’s thoughts are so eclipsed by the commentator that his words become merely a point of departure. In such instances, the reader has not tested out their convictions through the practice of

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intellectual honesty nor have they sufficiently come to understand perspectives that differ from their own. There have been many misinterpretations of Nietzsche, the most well-known misinterpretations of his works with the greatest staying power made by the Nazis and by his sister Elisabeth. One reason that Nietzsche is prone to being read dogmatically and dramatically misunderstood is that he writes both exoterically and esoterically. He understood that many, if not most readers, would only grasp the exoteric level of his writing. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes that ‘the exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down from above’ (BGE 30). He also states in this section that he intends that some readers will not be able to grasp the meaning of his writings. He was aware that there would be misrepresentations of his thinking and he warns his readers about this. Nietzsche writes, ‘Our highest insights must – and should – sound like follies, and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them’ (BGE 30). This section appears to mean that Nietzsche’s ‘highest insights’ can only be understood by a chosen few. However, this interpretation does not sufficiently consider Nietzsche’s educational aims, his notion of the free spirit, nor the element of provocation active in this aphorism. If we take into consideration these other aspects, the exoteric reader of Nietzsche can be understood as someone who has not been initiated into Nietzsche’s teachings because they have not spent sufficient time and efforts with his works. Such a reader may be overwhelmed by Nietzsche’s expressions, finding them ridiculous or uncomfortable because they are provoked by them. For those who are provoked, reactions include turning away from Nietzsche, being devastated by those provocations, or being inspired by them. The emotional yet inspired reaction to Nietzsche’s works is, in fact, an important one because it calls forth the reader’s beliefs and is part of coming to terms with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Instead of presuming that esoteric access to Nietzsche’s thinking is merely for a specific kind of person,15 we can approach Nietzsche’s esotericism in the context of his ‘educational goals’ (Clark and Dudrick 2012: 246). As Laurence Lampert states, no one can be ‘carried’ to the esoteric insight (Lampert 2001: 72–3), but one can work very hard to get there and pass through the raw reactions initiated by Nietzsche’s provocations. Nietzsche acknowledges that a book can be harmful to one reader and emboldening to another (BGE 30). For one to fully comprehend his esotericism, one must be able to experience tragedy without succumbing to pity. What Nietzsche means by this is that his philosophical insights are so severe

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that they are likely to create a crisis in the reader. Perseverance, patience, and courage are important characteristics of Nietzsche’s readers. We can also ask whether Nietzsche’s demand for a ‘higher type’ who is capable of esoteric knowledge is a provocation, a tool Nietzsche employs to push his passionate knowledge-seekers still further in their quest for selfunderstanding. Nietzsche views humanity as being goal-oriented and in need of ideals to motivate striving. As such, it is incorrect to claim, as Horst Hutter does, that Nietzsche’s books ‘do not contain his philosophy but are instruments of philosophical striving meant to initiate ascetic labours of self-transformation in free-spirited readers and provide the foundation for the creation of new values’ (Hutter 2006: 5). Instead, in Nietzsche’s books we find both his philosophical observations (critical and productive) and an ethics of self-cultivation to guide free spirits into self-transformation. Nietzsche certainly wants to push his free spirits towards a higher human type and, as Van Tongeren states, ‘reinstall the power of plural interpretations’ (Van Tongeren 2000: 74) but this move to encourage his readers to think for themselves does not mean that Nietzsche lacks philosophical concepts himself. The difficulty in understanding Nietzsche can be attributed partially to his use of aphoristic form, a form that is more familiar to literary scholars than contemporary philosophers. Practically speaking, Nietzsche wrote in aphoristic form because he travelled often and had short periods of time to write in between the flare-ups related to his chronic health problems. However, he also took great care in reformulating his notes to make them into aphorisms and intentionally wrote aphorisms because he considered them the appropriate form in which to communicate his ideas (Van Tongeren 2000: 69). This is evidenced by a discussion he has about the ‘brevity’ of his writing style in The Gay Science. Nietzsche opens The Gay Science (381) by stating that an author does not seek to be understood by ‘just “anybody’’’. Although, Nietzsche states, he does not want his style to make his philosophical reflections inaccessible to his friends, he purposely ‘approaches deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again’ (GS 381). Instead of assuming his aphoristic approach to philosophy does not enter the kernel of the issue because of its swiftness, Nietzsche proposes that with insights that are difficult to grasp because they are new, or challenge accepted beliefs, aphoristic form provides a mechanism by which to communicate selectively. Since the aphorism cannot be deciphered without exegesis – simply reading it is not enough – it demands a higher level of engagement to be understood (GM P8).

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The demand that Nietzsche places on his readers is substantial because he is attempting to find the readers who will be able to both comprehend his philosophical goals and employ them for individual and cultural transformation. To select readers who are capable of this, Nietzsche writes seductively, provocatively, and performatively. Nietzsche employs seductive language as a preliminary step to attract readers and keep them engaged with his writing. By speaking to the reader and using the pronoun ‘we’ Nietzsche compels his reader into a conversation that feels more direct and personal.16 When he writes to his friends and free spirits, Nietzsche creates a surface dichotomy between those who are liberated and those who are not, enticing and challenging those who are able to view themselves as weighted down by their prejudices and illnesses to free themselves. Nietzsche uses ‘philosophical eroticism’ (Clark and Dudrick 2012: 255) to appeal to the reader. His appealing personas (free spirits, philosophers of the future, the Overhuman, Zarathustra) seduce his readers into his philosophical company. Is it the case that Nietzsche presents a choice between being a companion and being an opponent? (Van Tongeren 2000: 91). At first glance this may seem to be what Nietzsche is doing, but Nietzsche is looking for more than this. Just as Zarathustra is unsatisfied with only finding disciples who follow him, Nietzsche wants companions who will be able to be opponents, agonistic friends who can test the strength of his ideas and refine them for themselves. Nietzsche wants to help his readers improve their philosophical skills through the refinement of the intellectual conscience which involves the testing of dialectical abilities. His provocative style, that is often hyperbolic, pushes his readers into disagreement and argument with him. Nietzsche employs seductive figures like the free spirit to ask his readers what they are and what they want to become. He writes performatively because he exemplifies his teachings in the very style of his writing.17 For example, he writes as an agonistic friend to his readers through challenging and provoking them into argument and self-questioning. As Yunus Tuncel points out, Nietzsche writes agonistically, in contest with his readers: this involves both being a ‘judge’ of the contest by offering his readers difficult messages that must be interpreted or solved (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and as a contestant himself when he implores his reader to ‘fight back’ (Tuncel 2013a: 94–5). Nietzsche’s genealogical method initiates the reader into a philosophical inquiry by compelling them to question the presumptions they hold about their values and beliefs. For Nietzsche, philosophy includes self-shaping exercises, and his writings aim to

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provide such tools so that readers of Nietzsche can prepare themselves for the building of new values and new ‘ways of life’ (Hutter 2006: 9).

Nietzsche as agonistic psychologist In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes that ‘a psychologist without equal is speaking in my works’ and he adds to this that ‘this is perhaps the first thing a good reader will realize – the sort of reader I deserve’ (EH ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’  5). Again, Nietzsche is speaking to the reader about how to read him and telling us how necessary it is to approach him as a psychologist. However, Nietzsche is not only a psychologist, he is one with a uniquely agonistic resolve who employs genealogy as a diagnostic method for examining the moral and metaphysical presumptions that structure human consciousness. Nietzsche was influenced by both Montaigne and Emerson who thought that philosophy was practical, not merely about empirical study, but more importantly about inner development and self-understanding. As a philologist of ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche was also influenced by the therapeutic approach in which philosophy provides a gateway into understanding personal sickness and health, engaging oneself in the pursuit of the ‘art of living’18 to heal the self. Nietzsche underwent much suffering throughout his life, both physical and psychological; he felt frustrated yet invigorated by it and wanted to use his experiences to reach greater philosophical understanding. He attributes a strength to the endurance of suffering and connects it to greater philosophical acuity. In The Gay Science Nietzsche states that he considers the experiences of sickness and pain to be good teachers. He writes, ‘I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares’ (GS P3). Nietzsche claims that out of suffering arises a person with more questions and a will to question more severely (GS P3), a person who is ready to engage in agonistic therapeutics. By bringing the element of agon into his questioning, Nietzsche encourages his readers to express the emotions associated with their beliefs and to practice their intellectual strengths through competition with him. Nietzsche thinks he can demand greater probity from his readers through causing them to suffer and to strive against him and against themselves. As he counsels: ‘Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself ’ (EH P3). As an agonistic psychologist, Nietzsche demands courageous

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self-confrontation from his readers who are seeking to be free spirits. They must be prepared to come to terms with what they are and want to become. This process involves becoming more self-concerned. Nietzsche is critical of ‘unegoistic’ feelings such as pity, self-sacrifice, and self-denial, feelings that he believed Schopenhauer admired and turned into values. Nietzsche contends that they tempt one into a ‘will against life’ or nihilism (GM P5). Agonistic inquiry acts as a remedy for these feelings by encouraging self-affirmation through struggle. Nietzsche often treats philosophical positions as psychological symptoms (Pippin 2010: 106) and utilizes a diagnostic model to provide explanation for the motivations behind belief systems. This is evidenced in The Gay Science when Nietzsche states that the philosophy one holds is directly related to one’s psychological constitution: ‘In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths’ (GS P2). Nietzsche states that those who philosophize through their deprivations ‘need their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation’. These ‘sick thinkers’ are affected by their illness and often seek a model or a metaphysics that supports an escape from their suffering through creating a place of peace (GS P2). For people whose deprivations philosophize, Nietzsche explains that characteristics that appear as admirable often have a motivation that is oppositional to what appears. In addition to the human qualities that we are aware of, Nietzsche states that we have many qualities of which we do not have good knowledge; both our unconscious and conscious qualities follow a line of development that we cannot consciously control (GS 8). This is further complicated by the fact that some qualities that appear as virtues mask an underlying drive or affect that is far less admirable. The conflict between the characteristic that is taken to be a good and the underlying motivation that serves very different ends than its surface representation claims to be serving is the cause of a lack of self-understanding according to Nietzsche. For example, instead of pity being a genuine experience of feeling – with the person who is suffering – Nietzsche thinks that the expression of pity hides more self-serving motivations that seek to overpower the other or to turn away from one’s own fear of suffering (D 133, HAH 103). Nietzsche also thinks that one who demands pity may in fact be motivated not by the desire to be cared for but instead by the desire to hurt someone else (HAH 50) since pity involves an experience of suffering. Pity, associated with care and kindness, is often an expression of egoism and fear according to Nietzsche. Other

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examples include Nietzsche’s suppositions that magnanimity is cloaked egoism and revenge (GS 49), neighbourly love is not concern for the other but a way to avoid self-reflection (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’), generosity is motivated by the lust to rule over others (ZIII ‘On the Three Evils’ 2), humility, which is actually ‘timid baseness’ (GMI 14), is a means to exact moral superiority, and erotic love is a form of possessive greed (GS 14). The question is: To what extent does Nietzsche think that we can become aware of the complexities of our unconscious motivations? Nietzsche must think that we can have some awareness of our underlying motivations which is why he demands probity and self-reflective honesty from his potential free spirits. Robert Pippin has claimed that Nietzsche’s belief that self-awareness of unconscious motivations is possible is what allows for ‘the project of shaming’ that he embarks upon and also provides hope for the prospects of transvaluation (Pippin 2010: 90). Although I do not think Nietzsche is shaming anyone, he is provoking, challenging, and questioning in the manner of an agonistic psychologist who utilizes confrontational methods. Nietzsche has a medical approach for doing philosophy because he engages in diagnosis (negative), prognosis (positive), and therapeutic recommendations (Van Tongeren 2000: 5). As an agonistic psychologist, Nietzsche is diagnosing and also prognosticating cooperatively with his patient-readers so they can consider therapeutic solutions. Nietzsche is bestowing teachings about self-overcoming because he believes that ‘the future is to be prepared by the labours of selftransfiguration to which free spirits submit themselves, once they have been jolted into wakefulness’ (Hutter 2006: 14). As Nietzsche states he is not a man, he is dynamite! (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 1) As a joyful, agonistic, and bestowing friend, Nietzsche utilizes his words explosively to help his future friends become what they are.

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A preoccupation with the nuances of relating to other people – friends, lovers, companions, neighbours, enemies – can be found throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre. The topic of friendship in Nietzsche studies was previously neglected because scholars overlooked his middle period where his writings on friendship come closest to our traditional conceptions of friendship, such as the notion that friends share joy (Abbey 1999: 50). With more attention given to the study of his middle texts, some commentators concluded that Nietzsche does have a philosophy of friendship, but it is to be found in his middle period only. This assumption, furthered by Ruth Abbey some time ago, was that after The Gay Science, Nietzsche is more interested in individualism and the Overhuman than in friendship (Abbey 1999, 2000). Talk of the Overhuman does indeed come to the fore in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, what has been unrecognized by readers of Nietzsche is that his positive evaluations of egoism and cruelty, generally assumed to be inimical to friendship, can also be found in the middle period. Throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, struggle is praised by him as being part of individual and shared growth. Nietzsche does link friendship more concretely with enmity, struggle, cruelty, and the shared striving for excellence from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onward but this does not make him less concerned with friendship. With the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche becomes more convinced that people need enemies to test out their intellectual conscience and facilitate the rethinking of belief systems and that friendships which include agonistic characteristics can accomplish this with the greatest effect. There are still other reasons why readers may assume that Nietzsche is not a thinker concerned with friendship. Nietzsche’s notion that competition and critique are central components to higher friendship breaks from the received canon in which friendship is associated with pleasure, harmony, and ‘the good’ found in Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, and Kant, among others. Nietzsche’s

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proposal, more explicit in the later works, that higher friendships require agon to generate health, seems to preclude the comfortable intimacy that is associated with friendship both in our popular understandings and in the received canon. Speculation on Nietzsche’s challenging personal relationships with his sister, Richard Wagner, Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and others adds to this doubt. Nietzsche often appears to be someone whose circumstances and personal relationships gave him reasons to be pessimistic about friendship. Nevertheless, it is restrictive to assume that Nietzsche’s personal challenges enter his philosophical discourse to such an extent that they prevent genuine insight: if anything, these difficulties increase Nietzsche’s interest in the practical and theoretical problems associated with friendship. By reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil together with the middle period texts, we can see that friendship remains an important theme for Nietzsche through the middle to late periods. It is false to claim, as some other commentators have, that Nietzsche’s focus shifts to the importance of enemies in developing character (Abbey 1999: 65) and away from the value of friendship in later texts.1 Foundational to Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of friendship is an ethics of self-cultivation that includes the performance of enmity. By examining the progressions that occur in Nietzsche’s writings on friendship from Human, All Too Human through to Beyond Good and Evil, with specific concentration on those passages where Nietzsche outlines a goal-oriented version of friendship, this chapter elucidates and questions the qualities that Nietzsche consistently indicates are important for friendship.

Lower and higher forms of friendship Like Aristotle, Kant, and others writing about friendship in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche has a hierarchical understanding of friendship.2 Nietzsche believes that friendship has lesser and greater forms and he too praises those relationships that develop excellence. However, Nietzsche is much less accepting of lower kinds of friendship than Aristotle who notes that useful relationships hold society together. This is because Nietzsche is especially suspicious of relationships that may limit overcoming and are repressive of individual creativity. Suppositions that Nietzsche is an autarkic individualist or a misanthrope are often founded on remarks in which Nietzsche is being critical of utility-based relationships that he thinks limit growth.

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One example of what appears to be misanthropy occurs in Zarathustra when Nietzsche writes, ‘Our belief in others betrays wherein we should like to believe in ourselves. Our yearning for a friend is our betrayer’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’). What Nietzsche expresses in this statement, however, is his concern for the distractions that can be part of friendship. More precisely he is referring to friendships that encourage escapism and herd behaviour, and, in doing so, contribute to the last human mentality. Nietzsche does not want his readers to relinquish their goals and desires for those of the friend or the group. Instead of making friendship seem impossible, as may be supposed, Nietzsche is attempting to provoke therapeutic reflection and open his readers up to other friendship possibilities that involve agon. By encouraging self-concern and competition between friends, he also encourages opposition to the qualities of the last human such as inactivity and hopelessness. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘For the worthier enemy, O my friends, shall you save yourselves (aufsparen): therefore you must pass many things by’ (ZIII ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 21). This statement emphasizes the importance of spending time alone and avoiding relationships that limit growth. In the third part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes about the experience of feeling lonelier when among others than when in solitude (ZIII ‘The Return Home’). The implication being made is that human relationships should be approached with discretion and questioned to determine whether they support one’s own health and free-spiritedness. In 1879 Nietzsche wrote letters to his friends Peter Gast and Paul Rée in which he expressed interest in starting his own Epicurean garden (KSB 5, 399, 460). In his reflections on the middle period, Nietzsche states that the free spirit describes those friends that he would like himself to have, people who have or who are attempting to disconnect with the conventions that are most familiar to them. In reflecting on his mood while writing Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche points to his desire to find friends with whom to share the simple pleasures removed from the noise of society (HAHI P1). One cannot help but think of Epicurus’s sentiment: ‘The purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many’ (Inwood and Gerson 1994: 33). For Nietzsche, if one wants to enjoy a contemplative life one must find ways to remove oneself from the world and join together with other like-minded people who are not fettered but free. Nietzsche states that one of the characteristics of a free spirit is that they do not want to be served and they find happiness in this (HAH 432). Nietzsche’s

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notion of the free spirit is a concept from Human, All Too Human that remains important to him throughout his oeuvre, providing a key to understanding the vital role that knowledge-seeking plays in his agonistic ethics of friendship. Nietzsche distinguishes the free spirit from the fettered spirit whose beliefs are based on habit instead of reasons (HAH 226). The fettered spirit has faith whereas the free spirit questions and seeks out knowledge in opposition to the ‘dominant view of the age’ and what is expected from them (HAH 225) and in doing so engages their intellectual conscience (GS 335). The free spirit is a relative concept for Nietzsche (HAH 225) because free-spiritedness is actualized with great variance depending upon one’s position in the world and how one specifically differentiates oneself from it. Free spirits practice honesty (Redlichkeit) (BGE 227), the relinquishment of certitude (GS 347), and the destruction of habituated beliefs (HAH 225). Nietzsche values the pursuit of one’s ‘own source of experience’ (HAH 292) instead of following or attempting to control one’s experiences. He emphasizes that the free spirit is someone whose beliefs and way of life differs from the majority and more specifically from their class, profession, origins, and environment (HAH 225). Does Nietzsche mean to extend his hope for a shared community of free spirits to women and people from various kinds of backgrounds? Epicurus did not restrict his teachings to men or the youth; his teachings were for people, both men and women of all ages, ‘whether slave or free’ (DeWitt 1954: 29). For this reason, one would be inclined to suppose that Nietzsche’s attempt to reinvent the Epicurean garden would embrace all people, in his own words, ‘who think differently from … the dominant views of the age’ (HAH 225). However, this is not exactly the case for Nietzsche because, according to him, the free spirit cannot be ideologically enslaved, and he believes that this is the general predicament of women. Nietzsche writes that although women are attracted to free-spirited endeavours, they have been socialized ‘for millennia’ to be subservient to societal authorities more than men (HAH 435). The feminine inclination to service (HAH 432) in conjunction with the social position of women that Nietzsche writes is one of slavery (GM III18; ZI ‘On the Friend’) makes it more difficult for women to become free spirits according to him. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche claims that a free spirit does not want to be served immediately after writing that women want to serve (HAH 423). In both Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes his opinion clear that women are not free spirits nor are they capable of friendship yet. Women are unable to take part in Nietzsche’s formula of ‘good friendship’

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(AOM 241) because they lack respect for the other while loving the other more. According to Nietzsche, women love the other more in a double sense: they love the other, as man, more, because they are willing to sacrifice so much in love with him (GS 363), and they love the other of themselves more, namely the image of ‘woman’ that has been created by man (GS 68). Luce Irigaray calls this doubling of love that lacks autonomy a ‘love of the same’ and describes it as ‘undifferentiated attraction to the archaic, as love of that which does not and will not know itself as different’ (Irigaray 2004a: 83). Nietzsche does not limit his critique to women: he writes that men lack generosity because they inhibit the abilities of women to become friends by failing to behave as friends themselves (ZI ‘On the Friend’). The need to subjugate another person to one’s own will or be subjugated occludes the possibility of friendship for Nietzsche. Nietzsche is critical of one person being instrumentalized for another even if it is justified as a social ‘good’3 or under the banner of friendship. Be it in service or domination, or in love relationships, instrumentalization of another person disallows the mutual respect that even Nietzsche thinks is necessary for friendship. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra is challenged by his encounters with people who have nothing to offer, who suffer from greed and weakness. During the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, after making the mistake of giving to those who are unable to bestow anything themselves, Zarathustra becomes more cautious in his interactions with people. Among these characters we find Zarathustra’s first friend, the corpse, whom he takes on as a heavy burden and who is literally nothing but a dead weight on his shoulder. Then there is the jester, who ridicules Zarathustra and seems ready to deceive him at any moment. We also read about the audience of people at the town who are incapable of listening to Zarathustra without turning him into an object of entertainment (ZI P6–9). Zarathustra concludes that he must look for ‘living companions … who will follow me because they want to follow themselves’ (ZI P9), namely people who will appreciate his teachings yet maintain their abilities to think critically, and in doing so, have some contest to contribute to the relationship. Later in Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes of those who cannot give and who measure every interaction with the concern to receive the greatest advantage, thinking only of themselves (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). He states that they act like secretive thieves, trying to manipulate the situation for their benefit: ‘With the eye of a thief it looks at everything that shines; with the greed of hunger it measures him who has plenty to eat; and it is always skulking around the table

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of those who bestow’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). These are companions to be avoided because they suffer from degeneration, according to Zarathustra, and a ‘sick selfishness’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1) that does not consider others during decision making unless it is to determine how much can be taken from them. Nietzsche also writes about those whose circumstances make it such that they have nothing to give and become resentful in the reception of kindness from another (ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’). He suggests that one should be wary of how one offers help to avoid offending the pride of the person who is suffering. In many instances, the deed of assistance cannot be forgotten and the one who was helped will look for a way to equalize what is perceived to be a debt. The expression of Schadenfreude – one of the methods Nietzsche explains – is used to achieve equalization between companions: one experiences pleasure in the misfortune of their friend because ‘the harm that befalls another makes him our equal, it appeases our envy’ (WS 27). Nietzsche states that the feeling of Schadenfreude is a common reaction for one who lacks powers in a society that values equality (WS 27). However, experiencing Schadenfreude does not necessarily make one a bad friend if one feels pleasure at the other’s misfortune because it equalizes their power dynamics. If one additionally manipulates this new advantage enacting a ‘sick selfishness’ to become further advantaged, then Nietzsche considers it problematic. Instead of seeking revenge, one can practice restraint and view equalization as an opportunity for friendship to emerge through a mutual striving in which peers raise each other up in competition rather than seeking to bring the other down through greed and weakness. In the preface to Volume I of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche states that he invented his free spirits to replace those friends he lacked and to keep him company ‘as brave companions and familiars’ (HAHI P2). In the story of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra seeks out friends with whom he can share joy and agon, but instead finds only disciples. Many attempts are made to help the disciples find themselves so that they may also shift from being followers to friends, but it is questionable whether any of them do this. At the end of the first part, Zarathustra leaves his disciples because he believes that they need a push to seek out who they are apart from him. He abandons his companions because they have become believers in him instead of seeking themselves (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 3). Zarathustra is looking for companions to learn from and to share his ideas with but comes to understand that those whom he has befriended have not done

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the self-searching necessary to change from being disciples to being friends. They have not discovered who they are. Zarathustra states, ‘Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 3). As a mentor to his companions, Zarathustra considers it vital that he relinquishes his leadership so that his disciples can form their own experiences and beliefs based on the practices of free-spiritedness such as self-questioning and honesty (Redlichkeit). Nietzsche writes that if one is too weary to seek out ‘genuine opponents’ in their students or to struggle against their teachers, then the thinker has lost their strength (D 542). Companions who cannot provide any opposition, who fail to think for themselves are not considered friends. In his letters, Nietzsche expresses frustration about his relationship with Paul Lanzky because he could not engage in a philosophical discussion with him: he was seeking too often to admire or agree.4 In order to be a Nietzschean friend, one must be able to provide some opposition, and this requires self-understanding. A deferential companion whose beliefs depend upon the other is incapable of this. People who use their friends as a means of escape or who provide others with a means of escape through ‘a contrived happiness’ (ZI P5) are also questioned by Nietzsche. He outlines that escapism is promoted, for example, through the concept of neighbourly love which dictates that consideration for the other has a higher moral value than consideration for the self. Nietzsche writes, ‘The Thou has been pronounced holy, but not yet the I: so the human being crowds towards the neighbour’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’). Nietzsche suggests that these acquaintance-type relationships encourage complacency through shared manipulation. For example, this may occur when one convinces their neighbour of their own grandeur and then chooses to believe their neighbour’s perspective rather than their own. One may also forget about their own life in the admiration of their neighbour. ‘One man runs to the neighbour because he seeks himself, and the other because he would like to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’). In other words, a lack of self-confidence and motivation makes a relationship that promotes escapism an attractive alternative to self-reflection. Nietzsche indicates that relationships that perpetuate self-escape are spiritually stunting and should be limited. They should be recognized for what they are – namely ‘two immature persons neither of whom has learned to be alone or to make something of himself ’ (Kaufmann 1974: 367). Although this statement of Kaufmann’s does not fully capture the spectrum of what occurs

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in relationships of escapism, it indicates what the solution to them might be, specifically greater solitude and energy given to self-reflection and the pursuit of those goals that are meaningful to oneself. The common thread that runs through Nietzsche’s critique of these lower types is the need to avoid companionships that infringe upon one’s ability to enact the values of the free spirit such as honesty, the relinquishment of certitude, and the destruction of habituated beliefs. To determine whether one’s current friendship is unhealthy in a Nietzschean sense, one might ask the following questions: Does this relationship involve tyranny or prevent knowledge-seeking? Does it encourage will-less-ness, the comportment of the last human who avoids challenging questions and difficult circumstances? Certainly, if it invalidates the pursuit of one’s ‘own source of experience’ (HAH 292) and the development of the intellectual conscience then it would be a relationship to be despised. Selfcultivation is not to be stifled in Nietzschean friendship. Near the end of the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra states, ‘Companions (Gefährten) the creator seeks and not corpses, not herds or believers either. Fellow creators (Mitschaffenden) the creator seeks, those who inscribe new values on new tablets’ (ZI P9). In this section, Nietzsche writes about the types of people that Zarathustra seeks to disseminate his teachings and facilitate others in self-overcoming. These types, namely the creators (Schaffenden), harvesters (Erntenden), and celebrants (Feiernden), provide insight into those kinds of friendship that Nietzsche values. Zarathustra states that his companions will be called destroyers and ‘despisers of good and evil’ because their actions will challenge values and provoke change, but they will also celebrate life (ZI P9). Zarathustra’s words on his future companions suggest that they will embody the characteristics of the free spirit and exceed them. He wants to be friends with individuals who have the greatest capacities for joy, transformation, and creativity. These qualities correspond to three higher types of Nietzschean friendship: the joyful friendship, the agonistic friendship, and the bestowing friendship. In The Vatican Collection of Epicurean Sayings we can read the following: ‘Friendship dances around the world announcing to all of us that we must wake up to blessedness’ (Inwood and Gerson 1994: 38). The joyful aspect of friendship that is accentuated by Epicurus is taken up by Nietzsche when he writes that ‘fellow rejoicing (Mitfreude), not fellow suffering (Mitleiden) makes the friend’ (HAH 499) and that friends should ‘share not suffering but joy’ (GS 338). The importance of sharing joy is further emphasized by Nietzsche in Daybreak as a

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life activating principle that creates a feeling of fullness in the individual. ‘Why is making joyful the greatest of all joys?—Because we thereby give joy to our fifty separate drives all at once. Individually they may be very little joys: but if we take them all into one hand, our hand is fuller than at any other time—and our heart too!’ (D 422) For Nietzsche, celebrating with others involves a shared creative movement that allows the drives to express themselves more fully. Friends join together to share uplifting emotions, experience pleasure and play, and affirm each other. This shared feeling of fullness is a remedy for the sicknesses of the modern human soul such as pity, guilt, and consumerism. In The Gay Science (338) Nietzsche encourages those who seek ‘one’s own way’ (free spirits) to separate themselves from society and even to ‘live in seclusion’. He qualifies this by explaining that the free spirit also wants to have friends and help others. As a friend, Nietzsche argues that one should only help the friend that one shares suffering and hope with because in helping the friend, one also helps oneself. Nietzsche ends this section by proclaiming in response to the ‘preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy’ (GS 338). Nietzsche is outlining the significance of the joyful friendship for its ability to act as a healing balm for the experiences of pity. At many points in the middle works Nietzsche indicates that joy is a central part of friendship and the above examples are reasons why it is easy to assume Nietzsche’s notion of friendship to be limited to these kinds of statements. Although the friendship of sharing joy is important to Nietzsche, its significance lies in its ability to act as a healing response to the negative consequences of pity (Mitleid) and provide a transformative outlet for the difficulties of life. What is important in Nietzsche’s therapeutic scheme is that by giving expression to the many drives through shared joy, this kind of friendship turns its gaze away from suffering and pity. The friends refuse to ‘be made gloomy’, refuse to burden each other with their lamentations and instead find repose from the difficulties of life through shared enjoyment. They celebrate life and the diversity of the human spirit (AOM 75). The joyful friendship involves proximity and care, but often occurs without too much depth by concentrating on the beauty of the other and the fun the friends have together.5 In Nietzsche’s joyful friendship, free spirits become less anxious about their mortality through enabling each other to express and share joy. The community that they hold together provides a healing balm for the realities of human life, one which allows for the activation of an affirmative energy. Nietzsche contends that ‘some people need open enemies if they are to rise to the level of their own virtue (Tugend), virility (Männlichkeit), and cheerfulness

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(Heiterkeit)’ (GS 169). Agonistic friendship is a technique of Nietzschean therapeutics that supports passionate knowledge-seeking. Agonistic friends incorporate spiritualized enmity into friendship so that they can provide each other with the opportunity for self-examination through cooperative competition. The practice of agonistic interactions develops the virtue of courage while testing out one’s abilities through contest with peers. By focusing on a shared higher goal, agonistic friends transform their envy and personal frustrations into a competitive energy that strives against the other.6 Agonistic friends ultimately seek out their own growth, but their potential to overcome is also connected to their friend’s level of excellence. Attainment of the shared goal is a process that involves competitive reciprocity and is best experienced by well-matched equals who find each other admirable. Care for the friend is built on admiration of character or some group of qualities which one hopes to achieve through struggle against them. ‘In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in your heart when you strive against (widerstrebst) him’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’).7 Enmity is brought into friendship and transformed into a tool for growth. In Zarathustra Nietzsche writes, ‘I teach you the friend and his overfull heart … in whom the world stands complete, a vessel of goodness – the creating friend, who always has a complete world to bestow’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’). The bestowing friend is portrayed as someone who has tremendous self-love and knowledge and longs to share, to find friends who will absorb their ideas. They are motivated by a sense of self-mastery; their self-control allows for a higher level of creative energy in their own life to be expressed towards others (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’). They are a leader, mentor, and teacher to their friends. The bestowing friend has reached a point of clarity and satisfaction with themselves such that they are not competitive with others, like friends engaged in an agonistic relationship. They have cast aside the battle-driven approach and learnt gracefulness and modesty in their interactions with others. They express spiritualized cruelty towards friends to incite struggle within them so they can strive against them without actively entering into competition themselves. The bestowing friend recognizes potential in others and offers wisdom to them so that they may use it for their own growth, believing that ‘to give is more blessed than to have’ (WS 320). According to Nietzsche, the development of the bestowing virtue comes about through the accumulation and refinement of knowledge and the self-

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transformation that is associated with this process which requires great discipline. In order to have the bestowing virtue Nietzsche writes that you must become ‘sacrifices and bestowals’ through the ‘thirst to pile up all riches in your souls’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). However, Nietzsche writes that this thirst is not that of a hoarder because one acquires precisely to bestow. ‘You compel all things towards you and into you, that they may flow back out of your wells as gifts of your love’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). According to Nietzsche, one requires great confidence and resilience to be a bestower because it is a position of leadership. The bestower is someone who has learnt to shape their drives into a trajectory that allows for their purposeful creation to be extended to others. Nietzsche writes that the bestowing virtue is a ‘power … a ruling thought it is, and around it a clever soul: a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). The possession of the bestowing virtue is representative of Nietzschean flourishing because the bestower has reached a place of self-mastery having attained both knowledge and power that sets them apart from their past selves and other people. Although Nietzsche does think self-love is a necessity for higher friendship, he also suggests that when it reaches a creative height exemplified in the character of the bestower the desire to command others supersedes the explicit reciprocity that is active in agonistic friendship. This is because in addition to his agonistic structure of friendship that supports the shared growth of friends, Nietzsche wants to promote the development of genius individuals8 who will become innovators and leaders and the bestowing virtue speaks precisely to this aim. Also, Nietzsche is insistent about the importance of maintaining ‘independence (Unabhängigkeit) of soul’ over and above friendship ‘if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and he [the friend] threatens this kind of freedom’ (GS 98). All three of these higher friendships are considered admirable for Nietzsche, part of building an ethics of friendship that supports creative growth and transformation. Whereas the joyful friendship is most prominent in the middle works and the bestowing friendship is more present in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s high appraisal of agonistic striving between friends has the most sustaining presence in his oeuvre. An account of Nietzschean friendship that fails to acknowledge the important role that the qualities of agon (cruelty, enmity, egoism) have in his ethics is one that does not fully grasp the significance of Nietzsche’s re-evaluative plan to change human relationships.

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The development of Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship There are three central components foundational for understanding Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship. The first is Nietzsche’s contention that friendship involves a shared higher goal. The idea of friendship as goal-oriented provides a base for construing friendship as an activity in which two people strive with and against each other to self-overcome. The second is Nietzsche’s rejection of the assumed incompatibility between self-interest and friendship. His treatment of egoism and what may be called inter-subjectivity (although Nietzsche does not name it as such) helps us to understand why self-overcoming has social value and is necessarily linked to others. The third is Nietzsche’s notion of enmity and the spiritualization of cruelty and how these concepts come to be more tightly connected to friendship. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil these qualities are associated with the experience of struggle between friends which facilitates the sublimation of destruction drives and the dialectical interventions that help to advance the intellectual conscience.

Friendship involves shared striving and a higher goal Nietzsche’s idea that friendship involves a shared higher goal is most clearly expressed in The Gay Science where he writes: ‘Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship’ (GS 14). In this section, Nietzsche distinguishes friendship from erotic love and neighbourly love relationships in which he claims the same drive gives rise to love and greed (Habsucht). Friendship allows for a sublimation or refinement of this tyrannical drive into a more productive outlet so that the attention of the people involved is oriented to the actualization of an ideal instead of the possession of one another. Friendship as goal-oriented thus becomes a creative and disciplined solution to the problem of immoderate egoism and its multiple expressions, especially for those who have an excess of energy and a hunger for power. Nietzsche introduces a less developed yet similar notion of friendship as a stepping stone or pathway to something higher in Human, All Too Human when he speaks of two different kinds of friendship among those who have a ‘talent’

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for it. The ‘ladder’ type of person ‘is in a state of continual ascent and for each phase of his development finds a friend precisely appropriate to it’ (HAH 368). Although this account seems to have a much more utility-based approach to friendship because the friends ‘part when the advantage is at an end’,9 it shows that Nietzsche is already reflecting on goal-oriented friendship early on with his notion that a friend can be a ladder towards a higher goal. In Beyond Good and Evil he echoes this thought with greater concern when he writes, ‘A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle – or as a temporary resting place’ (BGE 273). In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche’s commentary on goal-oriented friendship is solely descriptive, but in Beyond Good and Evil there is an element of critical commentary at work. Here, Nietzsche writes about how a lack of reciprocity, namely approaching others solely as ladders to ‘something great’, will bring one loneliness. Nietzsche indicates that a friend who approaches the other as a ‘means or as a delay’ also ‘knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it’ because they do not know how to express graciousness towards the other until they have achieved their goal (BGE 273). Although being goal-oriented in friendship is considered healthy by Nietzsche, he also emphasizes the importance of mutual benefit. The advantages of cultivating goal-oriented friendships are numerous in Nietzsche’s framework. In The Gay Science 14 and 13 Nietzsche explains that people in general are mostly interested in having a feeling of power and are willing to use and hurt others to achieve this (although those who hurt others are said to be lacking in power as opposed to those who benefit others) (GS 13). Nietzsche states that the hunger to possess that which is new is often expressed hastily and repeatedly because ‘our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves’ (GS 14). Those experiencing this drive enact an inconsiderate consumerism that bores easily and has a propensity to be exploitative of others in its need to assimilate. However, Nietzsche contends that if one can sublimate one’s drives into a project shared by goal-oriented friends, there is an opportunity to have a different kind of relationship. The structure of Nietzsche’s goal-oriented friendship provides a foundation for resistance and, if the friends are well matched, a prolonged experience of challenge and learning. Nietzsche thinks that instead of attempting to incorporate the other person as tends to be the case in both neighbourly and erotic love relationships (GS 14), goal-oriented friendships are grounded on mutual admiration and friends do

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not employ the other for self-aggrandizement or escapism. Admiration and respect for the other person’s relevant abilities are necessary to recognize the other as a worthy partner in the attempt to meet a goal. In addition, Nietzsche suggests that enmity has a role to play within friendship because it encourages competition and the development of a cheerful masculine virtue (GS 169). Nietzsche shares the sentiments of Montaigne whose writings on the art of conversation include the statement that ‘I like a strong, intimate, manly fellowship, the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites and scratches which draw blood’.10 Montaigne and Nietzsche view argumentative friendship as an opportunity to exercise one’s skills; they believe that critique should be welcomed, not avoided. Nietzsche considers the unique kind of intimacy that friends share when they bring a degree of enmity into their relationship to be important: the push and pull of goal-oriented friends inspire shared questioning and expose aspects of the self that would not ordinarily be visible. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes, ‘Let us be enemies too, my friends! Divinely we want to strive against each other!’ (ZII ‘On the Tarantulas’). The competitive nature of this kind of higher friendship allows for a striving that can be both therapeutic and transformative. Friends can provide the kind of resistance that Nietzsche later states in On the Genealogy of Morality is important for discharging the will to power and preventing the development of the bad conscience.11 For example, difficult and potentially destructive emotions such as envy are utilized in order to motivate striving: instead of envy for the friend driving one to harm them, that envy inspires one to attempt to be similar to or better than their friend. Nietzsche thinks that when mutual admiration is present, a certain level of spiritualized enmity drives competition and encourages critical engagement between peers while also providing an outlet for aggressive emotions. The passions of the knowledge-seeker, which are neither objective nor indifferent (GS 351), can be moderated through opposition. By sharing an argumentative engagement with one another, friends, especially those who have different passionate motivations, engage in a discourse that allows for greater recognition of the other and their perspectives to occur. The shared goal of the friends provides structure for the intensity of the interaction and allows for a sustained practice of emotional sublimation and intellectual intimacy. Although Nietzsche does not name one specific higher ideal of friendship in The Gay Science (14), he does state that the distinguishing feature of friendship is ‘a shared higher thirst for an ideal’. Robert Miner, who also turns to The Gay

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Science (14) to claim that ‘superior friendship’ has a higher goal for Nietzsche, argues that this goal is truth.12 I believe this is a misreading of Nietzsche because Miner fails to explain the central role that questioning plays in Nietzsche’s treatment of truth. Instead, what Hannah Arendt wrote about Lessing can be applied to Nietzsche here: ‘His thinking was not a search for truth, since every truth that is the result of a thought process necessarily puts an end to the movement of thinking’ (Arendt 1983: 10). Nietzsche’s discussion of truth is pointed towards its fallibility; friendship with a higher goal offers the friends an opportunity for greater criticality, not so that concrete truth will be found, but instead so that one’s truths and methods of truth-seeking will be questioned, multiplied, and recreated or, in short, overcome. Nietzschean friends help each other to develop a practice of suspicion important for developing the no-saying spirit who looks at the motivation behind their truths to determine if they are worth maintaining. Knowledge-seeking is vital to higher friendship but the goal of Nietzschean friendship is something more than the discovery of truth.

Self-interest and friendship are compatible One of the conceptual challenges facing those of us who attempt to read Nietzsche on friendship today is the commonly held presumption that egoism and friendship are incompatible. It is difficult to recognize the social value of Nietzschean self-interest because we tend to conceive of egoism and friendship as irreconcilable opposites. What is particularly important to note about Nietzsche is that he merges this presumed polarization and resuscitates the Aristotelian notion that the friend is (or is like) another self. Nietzsche maintains the notion in both middle and later works that one cannot be (and should not desire to be) distanced from their self-interest.13 It is also important to note that Nietzsche’s concept of the self has a definitively other-oriented character which allows for his notion of healthy selfishness to help rather than hinder his understanding of friendship. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche critiques the idea that one can act without self-interest by stating that this is an error of reason (Irrtum der Vernunft) and a psychological impossibility because human beings do not act without selfmotivation. He writes: ‘No man has ever done anything that was done wholly for others and with no personal motivation whatever; how, indeed, should a person be able to do something that had no reference to himself, that is to say lacked all

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inner compulsion (which would have its basis in personal need)? How could the ego act without the ego?’ (HAH 133) Nietzsche does not believe that an action can be unegoistic and the expression ‘unegoistic action’ is an oxymoron for him because all human action is motivated by a human need, drive, or will that seeks fulfilment. Even when it comes to those who may appear to be acting solely for the interest of another, Nietzsche states that there will be some concealed personal interest involved. Nietzsche expresses repeatedly that being egoistically invested in one’s relationships with others is both inevitable and necessary for psychological health. For example, in Daybreak (516) he writes that to be benevolent and show beneficence to others, a good person must first act in this way towards themself. The assumption that Nietzsche is working with here and elsewhere is that one cannot give without themself feeling they have something worth giving and this requires a significant degree of self-interest. Nietzsche comments on the misplaced idealism of unegoistic friendship and points to a specific problem associated with ‘selfless’ friendship in Human, All Too Human. He states that a person who seeks out someone whom they can love and give to without self-consideration must find a receiver greedy enough to accept that their ‘friend’ is acting purely for them (HAH 133). Nietzsche thinks that an unegoistic friend requires someone whose values are the direct opposite of theirs, namely one who is selfish or tyrannical enough to accept a selfless companion. The requirements of a so-called ‘altruistic’ friendship ultimately reduces the unegoistic friend to a position of servility that, to be maintained, requires someone who is careless enough to exploit it and this, for Nietzsche, is not friendship at all (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Additionally, Nietzsche states that since detachment from the ego is unattainable, the endeavour to be a ‘selfless’ friend involves a kind of doubling of the ego, an encumbrance that is unsustainable. Nietzsche writes: Why double your ‘ego’! – To view our own experiences with the eyes with which we are accustomed to view them when they are the experiences of others – this is very comforting and a medicine to be recommended. On the other hand, to view and imbibe the experience of others as if they were ours – as is the demand of a philosophy of pity (Philosophie des Mitleidens) – this would destroy us, and in a very short time. (D 137)14

Nietzsche does not consider the identification of oneself with the emotions of another person helpful or admirable: he views it as a limitation upon reason. Once one begins to over-identify with the emotions of another, they lose not only a sense of who they are, but also the capacity to judge the situation that causes

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the friend’s upset. Nietzsche thinks that attention should be directed instead towards the development of a self-love that, in its strength, is able to extend to the other. We can recognize from Daybreak (516) that Nietzsche believes goodwill towards the other first requires goodwill towards the self.15 He also emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge when caring for others (D 335). There is a connection between loving others and loving oneself for Nietzsche, one which moves in both directions. Nietzsche writes that to have a good friendship there must be both respect for the other and self-love (AOM 241). If one unlearns how to love other people, Nietzsche claims, they eventually cannot find anything lovable in themself either (D 401). One’s own mood, when shaped by an ‘ideal selfishness’, becomes ‘a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too’ (D 552). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that going so far as to foster self-enjoyment helps us to unlearn the practice of hurting others (ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’).

The therapeutic and instructive value of enmity and cruelty in friendship Nietzsche discusses the importance of enmity in self-cultivation and learning in Daybreak when he writes that a thinker must make it a priority every day to conduct a battle against their own thoughts (D 370). Nietzsche writes that many people, not only thinkers, require ‘open enemies’ (GS 169). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche merges the friend and enemy into one, stating that you are closest to your friend ‘when you strive against him’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Nietzsche believes that conflict promotes shared enhancement and that to grow, we require companions who are capable of questioning and potentially defeating us. He views conflict and critique as part of a higher culture necessary for individual and societal health. ‘Everybody knows nowadays that the ability to accept criticism and contradiction is a sign of high culture. Some people actually realize that higher human beings desire and provoke contradiction in order to receive some hint about their own injustices of which they are as yet unaware’ (GS 297).16 Nietzsche suggests that the particularly therapeutic power of enmity in friendship has its origins in a more destructive force, the instinct for cruelty that he believes has become refined over time.17 ‘Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty (der Vergeistigung und Vertiefung der Grausamkeit), on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition’ writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (229). Cruelty which was

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once like a beast, a savage animal, has not died out, but rather has become divine (vergöttlicht). Nietzsche claims that it is cruelty or some kernel of it that lies in many of those things that we consider great and sublime such as tragic pity. It is cruelty turned inward that drives the religious person when they act in self-denial or self-mutilation. Even ‘the seeker after knowledge’ (der Erkennende) employs a kind of spiritualized cruelty when they use it against themself to admit when they are wrong or to learn something that is against their hopes. In doing so they act as ‘an artist and transfigurer of cruelty’ (BGE 229). To learn something new and not remain with what is familiar, Nietzsche states that it is important to develop a severity towards the self that refuses one’s interior resistance against change. He describes this as ‘a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste’ towards the self (BGE 230). Nietzsche laments that most people do not have an intellectual conscience (GS 2). This is unfortunate because the intellectual conscience allows one to take part in self-observation and to question one’s own value judgements, for example, to ask: is this my good and my bad – where did these beliefs come from? ‘Your judgment “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. “How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: “What is it that impels me to listen to it?’’’ (GS 335) Nietzsche explains the intellectual conscience as a self-reflective apparatus that questions the conscience. The intellectual conscience helps one to determine the relevance of the convictions of the conscience and suggest alternatives. It allows for a refinement of one’s opinions and the normative assumptions that one has inherited. What provides the intellectual conscience with the drive to honestly self-reflect is spiritualized cruelty, a modification of that same drive that forced one to develop (bad) conscience in the first place.18 Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of enmity and spiritualized cruelty in friendship means that he also believes friendship can help one to develop one’s intellectual conscience. Nietzsche believes that friendship is important for self-knowledge and for challenging limitations. In Daybreak, he writes that we must welcome opposition to our thoughts to promote honesty. He states that we should embrace opposition from others (friends, enemies) and also question ourselves. Nietzsche claims that even if it means facing defeat we must strive for ‘honesty of thought’ (Redlichkeit des Denkenst) (D 370). Friends can provide one with a kind of meta-perspective when one fails to do so for oneself, or at least an alternative to the belief that is taken as a given. Those friendships that challenge one’s truths or beliefs can act as a check on those

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tendencies that seek out the familiar and the comfortable (GS 355). An openly critical friend can challenge the way that the ‘will to truth’ leads one to manipulate other beings and beliefs to their own perspective (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’). By affecting the intellectual conscience, friendship has the capacity to change the structures of belief systems and examine those convictions one holds dear, to test the level of one’s probity (Redlichkeit). The development of the intellectual conscience through critical dialogue assists one in understanding more about the process in which knowledge is shaped. Further, more accurate descriptions of things can be formed (GS 112). For Nietzsche, friendship provides an opportunity for self-overcoming. Even some people who are unable to conquer their own limitations can help the friend in overcoming theirs through exercising a degree of spiritualized cruelty in the spirit of amity. For example, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine for your friend? Many a one is unable to loosen his own chains and yet is a redeemer (Erlöser) for his friend’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Friendship can help one to recognize aspects of oneself that have been ignored or overlooked. Nietzsche explains that friends (and enemies) may expose a part of the self that was formerly invisible through a kind of helpful manipulation, what he calls taking ‘a secret path’. ‘The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path’ (HAH 491). Whether by overt or by furtive means, a friend can expose parts of oneself that were previously unknown. According to Nietzsche, friendships that encourage critique have the most significant aptitude for inviting transformation and creativity. Being critical, encouraging opposition in interactions is ‘evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm’ (GS 307). Through enmity and constraint, the friend may help the other to cycle through the demands of revenge and vengeance that hamper the spirit so that emotions can be released or sublimated into healthier and more creative endeavours instead of turned inward.19 Nietzsche believes that destructive drives without an outlet have the propensity to become harmful to the self. Goal-oriented friendship provides an outlet for the expression of one’s drives and is an opportunity for selfovercoming that enhances ‘one’s strength by encouraging a dynamic in which parts of one’s self are exhausted in pursuit of surpassing them, and it cultivates relations with others and products of competition that are

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(at least potentially) renewable’ (Acampora 2002: 34). Friendships that encourage struggle to push transformation are profoundly therapeutic for Nietzsche because he considers them a way to redeem suffering through the creation of something new.20 When a drive that was once destructive or cruel is spiritualized through the act of striving in friendship and concentrated into a trajectory of achievement, between friends, it is profoundly changed. Nietzsche praises the generative drive emergent within relationships that involve agon.

The practice of agonistics In ‘Homer’s Contest’ Nietzsche writes about how human impulses towards cruelty and violence in ancient Greeks were sublimated into activities that exercised cultural and individual excellence through agon. Words such as struggle, competition, and striving, as well as ‘mutual co-constitution’21 are used to describe relationships of agon in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The practice of agonistics in ‘Homer’s Contest’ is explained by Nietzsche as providing a controlled release for impulses associated with cruelty and enmity that he later states are disciplined and spiritualized to allow for greater rigour in learning, psychological health, and creative development. In addition to the prevention of savagery and violence through sublimation, Nietzsche explains agon in antiquity as being performed by those who had a strong bond with their community and each other. Nietzsche states that learning was connected to competitive interactions and talent was encouraged through struggle (HC 178). ‘It was not a boundless and indeterminate ambition like most modern ambition: the youth thought of the good of his native city when he ran a race or threw or sang; he wanted to increase its reputation through his own … in this his selfishness was lit, as well as curbed and restricted’ (HC 179). Agon was controlled through the opposition of the other and the discipline required to pursue excellence. Speaking about Nietzsche’s concept of agon, Lawrence Hatab writes that ‘competition can be understood as a shared activity for the sake of fostering high achievement and self-development, and therefore as an intrinsically social activity’ (Hatab 2002: 135). In ‘Homer’s Contest’ Nietzsche writes that contests were required to maintain the Hellenic state. Although contests were driven by envy and ambition, they also prevented unhinged cruelty and vengefulness from becoming dominant (HC 180).

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Later, in The Wanderer and His Shadow and in Daybreak, Nietzsche discusses envy as a motivating factor, as something good that pushes people to meet and attempt to rise above the one that they envy through contest (WS 29, D 38). Friendship which brings in an agonistic ethics can be understood to be enacting a spiritualized cruelty, what Nietzsche considers to be a modernized form of Greek wisdom, in which envy and contest are associated with the good (D 38) and virtue is exhibited instead of Christian sin (D 29).22 As Yunus Tuncel points out, ‘for Nietzsche there is wisdom in cruelty’ when it is disciplined and allowed a just space in which to be expressed (Tuncel 2013a: 74). The kind of struggle that Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics speaks of is taken from what he conceives to be a Homeric model. For Nietzsche, Homeric agon differs from the Socratic dialectic which attempts to extinguish its opponent through humiliation or making the other helpless to respond (Acampora 2002: 30). The Homeric notion of cooperative struggle and mutual co-constitution allows for Nietzsche’s understanding of agon to have a reciprocal and constructive quality.23 Nietzsche and Homer share the notion that the level of victory achieved in competition is directly related to the excellence of the contestants (Acampora 2002: 27). Nietzsche’s agonistic friendship involves a unique kind of relatedness in which friends develop their sense of self and individual excellences through opposition to one another. For Nietzsche, agonistic relationships are formative of identities since people come to define themselves through the acknowledgement of their differences in opposition. The other spurs one on to greater performance and gives one the opportunity to examine one’s selves through respectful competition. For Nietzsche, ‘Every advance in life is an overcoming of some obstacle or counterforce’ (Hatab 2002: 134) even friendship. Since overcoming necessarily involves opposition, struggle, and conflict, Nietzsche deems that those friendships which share in such experiences are higher and have greater merit. Friends of agon ultimately seek out their own growth, but their potential to overcome is also connected to their friend’s level of excellence. Attainment of the shared goal is a process that involves competitive reciprocity and is best experienced by wellmatched equals who find each other admirable. There are a number of concerns with this kind of friendship that I would like to briefly address. Namely if agonistic friendship depends on a shared goal, what happens when that goal is met? If it is primarily the goal that holds friends together, what chance to do they have of being loved for who they are? Lastly, what place do enjoyment, rest, and intimacy have in agonistic friendship?

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In Nietzschean friendship when friends come together because of a longing for a shared goal, and that which holds them together changes or is satisfied, it seems likely they will part ways (see GS 279). However, since the goal of Nietzsche’s friends of agon is ‘an ideal above them’, which makes it beyond their reach, it seems unlikely this goal will be achieved. The process of striving, which can appear as merely utility-based since it is goal-oriented, becomes more of a virtuous activity because the end of the process is extremely difficult to attain. Nietzsche suggests that the friendship is likely to end not because the goal is met, but rather because one friend cannot sustain the efforts required to continue to attempt to reach the goal. In exceptional circumstances, it is also possible that the goal changes or is re-invented during the process of striving. Although agonistic friends do not love the other for who they are in terms of some fixed nature, they do appreciate the other for their admirable qualities. One might say that this friendship is based upon the objectification of excellences rather than an appreciation of all the person’s characteristics. However, since Nietzsche does not think it is possible to access the other in some complete state, this is not a problem for him. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that we can never have a complete experience of another person no matter how close they are to us (HAH 32) and later he points to the human tendency to fictionalize others (BGE 138). Not only do we invent and project images onto others, we forget that we do this (BGE 138). The drive towards assimilation, to make the other into a possession of our own, or to make them the same as (or similar to) what is average and familiar limits the knowledge one can have of another.24 According to Nietzsche, each person faces a complex psychological challenge in their attempt to understand the other. What can be achieved in friendship is an appreciation of the friend’s differences and how their qualities communicate with and shape one’s own qualities.25 The love experienced between agonistic friends is reliant on the dynamic of the friends in question. Friends are appreciated for who they appear to be. This is tied to the qualities they represent and how these characteristics interact with the other person through their shared actions. Since the appreciation for the other cannot be isolated from this interactive relationship, it is more precise to say that it is the relationship that the two people love, a kind of third shared way of being that becomes through the togetherness of the friends. Those in agonistic friendships are loved for the interactions by which they come to be

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constituted by the other and how these experiences perpetuate their movement towards the shared goal. As Acampora notes, Nietzsche’s emphasis is broadly on value-creation instead of the glory-gaining of Homer (Acampora 2002: 26), but the importance of learning and sublimating destructive drives through agon is also very important for Nietzsche and necessary for self-development so that one can become a value-creator. Intimacy may play a greater role in agonistic friendship than this account suggests. The kind of intimacy however is not of the warm and soft kind. Relationships which involve the questioning of one’s beliefs, allow for the sublimation of drives, and encourage creativity have great psychological proximity. They encourage the qualities of the free spirit already outlined namely honesty (BGE 227), the relinquishment of certitude (GS 347), the destruction of habituated beliefs (HAH 225), and the pursuit of one’s ‘own source of experience’ (HAH 292). Those friends who engage each other in conflict and critique force a process of questioning and examination that allows them to gain a greater understanding of what they are and hope to become. This is mediated by the fact that competitive interactions also encourage a kind of guardedness which makes it difficult for friends to share their vulnerabilities with one another. The kinds of intimacy and play that agonistic friendships allow for are circumscribed by the push and pull of striving which can be therapeutic and transformative but are not typically thought of as pleasurable. The reason why this is not a problem for Nietzsche is because he has other concepts of friendship that are appropriate for a greater number of people and do not involve the practice of agonistics, but instead focus on joy and giving or receiving. The joyful friendship, for example, shares similarities with Aristotle’s pleasure friends in Nicomachean Ethics and Kant’s friends of taste in his Lectures on Ethics and is close to many of the friendships that are culturally predominant today. Nietzsche recognizes that friendships are part of a healthy life and also that more relaxed relationships of familiarity and comfort have a healing effect, especially for those tired from conflict, contemplation, and solitude.26 Relaxation and joy are experiences common to many kinds of interpersonal relationships, part of everyday experiences. Nietzsche, however, is most interested in agonistic friendship. He believes that friendships that support growth through conflict are more deeply affirmative of what one is and wants to become because they have the greatest potential for provoking selfovercoming and creativity.

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Friendship, Redlichkeit, and the Overhuman Nietzsche states that what is admirable in a human being is that they are ‘a bridge and not a goal’ (ZP 4). He is emphatic about the need for friends to inspire each other into overcoming, to ‘a yearning for the Overhuman’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Kaufmann states that Nietzsche’s idea of friendship reaches its maturity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when it becomes a longing for the Overhuman or ‘a mean towards the self-perfection of two human beings’ (Kaufmann 1974: 366). But is Nietzsche really seeking ‘self-perfection’? Zarathustra’s statement that ‘the human is a bridge’ (ZIII ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 3) suggests that Nietzsche is seeking something other than the perfection of the human. Instead, he is looking for ‘a beginning anew, a play’ (ZI P1) and this play arises out of the application of Redlichkeit to one’s beliefs and a struggle against them which also requires negation. Nietzsche wants to destroy the last human which concerns, as Heidegger points out, ‘the Platonic, Christian-moral interpretation of the world’ (Heidegger 1987: 217), but this destruction goes further. In the interest of multiplicities and becomings, Nietzsche’s goal is to move through the last human and into, as Deleuze writes, ‘the man who wants to perish’ (Deleuze 1983: 175), who takes destruction to its limit so that it becomes affirmative and creates something new, über, or over what has been before. Nietzsche makes very strong connections between friendship and the Overhuman, especially when he distinguishes friendship from neighbourly love relationships and attempts to explain what is most valuable within friendship. He writes: ‘Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. May the friend be to you a festival of the earth and a premonition of the Overhuman’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’). Following these statements in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is important to examine the links that Nietzsche makes between friendship, Redlichkeit, and becoming Overhuman. In The Gay Science there are many instances in which Nietzsche highlights the importance of being a knowledge-seeker or a warrior type that seeks out new ideas (See ‘Preparatory Human Beings’ of GS 283). These praiseworthy types of people are not lost in Thus Spoke Zarathustra either: Nietzsche writes of both saints of understanding (Heilige der Erkenntniss) and warriors (Kriegsmänner) of understanding and suggests that these two types of people are vital for the change that he conceived of as necessary to occur (ZI ‘On War and Warrior-Peoples’).27 In addition, he suggests that competitive relationships, even relationships of intellectual warfare are instructive, and that for some people simply fighting for

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Erkenntnis is a sufficient and worthy path. However, the pursuit of Erkenntnis, translated as understanding, or knowledge, or awareness, is very different from the standardized practices of truth that Nietzsche undermines throughout his oeuvre. In The Gay Science (335) ‘Long live physics!’ Nietzsche discusses how to engage in productive self-questioning. Through the intellectual conscience one moves into a deconstructive mode that involves the ‘purification of our opinions and valuations’. What follows this ‘purification’ is a new creation of human values for this world and this life, not the after-life. When Nietzsche proclaims ‘Hoch die Physik!’ he is proposing the value of physics, as this-worldly, propelled by human creation, over the other-worldly realm of metaphysics. Nietzsche writes that human beings must ‘give themselves laws … create themselves’ (GS 335). The intellectual conscience is a tool from which Nietzsche states people can discover what is ‘lawful and necessary in the world’. The quality that inspires one to pursue this specific orientation is Redlichkeit: ‘And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics – our Redlichkeit!’ (GS 335) Redlichkeit, translated as honesty in the Kaufmann edition of The Gay Science, but also meaning probity, is a term that Nietzsche returns to in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, calling it the youngest virtue and linking it to ‘the one who understands’ who is opposed to those who are sick and ‘long for God’ (ZI ‘On Believers in a World Behind’). Nietzsche connects Redlichkeit to this world on earth and the body and to becoming what one is.28 In order to become what one is, one must first learn how to measure the contents and drives of one’s beliefs. Goal-oriented friendships that reject the romantic escapism of erotic and neighbourly love and embrace Redlichkeit as a shared practice enable passionate knowledge-seeking that is both this-worldly and self-impelled. Why so many people lack Redlichkeit and an intellectual conscience is associated with ‘believers and their need to believe’ (GS 347). Metaphysics, religious faith, scientific positivism: all provide a strong foundation from which to rest upon and deactivate the will (GS 347). Leaning upon such posts, we follow a paradigm and are comforted by a community of fellow believers. Instead of developing a practice of questioning, Nietzsche writes that people have an unconscious and repetitive motivation to seek out that which is familiar and comfortable and to form conclusions based on this (GS 355). There is also the drive within each person to make that which is unknown accessible through creating a ‘truth’ about it: in Zarathustra Nietzsche connects this to the need to make all other beings ‘thinkable’, to define within the scope of one’s particular

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knowledge base and in doing so have a sense of control over the meaning of that thing (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’). In other words, it is easiest to choose a little truth that fits within one’s structures of belief. Nietzsche maintains that the search for knowledge is important, but he concurrently problematizes the tunnel vision inevitable in its pursuit. He points to cultural inheritances, including gender, socio-economic roles, and ethnic backgrounds as formative of our beliefs (GS 335). Even when the desire for certainty is functioning there is a tendency to unknowingly shape it in a specific direction to create a new fiction or faith to give it stability (GS 347) or to conform to accepted and useful humanized ‘truths’ (see GS 112). In Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that ‘the human being first put values into things, in order to preserve itself—it created a meaning for things, a human meaning!’ (ZI ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’). For Nietzsche, belief is shaped by a self-preserving need, one that has both cultural and biological components, as well as a drive to fulfil the requirements of moral beliefs.29 As such, Nietzsche indicates that ‘the truth’ should consistently be approached with a degree of scepticism and distance and even laughter at its conditionality. Truth is anything but indifferent (GS 351). Nietzsche explains that useful beliefs are most often supported beliefs which may in fact be errors but over time have gained credence due to their usefulness; often that which demonstrates greater honesty as a truth has less visibility and is overshadowed by such useful beliefs (e.g. GS 110 the belief in ‘enduring things’). ‘Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth, but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life’ (GS 110). One who attempts to develop the intellectual conscience is not merely limited by the capacity to genuinely attempt selfquestioning: the questions one asks will themselves be influenced by shared, normalized errors taken as truths. According to Nietzsche, the desire for certainty is overshadowed by the drive for survival and its many mutations regardless of their validity; that which supports life often prevails over that which supports Redlichkeit, especially when honesty threatens life. The truths which are supported and come to be part of the accepted knowledge base are ones which have been reconciled with life as life preserving (GS 110). In Zarathustra, the ‘famous wise men’ are mocked for knowingly pandering to normalized errors, to the so-called truths of the people, and guaranteeing their survival this way. Zarathustra declares that for one to sincerely become truthful, one must reject the people’s God and their truths,

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go into solitude, and attempt to strip oneself of all the prevalent discourses that shape one’s sources of knowledge (ZII ‘On the Famous Wise Men’). Nietzsche’s attack on the metaphysics of truth and his observation that the search for knowledge is inevitably hampered by many challenges both social and individual is well known and pervasive throughout his oeuvre. What makes it interesting in the context of a discussion of friendship and its goal is whether Nietzsche conceives of friendship as having the potential to interrupt this regular ignorance and thus become a partial remedy to the limitations that one person faces during the solitary path of knowledge-seeking. Considering that in Zarathustra becoming truthful is connected to rejecting ‘the people’, ‘the rabble’ and ‘the marketplace’, it is significant to ask how friendship differs. The question becomes: Can the intellectual conscience when exercised within the context of agonistic friendship have a better chance at achieving greater honesty and probity than in solitude? Before answering this question, I would like to briefly address one other challenge that the intellectual conscience and Redlichkeit appear to face in terms of rigour, namely the psychological need for art. In The Gay Science Nietzsche states that people incorporate an aesthetic enjoyment into life and create stories in order to be able to emotionally sustain the tragic nature of existence. Art allows for the glorification of what has been appraised (GS 85), and it also has the capacity to make that which is deeply problematic, such as the erroneous nature of much of our knowledge, endurable. Although this may appear to be an impingement upon the accumulation of knowledge, Nietzsche states that it is necessary for survival. The alternative, raw honesty, is too unbearable and ‘would lead to nausea and suicide. … We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge’ (GS 107). This need for artistry does not merely provide escape: art and religion also grant insight into the self through distance and a magnifying glass (GS 78). For example, Nietzsche explains that in watching theatre one may be drawn into selfobservation of one’s most despicable characteristics through connection with the characters of the play (GS 78). Thus, art, which can seem to limit the pursuit of knowledge as an expression of the drive for survival, can act as a spontaneous instigator of reflection into areas of one’s knowledge that may not usually be so available. When watching tragedy, for example, the spectator of antiquity did not rationalize the experience; instead they allowed themself to occupy what Tracy Strong calls an ‘ecstatic doubleness’ (Strong 2010: 54) because they became the character of the drama while concurrently remaining the spectator. This involves

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a mirroring experience in which openness and self-reflection are generated more spontaneously, and even with greater profundity, than the pointed approach that seeks final definitions of things. ‘What the plays made possible as political education was not a benign pluralism but an agonism that sought only a word and never a final word’ (Strong 2010: 56). For Nietzsche, friendship can have a similar function in that it allows for openings to occur in one’s knowledge base, reflective openings that would not be so easy to come to in solitude. What can the friend provide that one cannot find alone during an attempt to refine the intellectual conscience? Does the practice of solitude present limitations to knowledge-seeking that can be reconciled in friendship? How does friendship differ for Nietzsche from those communal spaces that he is so critical of, such as the marketplace? To answer these questions, it is helpful to examine why solitude is recommended in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As we have already seen, Nietzsche discusses how the concept of truth that one holds is vulnerable to one’s cultural environment and those people of whom one spends time. To become reflective, one must remove oneself from the distracting, repressive, and manipulative influences of the external world and go into solitude. Nietzsche suggests that it is too difficult to try to pick out which beliefs one likes and dislikes if, for example, one is surrounded by the fulminations of politicians and journalists (ZI ‘On the Flies of the Market Place’). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche also expresses concern about how education and societal values encourage one to become an object of usefulness for society instead of developing an individual path (GS 21, 296). Going into solitude provides one with the opportunity to become more self-oriented, to learn what is one’s own taste (ZIII ‘On the Spirit of Heaviness’ 2) and in doing so, also unlearn obeying (ZII ‘The Stillest Hour’). One who seeks out understanding, Zarathustra states, must also experience isolation and a deep self-questioning that breaks through the ideology that has been self-sustaining in the past. Nietzsche employs the metaphor of a desert to explain the solitary experience of ideological cleansing. Truthful – thus I call the one who goes into Godless deserts and has broken his reverential heart. In the yellow sands and burned by the sun he will squint thirstily at the islands rich in springs, where living beings repose beneath dark trees. But his thirst does not persuade him to become like those comfortable creatures: for where there are oases, there are also images of idols. (ZI ‘On the Famous Wise Men’)

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Solitude is an important therapeutic tool for the knowledge-seeker, one which cannot be overlooked. However, Nietzsche also acknowledges that solitude presents its own dangers which he suggests friendship can mediate. No matter how instructive solitude is, when it is prolonged a loss of human and social understanding is inevitable. In addition to the potential to become lost in one’s inner world and psychologically ill from spending too much time alone (ZI ‘On the Friend’), Nietzsche states that one’s self is very difficult to discover (ZIII ‘On the Spirit of Heaviness’ 2). In solitude, one is likely to repeat the same stories and habits with which one came into solitude (ZIV ‘On the Superior Human’ 13). A friend is a possible remedy to this predicament. If one can sustain shared critical engagement, as we have seen, the friend can show one previously hidden parts of oneself through intellectual confrontation, but also by taking a subtle route (HAH 491). Nietzsche states that ‘higher human beings desire and provoke contradiction in order to receive some hint about their own injustices of which they are yet unaware’ (GS 297). Such people become involved in more argumentative relationships because they want to learn and grow, knowing that relationships that involve an element of enmity present the opportunity for greater knowledge discovery. Even Zarathustra comes out of the mountains to seek friendship because his solitude is not enough for him. Solitude is important for coming to understand one’s own truths, but these truths gain value only once they are shared and tested out by others. In addition to his need to bestow and share his ideas with others, Zarathustra states that he requires friends with whom to cultivate his wisdom (ZII ‘The Child with the Mirror’), companions who are more than believers of his teachings. He is looking for interlocutors with whom to engage so that he can gain greater honesty and probity in the development of his intellectual conscience and discover which truths he has yet to overcome. Nietzsche’s approach to thinking is both agonistic and empathetic.30 He views friendship as a vehicle for developing and multiplying perspectives so that one can have a more intensively developed knowledge base. João Constâncio explains Nietzsche’s knowledge-seeking method as engaging an ‘agonal empathy’ which makes one ‘more personal and more partial’ (Constâncio 2012: 136–7). Contrary to the standard notion that becoming more personal and partial makes one less objective, Nietzsche believes that the accumulation and analysis of a great number of perspectives deepens one’s knowledge.31 By engaging the intellectual conscience in the accumulation of variant perspectives, and questioning the

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drives behind them, one can attempt to ascertain which perspectives are more precise. Friends who empathetically occupy their oppositional viewpoints and bring an agonistic standard of measure to these viewpoints through reflective questioning develop better descriptions of things (GS 112) and, in doing so, purify their opinions (GS 335). Instead of deceiving oneself into believing that this involves indifference, strict correspondence, or metaphysical insight, Redlichkeit assists one in understanding that each reflective questioning has a selective drive behind it and chooses to make observations based on personal relevance. The truth as a finality is not ascertained; instead the ongoing agonistic engagement of perspectives is refined through social engagement with the other. What a passionate knowledgeseeker can do, Nietzsche suggests, is build up enough wisdom, as Zarathustra attempts to do, so that one can become ‘the creating friend’ who gives back to one’s friends. This creating friend not only helps one in the pursuit of knowledge but will also and more ideally be ‘a festival of the earth and a premonition of the Overhuman’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’). Nietzsche thinks friendship has a significant position to fill in the coming of the Overhuman. But why does Nietzsche think we need the Overhuman? Who or what is the Overhuman? How can friendship provide a foundation for it? There are several reasons why Nietzsche believes that we require the ideal of the Overhuman. Primarily, he thinks it is necessary for human beings to have an alternative to a monotheistic God, specifically a figure that the human imagination can grasp that is both closer to the human being and open to individual interpretation. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche discusses the advantages of polytheism over monotheism and points to the prevalence of non-normative diversity in polytheistic models that support free-spiritedness. ‘The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen (Uebermenschen) of all kinds … was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual’ (GS 143). The Overhuman who is described ambiguously by Nietzsche as ‘the sense of the earth’ as opposed to the other-worldly is meant to replace the shadow of the Christian God (GS 108) as a spiritual symbol that encourages unique thought and creativity in the immanent frame. The Overhuman celebrates what is exceptional in the human being. Although the figure of the Overhuman is constructed out of the shadow of God, Nietzsche’s aim is to eclipse the metaphysical faith of Christianity with a post-metaphysical approach to life, a spiritualized physics that affirms human capacities without promoting conformity.

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Due to the tragic nature of life and the psychological reliance that people have on faith, Nietzsche thinks a spiritual symbol is needed to avoid nihilism and the last human mentality. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘Once one said “God” when one looked upon distance seas; but now I have taught you to say: Overhuman’ (ZII ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’). People still require hope, especially those seeking knowledge who have faced the brutality of human mortality and the ephemeral nature of truth. The Overhuman is hope taken in a new form, a hope that rejects the metaphysical faith that truth is divine (GS 344) by creating a figure that is humanly thinkable and attainable and can only come into existence through the human (ZII ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’) and through human relationships. Described by Zarathustra as a sea in which one can submerge great despising, but also described as lightning and madness (ZI P3), the Overhuman as a Dionysian figure of impermanence is meant to provide redemption from suffering through the linked and repetitive movements of destruction and creation in the human world (ZII ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’). This means continued knowledge-seeking and self-questioning: the refinement of the intellectual conscience so that one can create one’s own truths and values (and perhaps later overturn them to start the process again). When friends strive to grow and change with and against each other in their very human worlds, the symbol of the Overhuman provides a goal to push towards, acting as a catalyst that reveals to the friends their übermenschlich traits and potentialities. Becoming übermenschlich involves a state of being called ‘post-metaphysical’ (Ansell-Pearson 2005: 1). Learning how to become post-metaphysical requires a heightened awareness of the influences that have come to affect the structures of knowledge that are dominant. This occurs through the development of the intellectual conscience in solitude or in relationships that support a way of life that does not seek some exterior justification in religion. It is not that one develops some absolute kind of knowledge or eternal truth, but that, as already indicated, our descriptions will become more self-aware and nuanced. Habits must be re-programmed, ways of life and the structure of values changed. The after of this process of overcoming is the Overhuman who ‘needs steps and opposition among steps and climbers! To climb is what life wills, and in climbing to overcome itself ’ (ZII ‘On the Tarantulas’). Instead of seeking justification or reward for this pursuit in something divine like God or absolute truth, the Overhuman is given as a symbol by Nietzsche that lacks definitive substance but is nevertheless an instrument of provocation to inspire overcoming. Jill Marsden makes an important point when, citing

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Nietzsche directly from Ecce Homo, she states that the Overhuman is not an ideal type to be viewed through Darwinism and ‘hero worship’ (Marsden 2005: 102).32 Yet, this nebulous thing or state of being can be approximated and discussed conceptually without seeking a precise representation for it. We can do more than feel or sense it.33 The Overhuman is not one person or a God, nor is it meant to be idolized; it is that imagined, very possible self that rigorously pursues open-ended truth in conjunction with the intellectual conscience and, through an accumulation of knowledge, learns how to overcome its burdens and become a creating human being, a transvaluator. Part of becoming Overhuman (and taking part in the activity of overcoming) involves moving beyond the regular explication of one’s assumptions and attempting to demystify old values and beliefs. This no-saying practice of Nietzschean truthfulness involves Redlichkeit and has a productive quality, for in bringing in a process of questioning to one’s knowledge base, one already begins to form new ideas. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s notion of truth cannot be disconnected from production and artistry: truth is conceived as being inevitability and necessarily bound up with a creative drive. Nietzsche is attempting to give us greater awareness of the connection between truth and creativity; he is even celebrating it so that this knowledge can bring us greater honesty. As Babette Babich has pointed out, ‘A gay science will need to know itself as art’ (Babich 2006: 100). Friends who come together to strive for truthfulness as probity are already taking one step towards becoming Overhuman. Those who challenge and critique the friend to develop the intellectual conscience help to confront their inherited beliefs. Before one can become a creative leader, Nietzsche states that one must learn to question those characteristics others have valued most and decide whether they are also to one’s own taste. Since self-observation is extremely difficult to accomplish, the intellectual sparring of friends can help one’s habits, beliefs, and values become more visible. The practice of Redlichkeit in passionate, knowledge-seeking friendship brings attention to the value of the social world and the potential of human relationships to facilitate change. For Nietzsche, friendship is closely connected to overcoming and to becoming Overhuman. But, this does not mean that the value of friendship is overridden by the Overhuman; friendship’s association with the Overhuman does not promote extreme individualism.34 Instead, making the goal of friendship the Overhuman gives an immanent spiritual meaning to human relationships, one that Nietzsche considers vital for the thriving of the human spirit. Nietzsche’s

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conception of friendship is connected to a broader understanding of human flourishing that emphasizes the passionate and measured pursuit of knowledge in the interest of overcoming and creative re-evaluation. The Overhuman is a symbol that provides structure for friendship, encouraging affirmative struggle to foster virtues that accelerate the human into a new becoming.

What threatens friendship? Nietzsche contends that the increasing pace of modern life and the emphasis on work over contemplation and leisure has had an adverse effect on interpersonal relationships, making higher friendships more difficult to achieve. ‘One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something”. “Rather do anything than nothing”: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste’ (GS 329). Also, there are many personal characteristics, life choices, and unexpected circumstances that Nietzsche notes can upset friendship. Emotional difficulties and power inequalities have a particularly deleterious effect on friendship. Nietzsche writes that great change of any kind can make friendship unsustainable (AOM 242). One who takes frequented routes makes friends more easily (BGE 268) and does not face the same questions or frustrations from their friends. Another threat to friendship that Nietzsche points to is a lack of self-love or self-satisfaction. One who does not like themselves cannot fully share in their friend’s joys because they always feel the tension of their personal lack. ‘We have cause to fear him who hates himself, for we shall be the victims of his wrath and his revenge. Let us therefore see if we cannot seduce him into loving himself!’ (D 517) In The Gay Science (290), Nietzsche writes that one’s inner discontent extends outward in one’s expression and interactions so that those closest feel the other’s displeasure. Additionally, insecurity can motivate a drive towards obsessive self-control which makes one ‘insufferable for others’ (GS 305); this inner lack may express itself in pettiness towards others (ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’); they may have a greedy need to take from others while being incapable of satisfaction, enacting what Nietzsche calls ‘a sick selfishness’ or a ‘thieving greed’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). Without a sense of personal worth, it is unlikely that one will perceive themself as having something to offer to others. Nietzsche believes that those who think

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they have nothing to offer have a difficult time accepting kindness from others and become resentful when it is received (ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’). Alternately, one who has a low sense of self-appreciation may have something to give to others, but then seek out payment for it.35 This desperate need for recompense makes it difficult for their friends to enjoy any gift they offer. According to Nietzsche, self-confidence and the ability to give to the friend (without keeping a tally of it) are important characteristics to have because they demonstrate strength and support the higher pursuit of shared self-cultivation within friendship. For Nietzsche, the greatest threat to friendship is pity because it causes emotional strife through an upset of power dynamics. Pity (Mitleid) or sufferingwith is a likely reaction to the suffering of another person, but Nietzsche considers it to be an inevitable strain on the friendship by frustrating the one who is being pitied.36 Nietzsche views pity to be a largely disabling and reductive perspective that fails to adequately acknowledge the situation and feelings of the suffering friend. There is a condescension involved in the expression of pity (‘poor you’) that disempowers the friend, promotes an atmosphere of hopelessness, and a nihilistic attitude towards life of the weak kind. The individual experience of suffering cannot be grasped by another person, yet sometimes the one who pities presumes that they can and thus does so superficially. When they make the move to help their friend, they do so with an idea in mind that is so resultsdriven in its impatience that it overlooks the friend’s actual struggle. Rather than being motivated by care for the friend, Nietzsche states that pity is moved by a fear that wants to abolish suffering (BGE 225). At the core of pity is a perspective on life that is dominated by the need to avoid all pain and discomfort, which are inevitably reminders of one’s mortality. Nietzsche thinks that people are too anxious about their mortality (D 174). Behind the pity that one experiences for the friend is an anxiety about death. One wants their friend to feel better, but they want their friend to feel better because their friend’s suffering is disturbing. The suffering of one’s friend reminds oneself of their potential illness and death and as such, the move to want the friend to feel better is not really in care for the friend but is an expression of one’s fear of their own mortality according to Nietzsche. This dismissive gesture lacks sympathy, or a genuine attempt to feel-with (Mitgefühl) the friend and respect their struggle.37 Nietzsche explains that pity can also become an act of equalization in which the once envied friend whose strength has been diminished by their suffering is

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now perceived as less powerful through the gaze of pity.38 He identifies a pleasure in the pitier’s voyeurism, one which attempts to ‘sooth the narcissistic wound’ (Ure 2006: 70). Nietzsche states that the suffering of someone once admired brings them closer because one now has an opportunity to offer something to them (D 138) and this makes one feel more powerful. This kind of pity involves a hunger for possession, an exploitation that uses the friend’s difficulties as an opportunity for personal gain.39 ‘Be it pitying on the part of a God, or of human beings: pitying goes against modesty. And not wanting to help can be more noble than the virtue that jumps in’ (ZIV ‘The Ugliest Man’). With its condescension, presumptuousness, and underlying selfishness, Nietzsche contends that pity is likely to make the pitied one vengeful, to make them want to take revenge on their pitying friend.40 If one wants to help their friend Nietzsche states that one must understand their friend’s distress ‘because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the manner in which you help yourself ’ (GS 338). To offer help to a friend, there must be a shared commitment and investment in what is being suffered so that the pride disturbing strife of pity cannot interfere. In the middle works, Nietzsche suggest that the development of an Epicurean attitude towards life can counteract the tendency to pity that he thinks people of modernity share. In The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche refers to Epicurean ‘consolation’ to help one accept the ways things are (WS 7) and in Daybreak he recommends an alternative to approaching the friend with pity. Nietzsche asks whether it is more useful to help another person by ‘immediately leaping to his side’ which can itself become an overpowering act in which one attempts to exert their own will upon the other. Perhaps it might be more helpful to create ‘something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospital gate’ (D 174). Following Epicurus, Nietzsche suggest that we should share our friends’ suffering not with laments but with thoughtful concern (Inwood and Gerson 1994: 39).

Knowing when to leave a friendship Nietzsche suggests that knowing when and how to leave a friendship involves grace, modesty, sympathy, and the right amount of selfishness. Although it is horrible to be loved at the expense of another (D 488), Nietzsche does not state that this is a sufficient reason in itself to end a friendship. However, if a friendship threatens

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one’s ‘independence of the soul’ (Unabhängigkeit der Seele) then the friendship should be sacrificed in the interest of the self (GS 98). During a discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the character of Brutus, Nietzsche states that one should be able to end a friendship that encroaches upon one’s personal freedom. There is no person, even the closest friend or ‘the most glorious human being’ who can request your freedom in return for their friendship (GS 98). Nietzsche’s writings on lower forms of friendship explain how some relationships intrude upon personal freedom and discourage self-growth. The connections with others that are based on escapism, exploitation, cowardice, and greed are ones that are ripe to be abandoned because they perpetuate the most underdeveloped aspects of the self. The growth that one can have from them is usually retrospective. In order to strengthen the intellectual conscience through friendship it is important to have relationships of joy, agon, and bestowing. It may also be the case, as it is for Zarathustra, that one chooses to leave the friend because it is obvious that the friendship is preventing the other from learning and transforming. Out of respect for the friend and for oneself, one must be ready to leave the friendship when it reaches its stagnation. The separation of two good friends, however, does not necessarily mean for Nietzsche that the friendship is over. The memories of the friends remain, as well as the esteem they have for one another. Nietzsche explains this sentiment in The Gays Science when he writes the following: We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other – and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. – Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies. (GS 279)

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Conclusion Nietzsche views higher friendship as an opportunity for shared self-cultivation and the coming of the Overhuman. Ansell-Pearson points out that the Overhuman can only become through the human: the two are irretrievably linked (Ansell-Pearson 1997: 15). I would add to this that, aside from a rare few, humans require social interactions and friendships to learn, grow, and change, to be admirable human beings in the strongest sense. Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship puts human relationships to work with a therapeutic aim, requesting those involved to challenge themselves and their friend. This kind of striving friendship is less comfortable and also more intimidating than the relationships of pleasure that we know today. For Nietzsche, friendship does have a role to play in ‘the discipline of suffering’, what he considers to be the source of all the enhancements of human beings (BGE 225) because overcoming necessarily involves struggle, as well as joy and insight (BGE 284). He considers friendship a significant philosophical topic because he believes in the diverse capacities of intimate relationships to effect change. Nietzschean friendship is an expression of what Pierre Hadot describes as the philosophical ‘art of living’ in which philosophy is an ‘exercise’ in which ‘the whole of existence is engaged’ (Hadot 1995: 83). Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics views friendship uniquely as an opportunity for growth, for learning, and for healing through supportive opposition between friends.

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On Becoming What One Is: Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Concept of the Self

Learning changes (verwandelt) us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely ‘preserve’ – as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really ‘deep down’, there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. — Beyond Good and Evil, 231 We, however, want to become those we are – human being who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. — The Gay Science, 335 In the previous chapter I argued that Nietzschean friendship is invested in a therapeutic ethics that aims to help the friends become more of what they are and want to be. This claim presupposes that human identity is malleable for Nietzsche and that the Nietzschean self can be altered through human relationships. However, as the above quotes suggest, Nietzsche writings on self-becoming include doubt about the extent to which one’s beliefs can be transformed. To learn more about how individuals support mutual self-overcoming in friendship, it is important to also have an account of the Nietzschean self, one that considers how identity is formed and how it can be changed through social and individual experiences. In his reflections on identity and self-knowledge, Nietzsche portrays the self as both predetermined and open to transformation. The Nietzschean self has biological components associated with the physical body and social elements that psychologically impress upon the subject structuring their beliefs. Nietzsche’s notion that the self is formed both biologically and socially is complicated by his ontological account of the will to power in which the self is constituted by the

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activity of its drives. An interpretative challenge for one who is reading Nietzsche as a philosopher of self-cultivation becomes, how can a self that is the product of conflicting inner drives that are themselves shaped by a great variety of forces have the reflective agency required for conscious overcoming? In addition to Nietzsche’s foundational claim that life consists of will to power, he writes at length about the need for people to practice self-overcoming and pursue what they are. The move to dismiss any kind of Nietzschean agency as an epiphenomenal expression of the forces of the will to power overlooks a great number of Nietzsche’s writings. The ontological thesis of the Nietzschean self is consistent with his project to offer ‘new versions and refinements of the soulhypothesis’ (BGE 12) with an underlying aim to destabilize the religious belief in an enduring soul. Contrary to some deterministic readings of the Nietzschean self, I argue that Nietzsche’s descriptions of becoming are open-ended and allow for a notion of the subject that is precarious, shaped by the external world, internal forces, and the individual’s intellectual conscience. This reading of the Nietzschean self supports the argument that friendship has an important role to play in the formation and transformation of identity. What may be considered three versions of Nietzsche’s ‘soul-hypothesis’ will be pursued in this chapter: what I call the biological thesis, the social thesis, and the psycho-ontological thesis. The first section pursues the biological thesis by asking what role the body plays in Nietzsche’s conception of identity. I present his claims about the influence of ancestry on character formation and question the extent to which Nietzsche can be considered Lamarckian. This section helps us to understand what Nietzsche believes to be the foundations of human identity. The second section examines the social thesis of the Nietzschean self and asks how cognitive, moral, and emotional parts of the self are formed by social, cultural, and societal influences. I question whether Nietzsche considers familial or cultural influences to be more significant. The structure of consciousness and its functional status is examined in consideration of the claim that Nietzsche’s notion of consciousness is epiphenomenal. In the third section, which pursues Nietzsche’s psycho-ontological thesis, I examine his description of the self as a multiplicity of struggling drives. This section helps to elucidate how Nietzsche considers one to have the capacity for self-cultivation and overcoming. I then go on to explain Nietzsche’s concept of self-cultivation and how creativity through overcoming is meant to replace the religious-metaphysical soul-body dichotomy. In the last section, a textual study of self-overcoming helps to explain the meaning of this concept which is so crucial for understanding Nietzsche’s ethics of friendship.

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The self is the body In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘Body am I through and through, and nothing besides’ (ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’). He emphasizes the importance of the body as the grounds for human identity. Nietzsche reiterates the point that there is no enduring soul in Beyond Good and Evil (12) when he rejects ‘soul atomism’ stating that ‘the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!’ For Nietzsche, the human being is a product of all constitutive physical parts and psychological drives and suffers from the mortality connected to organic life. Thus, there is no escape from the lived-in world and the separation of the body and ‘the soul’ is a superstitious fiction. Nietzsche’s conception of the self as a vulnerable, very mortal body refuses the dualisms of Descartes, Plato, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. He considers this belief hard to bear because it is a tragic truth that exposes us to the terrors of living a finite existence. However, Nietzsche also considers it to be a powerful source of information, one that may allow for the bearer of it to live with greater intensity in the immanent world. For, if the self is only the body, this means that each person has the capacity to affect the self through the body, which is a highly vulnerable and modifiable thing. According to Nietzsche, the self is susceptible to the effects of inheritance, diet, exercise, and the environment, dramatically open to other people and the world. Nietzsche may believe, as Beyond Good and Evil (231) suggests, that there are some unyielding components of human character that are exceptionally difficult to modify through learning whether it be through education or by agonistic friendship. But where does he believe these unyielding qualities come from? There are several aphorisms from the middle to late works that suggest Nietzsche believes human characteristics to be inherited from one’s parents and ancestors. Although Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of cultural transmission in character formation, he also appears to make a strong claim for hereditary traits beyond physical characteristics like hair colour. If one takes Nietzsche’s statement literally that the self is the body and nothing else besides (ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’), the question arises as to whether identity is largely biologically obtained through one’s ancestry. In Beyond Good and Evil (264), for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘It is simply not possible that a human being should not have the qualities (Eigenschaften) and preferences (Vorlieben) of his parents and ancestors in his body (Leib), whatever appearances may suggest to

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the contrary. This is the problem of race’ (der Rasse). This statement is open to the interpretation that Nietzsche considers individual emotional dispositions, preferences, and physiological skills to be, at least partially, obtained through one’s bloodline. There is additional evidence in Nietzsche’s writings to believe that he also thought life experiences could alter one’s physical attributes and that these alterations could be passed on to the next generation. Does this mean that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian?1 Deleuze notes that Nietzsche admired Lamarck because he wrote about ‘a truly active plastic force’ (Deleuze 1983: 42). Nowhere in his published texts does Nietzsche explicitly state that he subscribes to Lamarck’s notion that characteristics acquired during one’s lifetime can be passed onto children. However, in his notebooks he writes briefly about how important Lamarck and Hegel were for him, stating that Darwin was an after-effect of their transformative thinking.2 Richard Schacht argues that Nietzsche was influenced by Lamarck’s claim that acquired traits could be inherited from one’s parents (Schacht 2013: 266). John Richardson considers Nietzsche to be Lamarckian (Richardson 1996: 48) and Maudemarie Clark reluctantly notes that it is ‘fast becoming the accepted position in Nietzsche scholarship’ (Clark 2013: 282) (although it is a position that has been entertained for some time). As such, it is important to consider those writings of Nietzsche’s that make a strong case for Nietzsche as a believer in inherited traits through ancestry and ask if Nietzsche has some Lamarckian conceptions of identity (characteristics acquired during one’s lifetime can be passed onto children). This is especially relevant for a study on Nietzschean friendship which posits that one’s environments, work, and relationships can impact the individual and have transformative effects. In Daybreak, when Nietzsche is discussing how pleasure in refined cruelty represents itself as a drive to distinction and has been transformed into a virtue over time he writes: For when the habit of some distinguishing action is inherited (vererbt), the thought that lies behind it is not inherited with it (thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings): and provided it is not again reproduced by education, even the second generation fails to experience any pleasure in cruelty in connection with it, but only pleasure in the habit as such. This pleasure, however, is the first stage of the ‘good’. (D 30)

The aphorism that follows this one claims that humans were once animals but remain resistant to admitting to this descent. Nietzsche calls this resistance a prejudice (D 31). In Daybreak (30) Nietzsche states that the notion of distinction

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‘in its first generation’ was a pleasure in cruelty. It has been forgotten as such because the drive to distinction is now perceived as a good and it is morally uncomfortable to equate its origins with something otherwise. Additionally, Nietzsche states that one reason why the foundations of the drive to distinction have been forgotten is because only feelings, such as pleasure in the habits connected to the experience of cruelty that has been refined over time, are passed down and not thoughts, such as the recognition that the feeling in question is a pleasure in cruelty. It seems that Nietzsche has a few notions of inheritance that are operative here. Although Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of modelling and cultural transmission in psychological formation, he also contends that one’s inherited physiology plays a significant role in psychological formation. In this section, Nietzsche is claiming that there are some feelings foundational to human nature that are culturally modified through habituated and customary practices and expressed in different forms depending upon what is morally permissible. The pleasure in cruelty is one of those foundational feelings for Nietzsche that he connects to a feeling of and urge for power, and to his notion of the will to power in later texts, as well as to the will to life. It is somehow part of the shared stuff that makes one human at an ontological level and is contained in the instincts of the body. In terms of how it is expressed, this is correlated to culture and modelled by the individual, habituated and modified through education and life experiences including one’s friendships. It is passed down through the generations in family habits and in societal practices. Nietzsche is stating here that the fundamental drive to cruelty that is part of being human (and is thus a universal human attribute for him) can come to be represented as something else and associated with different kinds of emotions depending upon the values of the time. The ways in which this drive is experienced as a feeling is hereditary but the ways in which it is explained through thought is something which is determined by cultural and societal norms and practices. This supports the supposition that drives experienced as inherited feelings can be given new definitions and come to be understood differently depending upon life experience. In a later aphorism from the same book, Nietzsche makes a different observation which lends itself more to a Lamarckian reading. In Daybreak (540), Nietzsche discusses the concept of learning through the relationship of Michelangelo and Raphael. ‘Michelangelo saw in Raphael study, in himself nature: there learning, here talent (Begabung). … For what is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation,

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whether at the stage of our fathers or an even earlier stage!’ (D 540) Here, Nietzsche can be read as a supporter of acquired trait transmission. He continues, ‘Raphael, like Goethe, was without pride or envy and that is why both were great learners and not merely exploiters of those veins of ore (Erzgänge) washed clean from the siftings of the history of their forefathers’. The word ‘Begabung’ means a natural ability or talent. Further, Nietzsche uses the metaphor of exploiting ore to elucidate this notion. The concept of mining one’s natural abilities is pointing to being able to access one’s inherited abilities. As such, it is likely in this section that Nietzsche is stating that a predisposition to certain skills is inheritable. A person whose ancestor(s) had artistic abilities and the physiology adapted to those abilities can inherit the physiological mechanisms that allow for those abilities to be more quickly fulfilled. In this section, Nietzsche also suggests that one who works very hard to learn during their lifetime to acquire a new ability, such as painting, will be able to pass down those skills to their children through both teaching and the physiological traits associated with painting that were acquired during one’s lifetime. This does indeed demonstrate a Lamarckian perspective. It can also be seen to suggest that the kind of relationships that one has with friends, family, and lovers during one’s lifetime can allow one to express their acquired traits or ignore them, and perhaps even contribute to the development of new traits that can be passed down to future generations. Beyond Good and Evil is one of the texts more commonly cited for evidence of Nietzsche’s Lamarckism: Schacht, Richardson, and Kaufmann draw on selections from it. In Beyond Good and Evil (200), which Richardson points to as evidence for Nietzsche’s notion that one’s drives are inherited through the kinds of lives their parents lived (Richardson 1996: 48), Nietzsche argues that the greater mixing of races is resulting in new kinds of human beings with a greater complexity of inner drives. Beyond Good and Evil (200) expresses Nietzsche’s notion that there is some direct correlation between one’s ancestral background, one’s inner drives, and one’s emotional life which has an impact on character. Nietzsche writes: ‘Human beings have in their bodies the heritage (Erbschaft) of multiple origins (Herkunft), that is opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest’ (BGE 200). He states that an increase in the mixing of races is creating human beings with greater strife within. According to Nietzsche, the results of ‘racial mixing’ are two very different types of people: those who seek a way to rest and calm the strife, and those rarer individuals who have ‘inherited and cultivated’3 self-control to such an extent

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that they become admirable artists and leaders. Nietzsche gives a few examples, Alcibiades, Caesar, as well as Emperor Frederick II, and also states ‘perhaps Leonardo da Vinci’ (BGE 200). These historical figures whose parents came from different geographical locations in Europe and Asia, and possibly from different class backgrounds, would have brought to the union different cultural legacies and beliefs. However, this is not all that Nietzsche is stating as he also associates race with something that exceeds culture and pertains to a group of people who are related through heredity and geographical background. He is referring to the heritage of traits through bloodlines and is suggesting that there is a correlation between ancestry and the expression of one’s drives. Although value standards refer to cultivated or learned beliefs, as we already saw in Daybreak (30), drives are often connected to something fundamental for Nietzsche, part of human nature such as the drive to cruelty, or, as in this case, connected to what he calls ‘race’ (die Rasse). However, it is also important to note, as Daniel Conway points out, that Nietzsche connects ‘the cultivation of race’ to a ‘self-perpetuating system of acculturation’ (Conway 2006: 127) and in doing so rejects a notion of race based solely on ancestral bloodline. Instead, Nietzsche is proposing that one’s race is actualized and passed on through the body, one’s language, one’s class, and one’s cultural practices including friendship. Nietzsche’s notion of inheritance in this section can be seen to articulate a biological thesis in which the human is conceived of as a product of their ancestral backgrounds in terms of race; however, this notion of race is not only about bloodline, but also refers to acquired trait transmission, which means that environment and culture are seen to have an important influence on one’s biology and this impact can be passed to one’s children. Schacht and Clark have made cases for and against Nietzsche’s Lamarckism in their two opposing articles that discuss passages from Beyond Good and Evil. Regarding Beyond (262) Clark argues, contrary to Schacht, that when Nietzsche states that ‘a type with few but very strong traits (Zügen) … is fixed beyond the changing generations’ and thus has ‘staying power’ (Schacht 2013: 270) this does not refer to biologically inherited traits enduring through the generations. In this section, Nietzsche employs the notion of breeders (Züchter) to explain the constraints that societies can place on its people to foster certain traits over others. Clark explains that Nietzsche uses the notion of breeding, also translated as cultivation, as an analogy to elucidate how selective cultural practices have generated human types with a strong staying power (Clark 2013: 287). Nietzsche points to cultural practices as evidence, such as marriage customs, education,

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and penal laws, for shaping citizens and developing some characteristics over others. For Nietzsche, unbending cultural laws are very effective in sustaining human types according to Clark (2013: 288). When change happens in such cases it is because of societal shifts in which those reified types are loosened, and a greater multiplicity of human types emerge. In Beyond Good and Evil (264), however, it is much more difficult to view Nietzsche to be claiming that character formation is based upon cultural practices. The impact that ancestral inheritance can have on character is expressed by Nietzsche when he writes, One cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors liked most to do and did most constantly. … It is simply not possible that a human being should not have the qualities (Eigenschaften) and preferences (Vorlieben) of his parents and ancestors in his body (Leib), whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If one knows something about the parents, an inference about the child is permissible … that sort of thing must as surely be transferred to the child as corrupted blood; and with the aid of the best education (der besten Erziehung und Bildung) one will at best deceive with regard to such a heredity (Vererbung).

In this section Nietzsche is stating that the soul (because it is conceived as mortal and part of the body) is not only influenced by family, friendships, and cultural norms, it is also shaped by the inherited drives and the characteristics of the body.4 As in Daybreak (504), Nietzsche is making a case for the belief that the learned and repeated behaviours of one’s parents and ancestors are acquired and can be difficult or even impossible to change. Although it may be uncomfortable to admit that Nietzsche considered there to be a strong link between one’s ancestral inheritances and one’s emotional dispositions and, in some instances, one’s talents, such as artistic aptitude, there is evidence in his writings that suggests this to be his opinion. Nietzsche’s writings on ancestral inheritance cannot be classified as strictly Lamarckian, but he does share some beliefs with the French naturalist, specifically his idea that children can inherit the character traits that parents acquired during their lifetime. Nietzsche make his own claims about inheritance when he conceives of certain drives being fundamental to human nature and argues that racial intermingling necessitates internal strife (leading to higher creative types in some instances). However, what can be seen in the aphorisms which suggest his Lamarckian inclination is that traits obtained genetically from one’s ancestry are not the sole sources of identity for Nietzsche. He also points

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to self-impelled willing, education, friendship, and one’s life experiences to be formative of the self.

The body is a great reason In The Gay Science, Nietzsche discusses the strong effects that one’s physical constitution has on one’s judgements and tastes. For example, while asking how accepted opinions and tastes are modified, Nietzsche takes a very visceral look at the influence of the powerful individual on societal change (GS 39). Nietzsche points to ‘life style, nutrition, or digestion, perhaps a deficit or excess of inorganic salts in their blood and brain; in brief, in their physis’ (GS 39). He states that alteration in one’s aesthetic or moral judgements can be a subtle effect of physical changes. There is further evidence that Nietzsche believes life style and food have a strong influence on one’s psychological state in The Gay Science (134) when he writes that the dietary practices of different cultures have resulted in widespread pessimism. Nietzsche considers diet a factor, affecting all parts of the human being: food not only nourishes or harms the body, it also has a causal link to the kinds of moods and emotions that are experienced (Hutter 2006: 148). For Nietzsche, the body is a vehicle of assimilation that digests all kinds of material; food, cultural information received from society and one’s friends, and environmental conditions are processed and modified into emotions and intellectual judgements.5 It is the human body as an organ of experience that seeks to satisfy variant and changing drives. When Nietzsche states that the spirit or mind is a ‘small reason’ and a tool of the body he does this to emphasize that it is a function of the body that processes the information received from the body’s experiences in the world. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes, ‘The awakened one, the one who knows, says: Body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for something about the body’ (ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’). This does not mean, however, that Nietzsche fails to recognize some analytic usefulness in the notion of the soul, so long as it is reformulated. In Beyond Good and Evil (12), he writes that conceiving the soul ‘as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!’ This necessary exclusion will allow for a new ‘soul-hypothesis’

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to emerge that includes the concepts of the ‘mortal soul’, the ‘soul as subjective multiplicity’, and the ‘soul as social structure of the drives and affects’ (BGE 12). Nietzsche recognizes potential in formerly robust symbols like the soul to generate new meanings and to draw in readers which is why he continues to use this word in Beyond Good and Evil even after demonstrating its conceptual fallibility in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’ Nietzsche takes conscientious steps to replace the metaphysical-religious soul with an embodied self. The self ’s experiential and intellectual capacities are conceived through human physicality. In other words, life is experienced only through the body. The ‘soul’ is a ‘cultural fiction’.6 In order to have some concept of individuality that is analytically, but not ontologically, separate from the body, Nietzsche introduces the notion of the Selbst (self), but again returns its place to a function of the body. After making efforts to show that identity is not reducible to thoughts and sensations Nietzsche writes: ‘Always the Self listens and seeks: it compares, compels, conquers, destroys. It rules and is also the I’s ruler. Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, and unknown wise man – his name is Self. In your body he dwells, he is your body’ (ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’). This notion of identity is one that returns to the body as the foundation, but it is also one that is conceptualized by Nietzsche as including different parts: the ‘I’ or ego, the Selbst or self (remaking of the soul) and the body. Nietzsche writes that the body (Leib) ‘does I’ and within the body there are the senses that experience and the ego (Ich) who says ‘I’. According to Nietzsche, the body acts and performs in the world, and the ego says this acting thing is me. The ego is shaped in accordance with its worldly experiences. The spirit or mind (Geist) that Nietzsche also calls the ‘small reason’ is considered a plaything of the body because it is vulnerable to the body’s health and whims; however, it is also that rational part of the body that solves problems and is connected to a deeper level of activity that Nietzsche terms the self (Selbst). The creating self works together with the mind to form judgements and with the senses to form perceptions, and it attempts to control their orientation as well as the direction of the ego. The self gathers information through the senses, the ego, and the mind and formulates its own kind of wisdom. Identity problems are manifest when one part of the body conceives itself as supreme over the others. In ‘Despisers of the Body’ (ZI) Nietzsche expresses concern for when the ego understands itself as something outside or more than the body and approaches the body as something that is lesser than or a threat to human rationality.

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Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the body makes it obvious that he has, in ‘Despisers of the Body’ (ZI), already made at least one attempt to do the work he lauds as necessary in Beyond Good and Evil (12), namely the reworking of the soul hypothesis. Nietzsche’s reason of the body has both ‘a polemical and a systematically foundational sense’ (Gerhardt 2006: 273). The polemical aspect is critical of, and opposed to, the dualist Christian–Platonic conception of being. As Gerhardt states the ‘great reason’ of the body becomes a replacement for God because it has an earthly orientation instead of an other-worldly one (Gerhardt 2006: 285). One of Nietzsche’s polemical goals is to move faith away from God and into the lived experience of the immanent world, one’s body, and human relationships. In terms of its foundational significance, the great reason can be conceptualized in two ways: first, the body has ontological primacy as the only thing that the human is and, second, its ‘great reason’ functions as a creative physiological intelligence which is pursued through its actions within the world and with other people. Nietzsche wants to change the focus on the mind as the seat of reason and situate it elsewhere, first in the body and then in the conflicting parts of the body of the ego, self, mind, and senses. The notion that the body has a great reason exceeds what is conceived of traditionally as the deliberative reasoning capacities of the mind. Nietzsche is attempting to create a new concept that has the residue of an old one; he considers the body to be an intelligent functioning whole. For Nietzsche, the body has a more significant role to play than what is conceived of as cognitive reasoning because it is the immediate organ of experience of the world and the medium of its own inner sensations and memories. As a filter of information, the body applies its own reactions to information and nutrition, including actual food as well as information connected to human relationships, enacting a logic of the body that is more primary than a separate reasoning capacity of the mind. Nietzsche’s concepts of nourishment and nutrition approach the self as changeable through the body. As Hutter points out, with his physical ailments and sufferings, Nietzsche found it increasingly important to listen to the ‘great reason’ of his body to decipher what foods and environments were the most conducive to his well-being and creativity (Hutter 2006: 158). Charlie Huenemann claims that health is a Nietzschean value, his ‘good’ because Nietzsche suffered so much sickness himself. Nietzsche was preoccupied practically and philosophically with finding ways to increase health and help recovery from illness (Huenemann 2013: 68). Instead of attempting to deny bodily sensations through ascetic practices,

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or blaming another for one’s suffering,7 Nietzsche claims that one has to live through one’s pain and learn from it to develop greater wisdom concerning the self. He expresses appreciation of his experiences of illness and convalesce as sources of self-knowledge (HAHI P4, HAHII P4). Sickness is considered just as much a part of life as health and the experiences of both are unique to the individual (Nietzsche rejects the notion of ‘a normal health’) (GS 120). The body’s ‘great reason’ can be found in its reactions to different kinds of nutrition; it provides information about one’s general spectrum of illness and health. The embodied self is vulnerable to food, drink, activity and rest, friendship and love, and any environmental factors that have the capacities to limit or invigorate life. As Ansell-Pearson notes, Nietzsche considers frailty to be linked to a deficiency in understanding about the everyday requirements of human life (Ansell-Pearson 2013: 105). In The Gay Science (134), Nietzsche writes about how diet and life style in different cultures shape a collective psychological disposition. He claims that in places where ‘a deep discontent with existence becomes prevalent’ it is a result of nutritional errors made over a considerable amount of time. Examples he gives are that too much rice in India led to a lack of ‘vigour’ and then the nihilism of Buddhism; ‘European discontent’ is blamed upon excessive alcoholic intake in the Middle Ages; the malaise of the German spirit is a result of ‘winter sickness’ and poor air from spending too much time inside in front of burning stoves. Nietzsche considers fresh air, good exercise, and balanced diet important for overall wellbeing. A change in these different kinds of nutrition has psychological, moral, and aesthetic consequences for those undergoing it as well as whole generations to come. When attempting to cope with psychological disturbance or ‘distress of soul’, Nietzsche suggests first the remedy of diet modification and physical labour (D 269) so the repressed drive(s) causing the distress can be discharged or given the proper nutrition they require (D 119). His writings on friendship suggest that human relationships that involve striving and struggle can also help through sublimation to discharge the repressed drives. Nietzsche considers the body’s physical sickness and health to have a radical impact on all parts of the human being. His notion of the self as embodied challenges the metaphysical-religious belief that the sensations of the body can be dulled through faith and ascetic practices. His aim is to ‘build a more robust and corporeally affirmative set of cultural practices and values than the Christian, reactive “virtues” that, for Nietzsche culminate in European nihilism’ (Faulkner 2013: 58). Nietzsche provides a new hope in the capacity of the individual to mould themselves through a physiological awareness that considers food,

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rest, exercise, friendship, and environment as formative of one’s emotional, intellectual, and moral life. As he writes, ‘These small things – nutrition, location, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn’ (EH ‘Why I am so Clever’ 10).8 For Nietzsche, the philosophical pursuit of self-knowledge includes watching the body’s reaction to these ‘small things’, building up a greater source of information about one’s physical and social needs so that one can shape the body into greater health through its very own great reason.

The socialization of identity and self-consciousness The new psychologist, Nietzsche writes in Beyond (12), is one that is ‘condemned to invention’ and ‘perhaps to discovery’. The psychologist must invent and discover because, for Nietzsche, the embodied self does not have an enduring soul, but is instead changeable, consisting of an agonistic multiplicity of conflicting drives. As is evidenced from Nietzsche’s Lamarckism, however, and his notions of inheritance, he does believe in some primary nature that comes with birth and family. After birth, familial modelling, education, interpersonal relationships, and one’s position in the world in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, ability, and occupation have a strong influence on identity. In Daybreak (455), Nietzsche writes about first and second nature. The first nature. – The way in which we are educated nowadays, we first acquire a second nature: and we have it when the world calls us ripe, mature, and useful. Some are snake-like enough to shed this skin one day when underneath this cover their first nature has ripened. With most people, the germ has dried up.9

The question here is what does Nietzsche mean by first and second nature? And if he writes that the second nature is acquired first then what is the first nature that underlies it? André van der Braak in analysing this section (455) of Daybreak states that Nietzsche conceives of education as creating a second skin, an ego connected to the outer world and one’s interactions with it that provides the first nature, that Dionysian vitality of life itself, with protection (Van der Braak 2011: 97). The reason one comes to know one’s second nature first is because it is the socially shaped self that allows one to be functional in the world and is conditioned by others. Second nature refers to the education obtained in school, and to

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familial, cultural, and social education. However, with first nature in Daybreak (455), Nietzsche is pointing to more than one’s life force, or as Van der Braak states, the Dionysian vitality of life. Instead, Nietzsche is referring to inherited human and ancestral characteristics, such as the instinct to cruelty which is part of the Dionysian vitality of life or will to power, and those traits connected to one’s bloodline which includes physical traits as well as emotional and artistic predispositions. Nietzsche’s statement that the first nature ripens means that the second nature inevitably affects the first nature: whatever one inherits at a genetic level is modified through life experience. The notion that the ‘germ’ of one’s first nature will, for most people, cease to be active upon maturity appears to contradict what is written later in Beyond Good and Evil (264) when Nietzsche states that one cannot escape ‘the qualities and preferences of his parents and ancestors in his body’ and ‘with the aid of the best education one will at best deceive with regard to such a heredity’. Whereas Daybreak (455) places emphasis more on the second nature as formative of adult identity, Beyond (264) suggests that those qualities ascribed to Nietzsche’s first nature maintain their hold on the person. The following paragraphs will attempt to clarify this tension. Nietzsche states that the process of building one’s second nature has numerous levels that are themselves open to change and fluctuation. Familial imitation and the transmission of moral feelings from parents to children is an early form of education. This is a kind of modelling behaviour rather than something inherited genetically. In Daybreak (34), for example, Nietzsche explains that moral feelings are passed on to children when they observe inclinations and aversions in adults and copy them. Upon maturity, justification is given for those moral feelings that were previously not deemed necessary as a child, but often this justification is selective in finding evidence because one seeks to give reasons that correspond with those feelings associated with the moral judgements obtained through family life. Nietzsche suggests that one should attempt to measure feelings in relation to one’s life experiences, instead of trusting them unconditionally because they are a product of familial transmission. Nietzsche discusses the strength of familial imitation and transmission in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche writes of Chamfort, that his mother’s hatred of nobility was passed down to him and was ‘sanctified by him through his love for her’ and even after trying to deny this drive in himself (his instinct of revenge towards nobility) he was compelled to return to it (GS 95). Nietzsche repeats his concern for a parent’s instinct for revenge being passed

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down to a child in Thus Spoke Zarathustra II: ‘On the Tarantulas’ when he writes, ‘What the father kept silent, that comes in the son to be spoken and often I found the son to be the father’s unveiled secret’. Nietzsche strongly believes that some unfulfilled moral feeling of a parent will be adopted by the child and acted upon in adult life. This is one reason why he emphasizes the importance of selfquestioning and finding evidence for one’s moral beliefs outside of their sources of origin. Nietzsche suggests that a friend may be able to help one question the beliefs that one is most attached to when one cannot achieve this oneself (HAH 491; ZI ‘On the Friend’). In addition to the moral beliefs of one’s family, Nietzsche recognizes that class, gender, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and the value one’s society ascribes to one’s place within these categories have a strong effect on personality and opportunity. One reason why Nietzsche writes that the ‘germ’ of one’s first nature often disappears is because life circumstances can make it difficult to practice and fulfil those feelings and talents that may be primary and part of one’s first nature: ‘Circumstances do not only conceal and reveal … they magnify and diminish’ (D 326). If it becomes advantageous for survival, or even the maintenance of the status quo, to exemplify certain traits, Nietzsche argues that learned traits become so habituated that they become part of one’s character. In The Gay Science (356), Nietzsche writes that after a certain number of years of performing the same occupation, people over-identify with that role, ‘they become victims of their own “good performance”; they themselves have forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of them when the question of their “vocation” was decided … the role has actually become character; and art, nature’. Those attributes that are considered advantageous for good performance in one’s career are practised and rewarded and become part of one’s valued character. In such instances it does appear that one’s second nature is very much responsible for one’s identity. Nietzsche examines the power of appearances earlier in The Gay Science when he discusses how the presentation of a thing determines its being. He writes that the ‘reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for’ is so often inaccurate and very arbitrary ‘foreign to their nature and even to their skin – all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body’ (GS 58). Nietzsche’s belief in the power of the second nature to form identity is expressed again in The Gay Science (361). Here, he suggests that people who face

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adversity because of their devalued positions in society due to gender, ethnicity, or occupation are most likely to become actors. When there is an expectation for a person to correspond to a predetermined appearance, the actor learns how to embody these roles without fully becoming them. Nietzsche describes ‘the actor’ as someone who excels in simulating different dispositions and is very adaptable. Nietzsche names those who ‘had to survive under changing pressures and coercions’, such as Jews, women, and diplomats, examples of the kinds of people who embody the characteristics of the actor to develop skills for survival and the acquisition of greater power (GS 361). According to Nietzsche their intelligence, when achieved, lies in their capacity to become performers of their reputations with self-observed irony. The potential hold of the second nature on identity is discussed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (231) when he notes how difficult it can be to shift how one thinks ‘about man and woman’. Nietzsche writes that although learning does change people, ‘deep down’ there is something ‘unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum’ that includes a number of decided upon questions and corresponding answers that shape one’s convictions. Nietzsche suggests that these convictions are indicative of one’s conceptual limitations, and they are ‘steps to self-knowledge, sign-posts to the problems we are’ (BGE 231). Nietzsche admits that he is himself limited by such convictions before he proceeds to write what are considered his most misogynist aphorisms on ‘woman as such’. Aphorisms 232 to 239 of Beyond Good and Evil occur immediately after Nietzsche states that one’s convictions on topics such as woman and man can be equated with a ‘great stupidity’ serving best as ‘steps to self-knowledge’ (BGE 231). It is precisely this admission that allows one to read the following aphorisms on ‘woman’ as a provocative invitation for the reader to consider how their beliefs correspond to them. Nietzsche’s awareness of the absurdity of the creation of the ideal of woman is performatively examined through his sarcastic exploration of the presumptions and prejudices that underlie the gendered female. The aims of the aphorisms on woman in Beyond Good and Evil include Nietzsche acting as an agonistic friend to his reader to induce discomfort and emotional reaction so that one is driven to question how the concept of woman affects one’s life and those people who are closest. The degree to which one will question the validity of ‘woman’ depends upon how entrenched these stereotypes are in one’s value system. This is tied to familial modelling and later to whether the beliefs that one has obtained are affirmed or discredited by education, interpersonal relationships, and language. Nietzsche believes that, for most people, the efforts

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required to consciously change a conviction are more than they can manage. Part of this difficulty rests on how inaccessible we are to ourselves: as Nietzsche writes, ‘Everyone is farthest from himself ’ (GS 335). Although Nietzsche considers ancestral inheritance to play a causal role in shaping identity, moral values exhibited by one’s family transmitted at a young age are very influential on early definitions of the self. If life circumstances disallow the development of one’s primary nature, what Nietzsche calls the ‘germ’ (D 455) will be more difficult to access (he states that for most people ‘the germ has dried up’). Yet the reason why Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil (264) that one cannot escape the inheritances in one’s body is because he believes that there remains some residue of it, even if it is emaciated. For example, if life circumstances change, it is possible that ancestral predispositions will re-emerge and seek a new medium in which to discharge themselves. Nietzsche writings on the body and self-formation suggest that the first and second natures co-mingle, and it is difficult if not possible to decipher the precise origins of one’s characteristics. Self-understanding is further complicated by Nietzsche’s observations about consciousness: although self-awareness is required for self-understanding, the structure of self-consciousness, shaped by language, both facilitates and impairs access to one’s most unique characteristics and experiences. To attempt to comprehend the history of one’s constitution and provide some definition of identity, one must take the position of a self-observing ‘I’, a position of which Nietzsche is sceptical. Nietzsche’s notion of consciousness or Bewusstsein does not refer to mere awareness, but rather includes the capacity to be self-aware, or as he states, to see oneself in a mirror (GS 354). Nietzsche writes that human consciousness is a late and underdeveloped quality that has arisen out of the need to socialize and the reliance that people have on one another for survival (GS 11, 354). He questions the notion that human beings require a self-observing ‘I’ to function. In fact, he goes so far as to state that consciousness is not required for humans to think, feel, will, or act. Nietzsche rejects the assertation that consciousness is representative of the individual or the pivotal decision maker; he writes that it is false to consider it to be indicative of the unity of the organism (GS 11). Instead, he states that consciousness has become habituated through the social world. In other words, Nietzsche claims that many feelings are spontaneously felt without being articulated and actions done without any reflection on them; one can and usually does act, think, and feel without also ‘having a second-order awareness of it’.10

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This is because he believes that human beings have not yet mastered the ability to assimilate knowledge so that it becomes instinctive. One cannot control each influence and then carefully select which aspects are more appealing. Instead, human beings are impressed upon by the world and the physiological functioning of the body. In a counter-intuitive fashion, Nietzsche argues that reflecting upon one’s actions and beliefs and naming them does not make them any more real or one’s own. In The Gay Science (11) Nietzsche suggests that the dynamism of the inner drives has the strongest influence on the behaviours and feelings of the individual. Does this mean that Nietzsche considers a largely unconscious part of the self to have the greatest power over the individual? This question has serious implications for the notion of self-overcoming and the extent to which friends can provoke the other into transformation. If people are mostly controlled by unconscious motivations, then how can one achieve the kind of self-reflection necessary for shared and self-impelled willing and overcoming? The extent to which conscious mental states give shape to a person’s feelings, beliefs, and actions is certainly questioned by Nietzsche. But is it correct to go so far as to claim that consciousness does not have a causal role in behaviour for Nietzsche? Brian Leiter has made this argument and Lawrence Hatab and Sebastian Gardner have also taken this position, claiming that consciousness does not add anything new to the functioning of the drives but is rather ‘an epiphenomenal expression of instincts’ (Hatab 2013: 192).11 Leiter’s reading is that the ‘psycho-physical facts about a person explain their conscious experience and behaviour’ (Leiter 2009: 121). He argues that if conscious mental states are the products of psycho-physical attributes, then conscious mental states are not determinate of action and are epiphenomenal. Leiter claims that although it may appear as though an action is causally linked to a preceding conscious mental state, conscious state influences ‘only in virtue of other type-facts12 about the person’ (Leiter 2009: 120). In other words, the inner drives are simply utilizing consciousness as an arm to achieve their goals. Leiter’s is a very selective reading of Nietzsche that fails to acknowledge his writings on self-shaping and the capacities of the individual to ‘give style to one’s character’ (GS 290). He claims that the experience of willing or self-mastery is an experience that is caused by an interplay of unconscious drives and affects. According to Leiter, Nietzsche thinks that there is no conscious self in ‘selfmastery’: each person is ‘an arena in which the struggle of drives (type-facts) is

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played out; how they play out determines what he believes, what he values, what he becomes’ (Leiter 2009: 125). Katsafanas and Constâncio have argued against this interpretation sharing the perspective that Nietzsche’s account of consciousness is a modified state that brings something new to the unconscious drives. Katsafanas writes that consciousness involves ‘conceptual content, whereas unconscious mental states have nonconceptual content’ (Katsafanas 2014: 10).13 Constâncio explains this modification by stating that consciousness translates information from a preconceptual and pre-linguistic realm and simplifies it into a concept (Constâncio 2011: 33). For Nietzsche, conscious mental states have formed out of the need to be social. ‘It was only as a social animal that man acquires self-consciousness— which he is still in the process of doing, more and more’ (GS 354). Consciousness is a translator between the inner and outer world and, as such, has a significant yet still limited causal role. Constâncio reads Nietzsche as stating that a conscious mental state must influence the instincts before it can affect the ‘total state’ of the person (Constâncio 2011: 28). As we have seen in The Gay Science (11), Nietzsche states that consciousness has an indirect power of influence, one which has not been sufficiently developed by most people. However, Nietzsche also expresses concern about the functioning of consciousness that simplifies unconscious content into communicative signs. Elsewhere in The Gay Science (354), Nietzsche explains that language, the medium of consciousness, manipulates the appearance of the inner drives and self-perception. ‘Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparable personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be’. The language of self-consciousness that allows for the articulation of one’s experience is also ‘a danger’ (GS 354) for Nietzsche: it acts as an impairment to self-understanding because of its regulative functioning which forces explanations into familiar channels of understanding. Nietzsche’s concern is that the structure of consciousness is a result of social and herd relations, it is not individual and thus, the more the individual attempts to understand themself, the more they become like the groups of which they are a member. What made consciousness develop is ‘the pressure of the need for communication’ (D 354) which is necessary for upholding a system of command and obedience and has developed in conjunction with its utility. In Daybreak, Nietzsche writes that ‘every man comes to know himself

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almost solely in regard to his powers of defiance and attack’ (D 212). According to Nietzsche, opposition between people and the ability to measure oneself in relation to others is formative of self-knowing (as occurs in agonistic friendship). Whatever medium acts as a mirror, whether it is another person, theatre, art, or religion that allows for the distance to enable ‘the art of staging and watching ourselves’ (GS 78), there is an opportunity for understanding. But, part of the project of seeking self-knowledge is a medium of communication that makes content common or non-personal to make it accessible. Thus, the ‘falsity’ of the self-observant ‘I’ for Nietzsche is that it holds neither an objective nor an independent viewpoint. Nevertheless, belief in the ‘I’ and ego does shape one’s sense of self – the inner drives are vulnerable to the influences of the world and conscious mental states can filter down to them. Although Nietzsche is keen to show that consciousness is overestimated, he is not claiming that it is merely epiphenomenal. Self-understanding is difficult to achieve (and complete self-knowledge is impossible to have) but self-awareness can be developed over time. Nietzsche does not dismiss the possibility of individuals being able to ‘stand alone and give an account of themselves’ (BGE 210), but he does consider it a rare skill. It entails a certain kind of sceptical person with a passion for knowledge, who is born from mixed peoples and has the potential to incorporate the selfcruelty required to speak a truth which does not seek to please (BGE 210). Those who have suffered most and been forced into deep self-questioning are likely to have the greatest powers in shaping their behaviours independently according to Nietzsche. Although consciousness may appear to erase originality from one’s inner experiences through conceptualizing them, it also provides a gateway of communication between the unconscious and the outer world. Language provides a reductive system of communication, but Nietzsche also recognizes the capacities of individuals to bring their own interpretative and ironic flair to it. Christopher Janaway claims that it is inaccurate to read Nietzsche as a thinker who excludes ‘creative agency from his picture of humanity, because without it his proposed critique of moral values and his project of learning to think and feel in healthier ways would make little sense’ (Janaway 2009: 66). To fully evaluate this claim, Nietzsche’s ontological conception of the body-subject will be examined with analysis given to the question of agency and the extent to which Nietzsche allows for self-cultivation within his psycho-ontological account of the will to power.

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Nietzsche’s psycho-ontological conception of the self and the will to power Nietzsche writes that all instinctive life consists of wills to power (BGE 36). However, once the drives form into an organization and receive an individual conceptual designation, as happens in a person, the wild activity of the drives appears to be restrained and made coherent. This does not mean that a person is no longer affected by the inner drives, but it does seem to entail that the conceptualization of them into human characteristics moves the instincts into specific trajectories that involve modification. Does this mean that the Nietzschean self is more than an expression of the will to power? This section will question the extent to which the body-subject can be explained through the ontology of the will to power. An analysis of the psycho-ontology of the will to power will be pursued in the interest of determining whether agency is possible for Nietzsche. If the drives of the will to power are the primary motivation of all activity, it is important to ask whether self-cultivation is a redundant notion. When the will to power is examined in the context of identity, it is often equated with the unconscious or inner world of the drives. It appears viable to claim that the will to power is determinative of all action because the inner drives are described by readers of Nietzsche as ‘discriminatory’, ‘intelligent’, and ‘interpretative’.14 There appears to be a secret world that one rarely if ever has access to that rules one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. The argument is that the will, like consciousness, is a word for something that is an epiphenomenal expression of something more fundamental; it is merely a linguistic symbol to provide social meaning. The consequence of this reading is that the possibility of self-overcoming becomes difficult to envision. If the human being is only a compilation of ever changing drives, the presumption becomes that one is never ‘complete’ or synthesized and thus there is no self.15 There is considerable evidence for this reading and variations of it to be found in secondary literature. Graham Parkes claims that ‘the I is not something stable that is independent from the drives’; any dominant drive or group of drives can prevail as the ‘I’ (Parkes 1994: 292). Christa Davis Acampora states that ‘what one is, strictly speaking, is this collection of drives in the particular order or relation they are in’; what one is can only be found in the ‘political arrangement’ of the drives (Acampora 2013a: 160). Yet Nietzsche writes about the self and self-overcoming throughout his oeuvre. As such, it is

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important to ask whether his account of the self as will to power is compatible with his views on self-shaping. In The Gay Science (349) Nietzsche writes: ‘The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority (Übergewicht), around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life’. Life is a combination of forces that seeks incorporation, assimilation, expansion, ‘the feeling of increased power’ (BGE 230). Accordingly, the human being is composed of a multiplicity of inner drives and each one wants mastery; each drive is affected by the other drives that share contest with it. Different combinations of struggling drives organize together into formations. Ciano Aydin explains that ‘a variable and relational multiplicity that is kept together is an organization – that which keeps it together is, according to Nietzsche, will to power’. That ‘organization’ is to be understood as a verb, not a noun because it is in continual movement, ‘always reorganizing’ (Aydin 2007: 30). The Nietzschean self is an organization of multiple wills to power that are continually undergoing modification. The formation of drives is unique to each person. The person is comprised of a number of different organizations of drives that compete to be dominant. A dominant organization attempts to reorganize a suppressed organization so that it can be properly assimilated, but it must also bring itself closer to that which is being assimilated to accommodate it (Aydin 2007: 31). The process of incorporation is not a simple submission but is instead a shared becoming where each organization bends to form something new. Nietzsche’s notion of will to power is to be understood not in dualistic terms of submission and dominance but instead as an agonistic model of transformation where striving between different and multiple drives allow intermingling and change to occur in each drive irrespective of which one is the incorporator. This means that there is no absolute overpowering for Nietzsche: each drive must learn how to shift itself in its search for growth. Nietzsche explains the nature of power relations and their interdependence upon one another in Zarathustra during a discussion of will to power. And just as the smaller yields to what is greater, that it might have pleasure and power over the smallest: so does even the greatest yield, and risks for the sake of power – life itself. That is the yielding of the greatest, that it is risk and danger, and a diceplaying for death. And wherever there is sacrifice and service and loving glances: there too is the will to master. By secret paths the weaker slinks into the fortress and into the very heart of the more powerful – and there steals power.

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And this secret did Life herself tell to me. ‘Behold’, she said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself’. (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’)

This section discloses that Nietzsche’s understanding of power is more nuanced than it might initially be conceived. Power is dynamic, vulnerable, and ever changing. This means that drives are exposed to other forces of all different variations of strength. Nietzsche rejects the notion of power as the unilateral maintenance of one force over another. Instead, active and reactive drives struggle and coexist, vulnerable to each other’s variations. It is precisely the openness of the drives to one another that allows for their very overcoming and it is overcoming that Nietzsche signifies as the most important pursuit of the will to power. For Nietzsche, the nature of life is to overcome itself: accordingly, this is also the fundamental orientation of the human. The question is whether overcoming can only occur within the inner world as an organic function of the will to power, according to Nietzsche, or if consciousness and human agency have a role to play in his concept of the self. Nietzsche examines an example of how one’s values and life pursuits are structured in relation to one’s inner drives in Beyond Good and Evil (6). Here, Nietzsche discusses the connection between a philosopher and their philosophical ideas. It is through a philosopher’s ideas and in particular their moral ones that Nietzsche believes one can discover ‘who he is—that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other’ (BGE 6). In this aphorism, identity is located in the hierarchical structure of the drives as will to power. Drives are constitutive of the individual, both inherited and shaped historically, yet with ‘relative strengths and orderings’ (Acampora 2013a: 163). In Beyond (6), Nietzsche distinguishes the philosopher from a scholar who works prudently in their research. Nietzsche claims that the dedicated scholar will work well and with an appropriate level of neutrality in their discipline if their more fundamental purpose (and thus their dominant will to power) is focused on a different orientation, such as family or politics. However, one who is wholeheartedly interested in their research, such as a philosopher, will be so passionately attached to their projects that their projects become an extension of the hierarchical relations of their inner drives. He calls philosophy ‘the most spiritual will to power’ (BGE 9) and claims that the creation of a moral system is an effective way in which the philosopher can assimilate and incorporate more into themselves through transforming the moral beliefs of others to cohere with

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their own. Nietzsche states that, more than anything else, the philosopher’s morality will reveal who they are (BGE 6). The notion that the ordering of the inner drives is the determining factor of identity would be troubling if we had not already seen that Nietzsche views the will to power to be a reciprocally shaping force. Accordingly, the dissemination of moral concepts involves an activity in the world that is inevitably affected by other selves and value structures. It also requires the use of language, gestures, and the engagement of the conscious mind. This suggests that the philosopher’s morality (BGE 6) is not purely a result of their inner drives. Nietzsche discusses the extent to which drives are transformed by one’s environment and culture in Daybreak (38). He writes that drives do not have a moral character until they are attached to a conscience, be it good or bad. They acquire a moral character and the sensation of pleasure/displeasure as a ‘second nature’ when they meet other drives which have already received a valuation. Nietzsche gives the example of a drive once perceived as cowardice, transformed into the admirable quality of humility by Christianity; he also discusses how the Greeks considered envy to be good, encouraging contest. Thus, following the above example of the philosopher from Beyond Good and Evil (6), when they attempt to use morality to exercise their will to power, the content of what is considered good and bad will be influenced by their culture, those around them, and the historical experiences of their conscience. In Beyond (230), Nietzsche discusses different expressions of the will to power in the self and points to two that he states appear as oppositional. Nietzsche states that the will to power attempts to master and command the multiplicities, ‘a will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful’. Its aim is incorporation, ‘to file new things in old files’ which is tantamount to ‘the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power’. It is important to note the irony here: although there is a feeling of growth that one experiences by categorizing ‘new things’ into old files, implicit in such a filing is a lack of judgement and accuracy. Nietzsche re-asserts this point when he writes, ‘An apparently opposite drive serves this same will’: it wants ignorance, veiling, limitation, and enjoys deception. This ‘other’ drive, which is just another operation of the will to power, acts as a protective measure to prevent one from becoming overwhelmed by too much new information. In its pull to collect and assimilate, the automatic functioning of the will to power lacks insight: falsification becomes a therapeutic remedy. This process, in repetition, is the common pattern of unconscious human psychology, according to Nietzsche. To counter it, one requires the

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‘cruelty of the intellectual conscience’, which Nietzsche states can be more kindly described as ‘extravagant honesty’ (BGE 230). This skill, practised by the seeker of knowledge, is one that must be developed through discipline and rigorous self-questioning, through the engagement of the conscious mind.16 In The Gay Science (335), Nietzsche explains the importance of the intellectual conscience and questioning one’s judgements through an analysis of one’s ‘prehistory’ in ‘instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences’. It is precisely the conscious move to self-examination that, according to Nietzsche, allows for one to practice probity and discover what is ‘lawful and necessary in the world’ (GS 335). The questioning of one’s opinions can help one to sort through the automatic filing that the will to power does during incorporation when it lacks discretion in sorting new things into old files. If one wants to become a creator, or a ‘physicist’ (GS 335) it is necessary to interrupt the automatism of assimilation: this is precisely the role of the intellectual conscience, an attribute that has, in some people, been developed beyond the brute pursuit of the urge for a greater feeling of power. Nietzsche writes that ‘when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life – and if … a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, selfcontrol, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated’ a rare kind of person arises, such as the artist, seducer, or warrior (BGE 200). Nietzsche suggests that having a high level of inner agonism can dispose one to the development of a conscious self that exerts some degree of intelligent control on the functioning of the unconscious. Is the above account sufficient to dispute a reductive view of the Nietzschean self and demonstrate a firm link between the will to power, consciousness, and self-overcoming? To more fully answer this question, we should consider an aphorism in which Nietzsche appears to reject the capacity to regulate or control the drives. In Daybreak (109), after listing six different methods of controlling the drives, Nietzsche writes, ‘that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us’. This statement sounds as if the intellect is really just a tool of the drives, having little influence over human activity. But, at the end of this aphorism Nietzsche writes that when one becomes aware of the two conflicting drives, the intellect will ‘have to take sides’ (D 109). Although the desire to control one’s drive is a

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result of the expression of another competing drive, Nietzsche’s statement that the intellect will side with one drive over the other suggests a third deliberative function of the self which corresponds to what he writes about the intellectual conscience elsewhere. In Daybreak (560) Nietzsche writes that one has the liberty to express the drives in a variety of different forms: through self-cultivation and sublimation or by allowing the drives to freely express themselves through minimal constraint or no constraint at all. He states that most people perceive themselves as ‘fullydeveloped facts’ and do not realize their capacities for changeability and the focused development of the drives (D 560) which accounts for why, in the majority of cases, Nietzsche does not think people act beyond the desires of their drives. However, for those who are inspired to do so, Nietzsche writes that ‘second nature’ can be ‘added’ and ‘original nature’ taken away through the daily efforts and ‘practice’ of self-artistry (GS 290). Through self-observation one can learn about the variations in one’s character and how to modify them. To achieve this, one requires a dominant, governing taste to exercise discipline and guidance. Although Nietzsche does not write in The Gay Science (290) that the ‘constraint of a single taste’ is an expression of the will to power it is fair to presume, in consideration of Nietzsche’s other aphorisms, that what lies beneath the single constraining taste is a very strong drive. One is not justified, however, to then claim that the attempts at self-observation and the disciplined practices of self-cultivation are reducible to the inner functioning of the drives. Instead, it is more accurate to read Nietzsche as stating that once a drive or organization of drives becomes conscious and the subject of self-reflection something is added to them. Although their conceptualization does, as Nietzsche states, appear to make the drives lose their individuality through a shared language (GS 354), it also opens them up to the analysis of the intellectual conscience and dialogue with friends. The refined practices of a knowledge-seeker can penetrate into the routine operations of the unconscious will to power and open up new pathways for interpretation and sublimation. Nietzsche’s conception of will to power as a multiplicity of interdependent, striving drives implies that overcoming is always occurring at an unconscious level. But, through self-critique and the critique of agonistic friends, one can consciously exercise overcoming as well. Overcoming is not about brute overpowering but is instead about building up a significant amount of dissent and questioning within so that something that was once very

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dear is transformed or let go in the interest of something new. If we are to ascribe a notion of freedom to Nietzsche, it lies precisely in the experience of conscious overcoming as a fleeting yet delightful experience of transformation (BGE 19). In terms of a Nietzschean concept of agency, when the self sublimates and performs the desires of the will to power as a mediator that negotiates between the different parts of the self, other selves, and the external world, this is agency. The malleable ego, operating at the level of human consciousness, provides a pathway from which the inner and outer worlds come together and are modified. The self ’s interpretation of the information it receives from within and without brings something new to the will to power which exceeds it. Another way to express this in Nietzsche’s terms is to state that consciousness and the activation of the intellectual conscience brings Apollonian structure and semblance to the Dionysian will to power and allows for the human to emerge as a creative being that employs its reflective and communicative skills to sublimate the drives into something new.

A textual analysis of the meaning of self-overcoming My humanity is a constant self-overcoming. — Ecce Homo ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 8 What occurs when an individual learns how to shape their drives into a trajectory that forces transformation, such as the overturning of beliefs or the destruction of previous habits? Self-overcoming involves the decision to surpass that which has come to be perceived as a constraint: this involves affirmative and destructive acts that can be supported by friendship but must be completed in solitude. In ‘On the Three Transformations’ (ZI) Nietzsche provides an account of self-overcoming through three kinds of archetypes – the camel, lion, and child – that represent stages of psychological development of the individual. Of the first stage, the camel, Zarathustra states: ‘What is heavy? Thus asks the weightbearing spirit, and thus it kneels down, like the camel, and would be well laden. What is heaviest, you heroes? Thus asks the weight-bearing spirit. That I may take it upon me and become well pleased with my strength’ (ZI ‘On the Three Transformations’). The camel represents a reverent and strong person who is unafraid of taking on the burdens of the world including their ideological belief systems. Lampert

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calls the camel a heroic victory-seeker because they pursue difficult tasks and enjoy the expression of their own strength (Lampert 1986: 33). At the start of his journey, Zarathustra is searching for companions that will be camels, eager to adopt the heavy burdens that are connected to his project of building a future for free spirits and the Overhuman. The camel does not question their burdens, but instead ‘presses on well laden’ (ZI ‘On the Three Transformations’) and thus makes a good comrade in the building of a project. The camel is philosophically limited by always saying yes and not engaging their intellectual conscience. To become a lion, they must feel frustrated with, perhaps even become resentful of the heaviness of their burden and seek a break with it. The change from camel to lion is built upon life experience and interpersonal relationships but requires solitude to be achieved. ‘But in the loneliest desert the second transformation occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it will seize freedom for itself and become lord in its own desert’ (ZI ‘On the Three Transformations’). Once one no longer has the need to perform and be heroic for others, focus turns to an inward dialectic. The lion moves beyond the camel by reacting to the ideological belief systems of the camel and breaking their ‘reverential will’ (ZII ‘On the Famous Wise Men’). The lion is a destructive creature who denies those values that they have decided are no longer meaningful to them, creating a space of freedom for themselves. They are ‘ravenous, violent, solitary, Godless’ (ZII ‘On the Famous Wise Men’). The limitation of the lion is that although they have shifted from the ‘thou shalt’ to the ‘I will’, they do not know what they will and confirm other than destruction. The temptation of the movement from camel to lion is weak nihilism because they will nothingness by rejecting the values of their former camel self and do not yet know with what they will replace their former beliefs. The experience of a loss of values is not something that is easy to sustain and, as such, many turn to inactivity and escapism, the last human mentality, instead of pushing through to the point to when their highest values turn against themselves so that new ones can emerge. Zarathustra is unclear about exactly what occurs for the lion to become a child. What can be gathered from ‘On the Three Transformations’ is that the person does not give up but builds upon the strength of the camel and the destructive powers of the lion to create something new. The suggestion made by Zarathustra is that out of the movement of negation comes a creative moment and a new goal connected to the thought of ‘I will’ because ‘only where there are graves are there resurrections’ (ZII ‘The Grave-Song’).

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Yet, the birth of the child is also said by Zarathustra to involve a forgetting: ‘Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a selfpropelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying’ (ZI ‘On the Three Transformations’). To become a creating child, it appears that one must have abandoned former aspects of the self during the lion stage. Later, Zarathustra states that it is only when the need to be heroic has been left behind that one can consider overhumanly potentials.17 What this section reveals to the reader about the process of self-overcoming is that it requires one to come to terms with the constraint that one wants to surpass. To be capable of overcoming the belief in question one must have good familiarity with the experience of living that constraint and carrying its burden as the camel does. The next step is to remove oneself from the external influences that affirm that constraint and this requires solitude. Then one can further engage the practices of the intellectual conscience to decide if that belief now perceived as a constraint is something that one wants in one’s life or not. If one continues to act as a lion, they will deny the importance of that constraint, and destroy the attachment that they have to it. This is part of the process of self-overcoming; it becomes a creative movement when the former experiences of the camel and the lion are sublimated into the productive powers of the child. Nietzsche writes, ‘Whatever I create and however much I love it – soon I must oppose both it and my love: thus my will wills it’ (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’). The experience of self-overcoming is not something one accomplishes once in one’s life; rather it is the very structure of living18 connected to the will to power. A passionate knowledge-seeker who pursues free-spiritedness attempts to enact the inevitability of overcoming purposively. In Zarathustra, the free spirit is associated with the lion archetype (ZII ‘On the Famous Wise Men’). The free spirit spends time in the desert but does not remain there – they exceed the lion archetype because they are someone ‘that has taken hold of itself again’ (EH ‘Human, All Too Human’ 1) and this involves surpassing the destructive stage of the lion. The character of Zarathustra is one example of a person who pursues the very difficult path of purposeful self-overcoming entering in and out of different kinds of lion stages. Yet, Zarathustra also attempts to exceed the conscious self-overcoming of habits and beliefs by affirming everything that he is so that he can transform himself fundamentally. Whereas the self-overcoming I’ve been attempting to describe involves the restructuring of beliefs and habits through the practices of the camel, lion, and child and involves a kind of selfartistry that facilitates subtle change, Zarathustra longs to perform amor fati and

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eternal recurrence, overhumanly practices of transformation that move beyond the self-overcoming of select aspects of the self. Of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: ‘The ladder he climbs up and down is enormous; he has seen further, willed further, had further abilities than anyone else. This most affirmative of all spirits contradicts with every word he speaks; all oppositions are combined into a new unity in him’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 6). Zarathustra provides inspiration for those looking for new ideals, just as the Overhuman does, but the self-overcoming of passionate knowledge-seekers that is the focus of this book is a less ambitious, yet still very challenging task related to the efforts of the intellectual conscience and the agonistic sparring of friends to force selfquestioning of one’s camel burdens.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that Nietzsche has a complex understanding of identity with both descriptive and polemical aims. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the body rejects dualism and moves faith away from God and into the experiences of the embodied self, human relationships, and the immanent world. The self becomes a site of potential and risk, very mortal and open to different kinds of ‘nutrition’: biological, emotional, ideological, and social. Nietzsche’s analysis of first and second natures, and his Lamarckian conception of character trait transmission, illustrates that he conceives of identity as having multiple origins based on inheritance, modelling, opportunity, human relationships, and self-creation. Nietzsche is misread as stating that there is no self, ego, or ‘I’. What is fictional about the human subject for Nietzsche is the presumption that it is unchanging and enduring. Those who read him as having an epiphenomenal account of consciousness and the will disregard a large selection of his writings in which he discusses the importance of self-questioning, the development of the intellectual conscience, overcoming, and self-artistry. Nietzsche’s psychological account of the will to power provides an ontological description of human life but is not reducible to it. If the Nietzschean self were merely a human representation of an organizational struggle model of will to power, there would be no concern for the effects of consciousness and social relationships on individuality. Zarathustra would not call his disciples into solitude so vehemently if he did not consider

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them vulnerable to the influences of society, capable of self-reflection, and in need of agonistic friendship and conscious self-overcoming. The goal of the Nietzschean self is to overcome with a degree of skill that activates all of its facets including its ego. As Nietzsche writes, ‘Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called ego is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny’ (D 115). Overcoming is about relinquishing what was once mastered because there is currently enough resistance against it to show oneself it is time to move on. Self-overcoming in friendship is not about holding on or tyrannizing over or against another but is instead about sharing struggle with a friend in the interest of growth and the increase of tension so that energy can be accumulated and discharged again. Nietzsche’s self is composed of an unknowable number of drives that live in agonistic relationships that are the will to power. The individual can influence the constitution of the drives and create change (to become what one is) by strengthening the embodied self with different kinds of nutrition including friendship.

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Nietzsche and Aristotle on Character, Virtue, and the Limits of Friendship

Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche scholars take very different positions on the influence of Aristotle on Nietzsche when it comes to character, virtue, and friendship. Walter Kaufmann claimed that Aristotle’s ethics influenced Nietzsche significantly, especially his concept of greatness of soul (megalopsychia) (Kaufmann 1974: 382). More recently, Robert Williams has agreed, proposing that there is a connection between Aristotle and Nietzsche’s senses of noble self-love (Williams 2012: 55). On the other side, Bernd Magnus rejected Kaufmann’s reading of Nietzsche for failing to acknowledge that Nietzsche would never subscribe to Aristotle’s understanding of the good life and happiness (Magnus 1980). He has been echoed by authors, such as Christine Daigle and Lester Hunt, who reject the connection between Aristotelian virtue and Nietzsche’s ethics.1 Although commentators have examined the links between Aristotle and Nietzsche’s senses of self-love and even acknowledge that Aristotle’s concept of greatness of soul likely influenced Nietzsche, none have examined Nietzsche’s character of the bestower (and the bestowing virtue) and how the bestower shares similar character traits with Aristotle’s megalopsychos or great-souled man.2 The first part of this chapter will articulate the meaning of flourishing for Nietzsche and examine Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of virtue. To put it simply, flourishing is connected to the experience of accumulating and discharging power for Nietzsche. Nietzsche introduces the notion of bestowing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a concept which modifies the Aristotelian understanding of virtue into a strength which facilitates the Nietzschean notion of flourishing. After examining Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of virtue through his notion of bestowing and how it relates to his ethics of friendship, the role that self-love plays in friendship will be explored. The question of whether self-love and friendship can coexist without limiting flourishing is pursued.

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In the second part of this chapter, Aristotle’s great-souled man (megalopsychos) is analysed as a model for questioning Nietzsche’s bestowing friend and their virtue (schenkenden Tugend). The high character of the great-souled man, as well as his need for superiority and the honours relevant to his position, isolates him from others. Both Nietzsche and Aristotle imply that those who have the most to give – respectively, the bestower and the megalopsychos – have a difficult time accepting friendship. I ask if Nietzsche’s bestowing friendship dismisses the elements of reciprocity that are central to Aristotle’s understanding of friendship. If a bestower, who excels in self-love, expresses their generosity to one whom they deem worthy but not equal can this be conceived of as friendship? Is it possible for a great-souled man or a bestower to have friends? As people who have great worldly aims, one must ask if Aristotle and Nietzsche believe that there are some people whose work supersedes the ethical value of friendship. Many have posed the question of whether greatness of soul or friendship is the crown of the virtues for Aristotle. In the context of this chapter, the question becomes, ‘Can one’s virtuous tasks supersede the importance of friendship?’ My suspicion is that Nietzsche’s bestower is troubled by many of the same difficulties as those of the great-souled, precisely because their shared character virtues and their corresponding life projects force them into noble solitude.

On flourishing, virtue, and self-love What does Nietzschean flourishing involve and how is it related to virtue and friendship? Whereas Aristotle equates flourishing with the activity of eudaimonia or happiness which is achieved when one utilizes one’s practical wisdom (phronesis) in accordance with virtue, Nietzschean flourishing is related to the movement of the will to power and how aptly one can shape the drives into an orientation that allows for self-overcoming. Nietzsche states that one experiences enjoyment from the sensation of power that is felt when one part of oneself commands another (BGE 19). He associates happiness with an increase of power that is experienced when a resistance is surpassed (AC 2). The reason why agonistic friendship supports Nietzschean flourishing is that it engages two people in a project in which striving against each other promotes shared overcoming. In a bestowing friendship the relationship differs because there is a power disparity between the participants. However, it appears that both friends contribute to the other’s flourishing by offering the other what they

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cannot give to themselves. The bestower wants to express their mastery over the other through teaching and bestowing and their friend wants to be a student and receive the gifts of the bestower. Daigle claims that Nietzsche would disagree with Aristotle’s conception of virtue because ‘it is too intertwined with the contemplative or rational activity of the soul’ and is not Dionysian enough (Daigle 2006: 3). Her observation that Nietzsche’s notion of flourishing is Dionysian is important. Flourishing for Nietzsche involves opposition and conflict, both destructive and creative. However, it is also vital to note that if there is no resistance or measure expressed by the individual over the chaotic functioning of the drives through contemplative activity then people do not become admirable in Nietzschean terms (as passionate knowledge-seekers, free spirits, or bestowers for example). Contemplation involving the practice of Redlichkeit through the intellectual conscience (what may be considered an exercise of the Apollonian because it utilizes the discipline of self-reflection (GS 335)) is necessary for Nietzschean flourishing as well. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche names insight (Einsicht) one of four virtues (BGE 284) and insists on the importance of bringing a critical eye to oneself in the interest of probity and precision (BGE 229). ‘Finally consider that even the seeker after knowledge (Erkennende) forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart – by way of saying No when he would like to say Yes, love, and adore – and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty’ (BGE 229). Nietzsche does not have the same concept of virtue as Aristotle, but rational activity of the soul is not the crux of that difference. For Nietzschean flourishing to occur, the Dionysian activities of the will to power require structure to function in the social world and to pursue knowledge-seeking which is integral to overcoming and creative growth. Like Aristotle, Nietzsche requires that one be able to exert control over the spirit or, in Nietzschean language, over the chaotic nature of the drives through the exercise of the intellectual conscience. In fact, the most cherished human experiences that involve the completion of difficult tasks and result in feelings of elation and freedom occur because the will to power has been sublimated and transformed. Projects that result in human flourishing often take tremendous self-reflection and contemplation, much more than simply the expression of instinctual drives. Nietzsche does not discard the importance of rational activity. Instead he insists on the importance of his Dionysian element of creative growth in addition to the use of the intellectual faculties and the body.3

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In The Gay Science (370), Dionysian energy is associated with courage, superabundance, and creative power, qualities that are also connected to the bestowing virtue in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche problematizes the notion of ‘virtue’ in both The Gay Science (21) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (ZI ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’; ZII: ‘On the Virtuous’), but he also employs the concept of virtue for his own re-evaluative use in Beyond Good and Evil (284) and throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s contention with virtue is centred on its instrumentalization and he takes up his critique in two ways: either one is used in the interest of the group under the name of virtue (GS 21) or one uses the notion of virtue as a means to seek out reward without admitting to doing so (ZII ‘On the Virtuous’). Thus what is really praised when virtues are praised is, first, their instrumental nature and, secondly, the instinct in every virtue (der blinde in jeder Tugend waltende Trieb) that refuses to be held in check by the over-all advantages for the individual himself – in sum, the unreason in virtue that leads the individual to allow himself to be transformed (umwandeln) into a mere functioning of the whole. The praise of virtue is the praise of something that is privately harmful – the praise of instincts that deprive a human being of his noblest selfishness and the strength for the highest autonomy. (GS 21)

Examples of the kind of virtue that can have deleterious results on the quality of life of the individual include industriousness (fleissigste) and selflessness. Nietzsche states that the virtue of selflessness is involved in a contradiction because the selflessness of the other is praised to bring oneself advantage. Regarding industriousness, Nietzsche claims that while it can bring private advantage such as wealth, it blunts the senses often causing illness and decline (GS 21). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s analysis of virtue moves away from his critique of how it exploits the individual and becomes an ethical challenge posed directly to the reader. In the first part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes about the importance of having a virtue that is one’s own, not one of ‘the herd’. He underlines the Christian practices of body hatred, self-denial, and the seeking of other-worldly rewards and implores his readers to reject them for an ‘earthly virtue’, a virtue that is a creative invention of the individual (ZI ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’). Nietzsche further pursues the agonistic and re-evaluative questioning of virtue4 in the second part of Zarathustra when he writes: ‘You want moreover to be paid, you virtuous ones! You want rewards for virtue and Heavens for earths and the eternal for your today? And now you

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are angry with me for teaching that there is no reward-and pay-master? And verily, I do not even teach that virtue is its own reward’ (ZII ‘On the Virtuous’). Through the character of Zarathustra, Nietzsche is attempting to shift how his readers conceptualize virtue. Nietzsche is rejecting Christian–Platonic romanticism and the moralistic tradition of reward and punishment associated with it and replacing them with the ethics of the free spirit, the passionate knowledge-seeker, and the bestower. These ethics include the development of the intellectual conscience in the interest of overcoming and growth. Once again, Nietzsche is asking his readers to value their ‘own source of experience’ (HAH 292) by claiming that virtue should be self-created rather than otherimposed.5 However, this does not prevent Nietzsche from presenting a number of virtues himself, virtues that are connected to his therapeutic approach to doing philosophy. In Beyond Good and Evil (284) Nietzsche names four virtues: courage (Muthes), sympathy (Mitgefühls), insight (Einsicht), and solitude (Einsamkeit). In this section, he speaks of ‘us’ to his readers and friends which makes it clear that these virtues are qualities he admires and believes are important to have. He is especially emphatic about solitude, stating that interactions in society are unclean. Nietzsche thinks that solitude is important because it allows for the quiet required for self-reflection and the re-evaluation of one’s beliefs. To renounce the ideological burdens that one is carrying and transform from the camel spirit into the lion one requires solitude (ZI ‘On the Three Transformations’). Nietzsche qualifies this statement by also explaining that too much solitude can become restrictive. When a man has been sitting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year out, day and night; when in his cave – it may be a labyrinth or a gold mine (Goldschacht) – he has become a cave bear or treasure digger (Schatzgräber ) or a treasure guard (Schatzwächter) and dragon; then even his concepts eventually acquire a peculiar twilight color, an odor just as much of depth as of must, something incommunicable and recalcitrant (Unmittheilsames und Widerwilliges ) that blows at every passerby like a chill. (BGE 289)

In this passage, Nietzsche explains that one who spends too much time alone in contemplation can become lost within it, in the twists and turns of the labyrinth, but one may also discover a source of creativity, a new knowledge (‘gold mine’). The danger in the case of the discovery of a new knowledge and creative energy is becoming too attached to it so that one cannot measure its value nor communicate its relevance to others. Nietzsche implies that the solitary pursuit

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of self-understanding can be fruitful, but it can also result in an isolation that stifles the work of the intellectual conscience that is required to test the relevance of one’s convictions. One needs the opinions and voices of other people to refresh one’s critical capacities and provide variant perspectives on beliefs. For example, after many years of solitude and the accumulation of new insights, Zarathustra comes down out of the mountain to share his ideas with others. To avoid the plight of a ‘treasure digger’ who becomes lost in the labyrinth of their thoughts or so attached to them that they become a ‘treasure guard and dragon’, Nietzsche suggests that one must go out into the world and test out one’s ideas on and with other people. Otherwise one hears only an echo: ‘In solitude. – Those who live alone do not speak too loud nor write too loud, for they fear the hollow echo – the critique of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude’ (GS 182). Nietzsche’s understanding of friendship is closely linked to the passionate pursuit of knowledge and how friends engage with one another to strengthen their beliefs. Even with a rich internal life, one requires other people to learn and grow. In the figure of Zarathustra we find a character who has passed through the camel and lion stage in solitude, and become a child again, creating a new wisdom that he wants to share with others. In the prologue Zarathustra states, ‘Behold! I am overburdened with my wisdom: like the bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands outstretched to receive it’ (ZI P1). Zarathustra returns as a bestowing friend, exercising the bestowing virtue by offering up his insights to others because he ‘wants to become human again’ (ZI P1). The bestowing virtue is associated with an accumulation of knowledge and strength that must be expressed, given away to others so that the process of learning, growth, and transformation can occur again. The virtue that the bestowing friend has, how it is developed over time, and how it is to be expressed to others is discussed at length during the end of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The development of the bestowing virtue comes about through the accumulation and refinement of knowledge and the self-transformation that is associated with this process, which is described as requiring great discipline. ‘When you despise what is pleasant and the soft bed, and cannot bed down far enough from the soft-hearted: there lies the origin of your virtue’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). To have the bestowing virtue one must become ‘sacrifices and bestowals’ through the ‘thirst to pile up all riches in your souls’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). This thirst is not one of a hoarder

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because one acquires precisely to bestow. Zarathustra explains: ‘You compel all things towards you and into you, that they may flow back out of your wells as gifts of your love’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). Nietzsche states that one requires great confidence and resilience to be a bestower. In the character of Zarathustra, the bestower is exemplified as a position of leadership, self-assurance, and power. The bestower is someone who has learnt to shape their drives into a trajectory that allows for their purposeful creation to be extended to others. The possession of the bestowing virtue is representative of Nietzschean flourishing because the bestower has reached a place of self-mastery having attained both knowledge and power that sets them apart from their past selves and other people. The position of the bestower is one that Nietzsche frames as someone who has undergone much striving. In Nietzsche’s ethics of friendship, the bestower leads through teaching and commanding others who have yet to accumulate the wisdom they hold. They are a self-affirming person who desires to command others through their generosity. Nietzsche explains that underneath their generosity is a ‘lust to rule’. Lust to rule (Herrschsucht): but who would call it lust (Sucht) when what is high longs downward for power! Verily, there is nothing sick or lustful in such longing and condescension! That the lonely heights might not remain eternally lonely and sufficient unto themselves; that the mountain might come down to the valley and the winds of the heights to the lowlands: – Oh who could find the right baptism-and virtue-names for such a yearning! ‘Bestowing virtue’ – thus did Zarathustra once name the unnameable. And at that time it happened also – and verily, it happened for the first time! – that his word hallowed selfishness, the wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells up from a powerful soul: – – from a powerful soul, to which the lofty body belongs, one that is beautiful, victorious, restorative (erquickliche), around which each and every thing becomes a mirror. (ZIII ‘On the Three Evils’ 2)

Nietzsche qualifies the bestower’s want to lead and rule over others as a positive characteristic. However, he also implies that the bestower’s height places them in a position of loneliness that their leadership position attempts to appease. But what does Nietzsche mean by the statement that everything becomes a mirror around the bestower: is this meant to be a praise of the bestower’s self-love or a critique of it? If the bestower relates to other people as a mirror, it seems that their ‘friend’ would only be a means for them to acquire greater power or

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to see themself as a reflection. This likely means that they do not attempt to understand the other people that they engage with and pursue unilateral rather than reciprocal relational dynamics. Conway claims that Nietzsche is following Aristotle’s lead that the friend is another self, ‘an external instantiation of one’s own virtuous character’ (Conway 1997: 57). Both Aristotle and Nietzsche mention that a friend is like a mirror to the self; they also state that friendship proceeds from and is connected to the relationship that one has to oneself.6 Although Nietzsche may follow Aristotle in some respects, it is a misreading of Nietzsche to assume that the friend is a representation of virtue or a direct extension of oneself unless one views all friends as projections of oneself. In Nietzsche’s agonistic friendship, friends come together out of admiration and a shared goal and thus do see something new in each other that they admire and aspire towards. However, what is also important to realize is that when Nietzsche writes about the mirror relationship of friends in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he states that the face of the friend ‘is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’, my italics). This means that what the friend reflects back to you (‘rough and imperfect’) will not be an accurate representation of who you are, and the image can affect you in a multitude of ways, both harmful and helpful. Nietzsche does not share the supposition of Aristotelean virtue friendship that Conway refers to in which the mirroring unity of friends necessarily increase and reflect virtue. Nietzsche expresses much greater caution about the reciprocity that friends can share. In his Lectures on Ethics Kant raises a concern about the tension between friendship and self-love when he states that real life is not able to cohere with the expectations of friendship. The ‘idea’ of friendship proposes friendship as an extension of generous self-love, but reality does not live up to this; rather we grapple with the conflict between self-love and the love of others which is not readily reconcilable (LE Collins 27:422). This appears to be especially relevant for the bestower whose goals are connected to self-affirmation and the accumulation of energy and strength. But what about other kinds of friendships? In a number of passages from the middle period Nietzsche appears to agree with Aristotle who states that friendship proceeds from and is connected to the relationship that one has to oneself.7 On the topic of expressing love and benevolence to others, Nietzsche emphasizes that it is very important to first develop self-love and self-understanding in order to be capable of appreciating others.8 One can find in both Nietzsche and Aristotle the supposition that the degree to which one loves the self is reflected in one’s relationships with others.

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Thus, healthy self-concern can enable interpersonal relationships instead of detracting from them. This is especially the case for Aristotle whose notion of virtue friendship includes the assumption that the excellence and success of the friend becomes yours as well. Aristotle writes that ‘in loving the friend they love what is good for themselves; for when a good person becomes a friend he becomes a good for his friend’ (NE 1157b33–4). When one views the friend as another self in virtue friendship, it involves both watching and performing virtuous acts: the shared experience and belief in virtue allows for the friends to feel closer and identify with each other more intensely. Aristotle claims that if a good man loves himself, he helps both himself and others through his noble acts (NE 1169a10–15). This means that what may appear as self-sacrifice is an act of self-love, since giving to the other will raise one in nobility (NE 1169a20– 1169b).9 There is a connection between loving others and loving oneself for Nietzsche as well, one which moves in both directions and is closer to Aristotle than would be expected. For example in Daybreak (401), when speaking about selfdevelopment, Nietzsche claims that if one cannot love other people, one will be unable to find anything lovable in oneself either. At the start and end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the metaphor of the star/sun suggests that Zarathustra, like it, cannot find happiness without having the opportunity to shine, nourish, and bestow onto people.10 In addition, Nietzsche’s notion of higher friendship is connected to self-cultivation and the quality of interaction that friends have is very much dependent upon the level of confidence and self-love that each friend holds. The notion that self-love extends into loving others and that friendship in turn provides one with a feeling of goodwill is an observation found in Aristotle, consistent with his notion of virtue friendship. For Nietzsche, to have ‘a good friendship’ the friends must have a ‘great respect for the other, more indeed than for himself ’, and a love for the other that does not exceed self-love; they also share a non-invasive intimacy (AOM 241). In Nietzsche’s agonistic ethics of friendship, a feeling of mutual goodwill must exist for the friends to come together and pursue a shared project. Yet, Nietzsche also asserts that friendship can be harmful to the self and that it is sometimes necessary to abandon the friend out of self-interest (GS 98). In addition, Nietzsche’s assessment of egoism as a natural disposition for human action (HAH 133) serves to affirm self-love and bolster individuality against the pressure to assimilate that he believes is motivated by possessive love (GS 14), active in all relationships. Thus, one of the

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roles of self-love in Nietzsche’s ethics is to stimulate a higher quality of friendship, but self-love also acts to shield oneself from the assimilating drives of the other. According to Williams, Nietzsche appreciates Aristotle’s account of friendship for his recognition of the inter-relation between egoism and altruism, his rejection of the view that they are ‘mutually exclusive’, and ‘his view that the utter selflessness and self-denial required by altruism are impossible’ (Williams 2012: 55). As Williams explains, what is particularly interesting about both Aristotle and Nietzsche to a present-day reader is that they do not share the assumption that in friendship one should restrain self-interest. Having a healthy selfishness or ‘modest egoism’ (Ansell-Pearson 2011: 179) is viewed as strengthening the individual and thus making them a more confident and generous person. Nietzsche also looks to therapeutic devices that can focus egoism because he believes that self-love has a propensity to turn into an assimilating drive. Perhaps out of concern for those individuals who have the potential to offer something as admirable as the one who already has the bestowing virtue, Nietzsche highlights the dangers of assimilation in love relationships (GS 14). For one who is inspired by the urge to overpower, an agonistic friendship brings structure to those desires so that they can be focused into shared self-growth and learning instead of simple overpowering. An envious person, for example, is provided with an opportunity to exercise frustration during the competition between agonistic friends when they become ‘drainage ditches for the affects of envy’ (BGE 260). Envy becomes an inspiration for the agonistic friend ‘to raise himself up (erheben) to the height of the other’ (WS 29) in the tradition of the Greeks ‘the soul of which was contest’ (D 38). The hunger to exert domination or cruelty that the victory-seeker or envious person has is expressed within the controlled medium of Nietzschean agonistic friendship. Nietzsche, unlike Aristotle, writes about the assimilating nature of human beings and provides his agonistic ethics of friendship as a possible remedy for the desire to overpower and assimilate by creating a type of friendship that helps focus one’s desires into a trajectory of striving through ‘a shared higher thirst for an ideal above’ (GS 14). This differs from the bestowing friend who appears to be an exception to this rule because their creative power (built on earlier experiences of passionate knowledge-seeking and agonistic friendship) means that their role is to lead and teach, to distribute new wisdom to others before they undertake the striving stage again. Aristotle does not recognize the possibility of a competitive friendship based on striving towards a goal or anything like Nietzsche’s agonistic friends; he

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does not have a therapeutic notion of friendship to help those struggling with emotional angst. Just as a good man does not experience inner conflict for Aristotle, so should a good friendship not be troubled by interpersonal conflict. For Aristotle higher friendships involve mutual understanding (EE 1240b) not enmity and competition.11 ‘For friendship is community, and we are related to our friend as we are related to ourselves’ (NE 1171b32–3). Nietzsche does not disagree with the statement that friendship is community – he does seek a future community of free spirits but opposition and difference in the interest of creating greatness (not concord and similarity) are at the centre of that community. Friendship is at the foundation of society for Aristotle; he writes that friendship is a natural human inclination that brings stability to civic life. Concord is similar to friendship and when rulers try to ‘expel civil conflict’ they are also attempting to be rid of enmity and to promote friendship (NE 1155a25–30). Nietzsche does not point directly to the social good that friendship engenders; however, his notion of agonistic friendship provides a framework for human relationships that supports greater variance and struggle between friends. Nietzsche views conflict as an opportunity for self-understanding and greater achievement. His ethics promote flourishing through oppositional relationships that affirm difference on an interpersonal and societal level and in the development of the great individual through the bestowing virtue.

Aristotle’s great-souled man, Nietzsche’s bestowing friend, and the meaning of nobility We have already seen that there is a link to be made between Aristotle and Nietzsche’s senses of self-love. However, commentators have overlooked making a comparative analysis between Nietzsche’s bestower and Aristotle’s megalopsychos even though both are noble types characterized by their selfloving personas. As such, it is important to consider how Nietzsche’s notion of the bestowing virtue might align with the virtue of megalopsychia. In the following sections, I examine the character traits of Aristotle’s megalopsychos, his relationship to the pursuit of honour, and the challenges he meets in friendship. This account is followed by an analysis of Nietzsche’s bestowing virtue and its re-evaluation of ‘the noble’ which includes a rejection of the Aristotelian notion of honour for the value of self-creation. I will ask whether Nietzsche’s bestower is, like the megalopsychos, an exception to the general claims that are made about

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friendship by Aristotle. Do the high characters of both the great-souled man and the bestower make their experiences of friendship different from others? This analysis provides insight into the ideas of Aristotle and Nietzsche and more broadly into the limits of friendship, particularly for those rare persons of high character (such as the bestower and the great-souled). Who is Aristotle’s megalopyschos? In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle explains that the great-souled man is a complex person of extraordinary excellence and pride whose life revolves around his capacity to achieve the correct acquisition of honour. Aristotle portrays him as the most virtuous kind of human being, yet he is also someone whose need for superiority makes it difficult for him to receive or acknowledge benefits from others. The requirements of his character involve a disciplined appearance that seems self-sufficient, but his vulnerability to fate and the opinions of others also make him a potentially tragic figure. Aristotle’s megalopsychos can be read as an attempt to merge the Homeric value of greatness with Aristotelian moderation.12 What this vision seems to lack for us in a post-Christian world is a sufficient concern for humility, care for others, and the value of equality.13 It is likely that Nietzsche appreciated, along with the more heroic qualities of the megalopsychos, precisely these lacks. Aristotle writes that honour is ‘the greatest of external goods’ and the ‘prize of virtue’ (NE 1123b20–35). He considers it reasonable and good that a person seeks recognition and affirmation through honour for their qualities and deeds when they are of great merit.14 The great-souled man is described as an exemplar of the virtuous man whose remarkable accomplishments benefit the city; he is the most deserving of esteem. However, one cannot help but notice that he is also particular about who he receives honours from: he cannot accept honours from ordinary people, but only from ‘excellent people’ because their recognition is the only kind that is meaningful to him (NE 1124a5–12). The megalopsychos views himself as above most people and honours so any esteem expressed for him must have the level of grandeur fitting for his station. In his efforts to appear less vulnerable to the opinion of others and to fate, the megalopsyschos cultivates a moderate and even detached attitude to his life events (NE 1124a12–20). He is eager to maintain his position of superiority, so any sign of weakness must be avoided. He may seem arrogant. His arrogance, however, is an expression of the resilience he requires to shoulder the very large expectations he and others have of himself. Aristotle explains honour as a mean between the pusillanimous who does not think himself sufficiently deserving of honours and the vain who overestimates

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the extent to which he should be esteemed (NE 1123b10–17). Part of what makes the megalopsychos admirable for Aristotle is his intense concern for achieving the greatest honour possible (Crisp 2006: 173). But, this drive for high honour presents unique challenges and dangers to the great-souled. As someone who stands above most in virtue, the great-souled lacks peers and friends as well as people who can adequately recognize the significance of his tasks and achievement. Yet, to be fully successful, the megalopsychos requires the appropriate recognition from the right people. This means that although the great-souled appears to be self-sufficient and aims to appear as such, he is very much dependent upon others and their affirmation for his self-worth. Aristotle suggests that the great-souled man faces challenges in his interpersonal relationships because his character is so much more virtuous than almost all other people. Although he mediates his behaviour with different people depending upon their station, and Aristotle implies he does so with good judgement, it is likely he will offend some, invoke jealousy in others, and at times err in his opinion of others (as Zarathustra does when he attempts to bestow). Aristotle writes that he is more interested in the truth than the opinion of others (NE 1124b28–9); however, this is concerning because if he is so disconnected from others because he is above them, one is left wondering how he can access ‘the truth’. How can the great-souled man have accurate knowledge of other people and the events that he must give himself to if he is so removed from them? Aristotle’s statement that the megalopsychos is correct to look down on others since he has the right opinion of himself (NE 1124b6–7) suggests circularity in his judgement that can easily lead the great-souled to hubris. Aristotle states that it is better (in general) to be loved (NE 1159a26) than to be honoured. But is the great-souled man an exception to this rule? His inaccessibility makes it difficult, if not unlikely, to have love relationships; his generosity makes him lovable by those who receive it (NE 1120a23), but he will not accept the love of those who he does not consider worthy of loving him. Aristotle writes that ‘benefactors seem to love their beneficiaries more than the beneficiaries love them’ (NE 1167b18–20) and this could suggest that the greatsouled man as civic benefactor loves the citizens, except for the fact that he seems to care more about the moral significance of his deeds than the affectations of others. It seems that the megalopsychos’ need for superiority and isolation above others ironically makes it so he must seek his meaning through honour most of all. The height (and isolation) make him prone to moral self-indulgence and excessive pride, or hubris, and the inevitable harms that follow.

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We must not overlook that, to a certain degree, the megalopsychos cannot separate his self-worth from the community (even if he thinks he can). Aristotle views the human being as a social and political animal who is shaped by their relationship with others (NE 1169a19–20). His virtuous person acquires their sense of ethical merit through community standards. The megalopsychos looks to the needs of his community to find deeds that warrant his skill and concurrently rejects the requests and praises of others that do not have sufficient import to demand his recognition. But, we must ask: Who decides the hierarchy of these projects? The civic community does, but the great-souled man can err and unwittingly believe it to be a product of his own excellent judgement. Like all of us, ‘the great-souled man’s self-knowledge is mediated by conventional opinion’ (Howland 2002: 42). Since conventional opinion is so prone to generalizations and misinterpretations, it seems that it is important to have friends to question it, to acquire self-knowledge, and to help one achieve a more measured opinion. In tragedy, it is the solitude of the hero, their inability to listen to others that is instrumental of their downfall. Friendship is the possible redeemer of the heroic great-souled man, that is, if his pride allows for him to accept it. Aristotle suggests that friendship is a more direct pathway to affirmation than receiving honours because one is loved directly instead of being esteemed for one’s accomplishments (NE 1159a25–30). It is not all clear, however, whether Aristotle thinks virtue friendship or megalopsychia is the greater good: he states that greatness of soul is a crown of the virtues (NE 1124a1–4) and that honour is ‘the greatest of external goods’ (NE 1123b20), but he also praises friendship, writing that ‘having friends seems to be the greatest external good’ because even if one has everything else, without friends one cannot be happy (NE 1169b1– 11). This latter statement suggests that even if one has honour, they require friendship  to experience happiness.15 Further, Aristotle suggests that without friends it will be difficult to develop and sustain a virtuous nature.16 Is it possible that the megalopscyhos is an exception to these rules? Can his exceedingly rare character trump the usual requirements that Aristotle considers necessary for living a good life? Although Aristotle does not dismiss the possibility that a great-souled man can have friends, he has qualities that make friendship difficult and even improbable. When he has received something from another, the megalopsychos will over-reciprocate so that he will gain the more powerful position. His unease with being a beneficiary, his propensity to forget when he has been one, together with his good memory of those times when he has benefitted

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the other (NE1124b10–15) limit his ability to have friends. He appears as inconsiderate and, in some instances, disrespectful in his ingratitude to those who have attempted to extend their assistance to him.17 In order to feel capable of accomplishing great tasks and sustaining the threats associated with them, it seems that the megalopsychos must convince himself that he is reliant on no one. The great-souled man’s selective memory and prideful character is a potential obstacle to both his self-knowledge and his role as civic benefactor. If he does not remember those who have benefitted him and he resists the help of others, he may find himself alone at inopportune moments, even (and most likely) during some point when he is attempting to fulfil his great act. His belief in his own greatness is based on an incorrect assumption that he is self-sufficient (Howland 2002: 47). Although he values honesty, this appears to be exclusively in relation to his own words because he avoids conversation about himself to maintain a position of power. Jacob Howland argues that great-souled men are not capable of friendship because when they come together, neither will be able to accept criticism and thus they will be incapable of learning from each other. Both think of themselves as perfect in virtue and self-sufficient so although they may admire one another, they will be unwilling to listen to each other (Howland 2002: 51). This is a challenge that great-souled men face, but is it inevitable? Aristotle’s megalopsychos seeks superiority and thus in a relationship with another who he perceives as an equal, he will attempt to prove himself through competitive interactions that require observing and watching the other.18 Although competitive interaction is not indicative of friendship for Aristotle, it may lead to Nietzschean friendship if there is a shared goal and mutual admiration. For example, if two great-souled men enter into a goal-oriented friendship with each other in which the meaning of the friendship is structured by their shared life goals as great benefactors, they have the opportunity to provide each other with advice that would be of value to one another. One may respond that perhaps it is possible, but also likely to be short-lived: the two megalopsychoi will not trust one another for very long because of their proud natures and the desire to remain superior. If their aims are too alike any friendship that is built will give way to their ambitions and the attempts of one to overpower the other; this will break the agonistic friendship which is based on learning through shared struggle rather than overpowering. For a friendship between two great-souled men to last, their interests would have to differ: they could not be interested in achieving the same accomplishments in the same city. If they were at different life stages due to age, from different

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cities, or involved in different areas of achievement, such as one in politics and the other in learning or the arts, this would allow for friendship because they would not be in direct competition with each other and thus, they would be able to intellectually contribute to the other’s life without feeling threatened. The great-souled man may be capable of friendship, but it must be with one who has significant enough differences not to be a threat to his aims.19 The great-souled man may only be interested in being friends with those who are not equal to him.20 As a lover of the noble, the megalopsychos will express friendship to someone who affirms his superiority and facilitates his actualization of virtue. Although the great-souled man should aspire to friendship with someone who is greater than him so that he can further cultivate himself, he also needs friendships that are useful to accomplish certain tasks and will choose people who fit this role accordingly, making sure that they receive good benefit for it. For Aristotle, there are better friendships than the unequal one in which ‘one reaps the noble while the other gains the merely useful’ (Hanley 2002: 19) namely those of virtue. But, perhaps the friendship of equals is not for the megalopsychos? As a civic benefactor who loves the noble and seeks out honour most of all, he does not seem to have the leisure necessary to pursue virtue friendship. He must value honour more than friendship because his highest goal is worldly recognition and friends are, for him, people who help or hinder him from this achievement. I think Robert Crisp is incorrect when he claims that Aristotle generally places honour above friendship (Crisp 2006: 162–3). However, when it comes to the great-souled man honour is necessarily more important to him because he relies on his belief in himself and its affirmation by others to strive to be a man worthy of his title. Nietzsche comes closest to Aristotle when he discusses what is noble and the behaviour of a bestower with respect to their generosity. Like the megalopsychos, the bestower faces difficulties in having egalitarian friendships: for both figures this struggle is related to their position of power and their shared desire to maintain it. However, the role of the bestower differs: they do not have the same concern for honour nor are they a civic benefactor and, as such, they are more open to the pursuit of knowledge and having relationships that contribute to learning. The bestower recognizes their reliance on others and how their own self-worth is dependent upon being able to give to others and to rule over them. They may struggle with a desire to be self-sufficient, but they are not as mistaken about their independence as is the megalopsychos. The bestower is a more imperfect figure who does not have the same heroic expectations imposed

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onto them (they impose them on themselves). Their role is to be a benefactor to free spirits and philosophers of the future, to teach them techniques for selfovercoming. Their greatest frustration is finding the right recipients for their gifts: friends who can understand the relevance of what they want to give to them. However, the bestower is unafraid of trying multiple times to achieve their goals (as seen through the character of Zarathustra) because they are not a product of the civic community like the great-souled man who relies on honours. Instead, the bestower is a free spirit. What the bestower and megalopsychos are united in is being misunderstood. They look to others for their self-value (the bestower through the reception and understanding of their gifts and the megalopsychos by being esteemed) but cannot find companions capable of comprehending the depth of their projects. Although the bestower’s good does not hinge on honour, it is dependent upon others because they search for the students who will continue their project. It is this shared difficulty that unites them: whereas the bestower turns away from the world and goes into solitude saddened by the inability to reach others, the megalopsychos enacts his frustration through moral self-indulgence. In both instances, their failures can result in harming those who are their beneficiaries. One reading of this concomitance is that both Aristotle and Nietzsche consider a person of noble generosity and great virtue prone to tragic and very solitary ends. However, Nietzsche’s bestower as a former knowledge-seeking friend (who wants to find agonistic friends again) is less susceptible to the blinding pride that propels the megalopsychos to his own destruction. In The Gay Science 55, Nietzsche asks, ‘What makes a person “noble” (edel)?’21 He states that nobility is not about sacrifice or acting without the self in mind. Instead it involves ‘the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet’ and ‘a courage without any desire for honours; a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives (mittheilt) to men and things’.22 The Nietzschean value of nobility is generous and self-creating; Nietzsche wants a new nobility to emerge that will not be bound by the norms of social contract.23 Nietzsche’s noble (vornehme) creates their own beliefs and views themselves as correct without requiring the acknowledgement of others (BGE 260). They share with Aristotle’s megalopsychos a strong sense of responsibility (BGE 272) as well as a feeling of superiority and a need to maintain this feeling (BGE 260).24 Like the great-souled man, Nietzsche’s noble takes much greater risks than the common person (BGE 276). Nietzsche describes the noble (vornehm) as having an egoism that ‘hinders it: quite generally it does not like to look “up” – but either ahead,

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horizontally and slowly or down: it knows itself to be at a height’ (BGE 265). This sounds remarkably similar to the great-souled man whose pride isolates him from accepting advice or assistance from others. What seems to prevent Nietzsche’s noble from self-indulgence and wilful blindness is his idea that a noble person should be a knowledge-seeker who learns from their suffering. Although Nietzsche states that reputation is a powerful force (GS 52, 58), he also states that a knowledge-seeker should not allow the opinion of others to limit them. Nietzsche writes that the ‘culture of nobility (vornehmen)’ has changed for the better ‘thanks to the work of our freespirits’ who have made it acceptable for those raised as aristocrats (Adels) to pursue wisdom and studies (D 201). The aristocrat need not isolate themself from the world, but instead can open themself up to forms of knowledge that were previously unfamiliar. The catch is that a serious knowledge-seeker cannot be too concerned with having a good reputation because one who is learning is always changing and this will inevitably threaten the coherence of their reputation. Nietzsche states that being changeable is considered dishonourable or disreputable (gilt als unehrenhaft) (GS 296) and this implies that one who aims to maintain their aristocratic status will either choose to limit their pursuit of knowledge or create an appearance that does not disclose their goals and their changeability. Nietzsche’s re-evaluative concept of nobility is not some class type. Rather, it is a character type who is self-loving, self-creating, and endures suffering. Although Nietzsche believes privilege and wealth can provide an advantage for one to practice the qualities of nobility, such privileges are neither sufficient nor necessary. In fact, he believes that too much advantage causes stagnation. For Nietzsche, one is shaped by suffering and the skill with which one endures hardship is telling of one’s character. In Beyond Good and Evil (270) Nietzsche discusses a different kind of wisdom that comes about through suffering. Nobility is associated with the experience of undergoing such suffering that a profound insight is gained that separates one from others. He states that profound suffering ‘makes noble’ (Das tiefe Leiden macht vornehm; es trennt) (BGE 270); suffering makes one more knowledgeable, even more understanding and worldly, but concurrently moves one away from others because of its difficult insights.25 Unlike Aristotle, for Nietzsche insight does not bring one happiness, it brings one frustration and even horror. To sustain contact with the terrible truths that are an inevitable part of gaining wisdom, the noble becomes stronger, more self-loving and self-creating. ‘The noble (vornehme) soul has reverence for

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itself ’ (BGE 287). One who embodies Nietzschean nobility creates something new to turn away from the disgust at their own mortality and the unpredictable character of learning. Nietzsche’s noble is self-loving and affirming to endure; they create new meanings and significances for things, changing values so that they can place a veil over the unstable character of existence. However, they do not reject the pursuit of knowledge in the interest of their own self-creation. Nietzsche’s re-evaluative notion of nobility (as vornehm, edel, and Adel) involves a self-loving and self-creating person who refuses to turn away from the difficult pursuit of knowledge that is both disturbing and isolating; they reject a need for honours and instead accept agonistic friends.26 How does one who becomes a bestower differ from the noble? They are much more concerned with sharing time with others and giving to them to build a future that embraces this-worldly values. They have already learnt from having agonistic friends in the past and now seek out students that will one day become teachers and leaders themselves. Generosity is characteristic of both the noble and the bestower for Nietzsche. In Human, All Too Human (497), Nietzsche describes what he calls the ‘involuntary noble (vornehm)’ as one who wants nothing from others yet continually bestows gifts onto them. In Daybreak, he explains a magnanimous (Grossmuth) person as one who from a place of great prosperity (Reichthum) takes pleasure in giving what is his to others (315). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he returns to this idea stating that noble (edel) souls want nothing for free from life, but rather ask what they can give back to life (ZIII ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 5). Nietzsche values a proud generosity, and this is considered not only a quality of nobility, but, like Aristotle, is also indicative of magnanimity (Grossmuth) (D 315). One can recognize strong conceptual links between Nietzsche’s noble and Aristotle’s megalospsychos and bestowing is considered a noble act for Nietzsche. However, Nietzsche’s bestower differs from his noble and Aristotle’s megalospychos in that he does not have the same degree of separation from those to whom he bestows. The bestower seeks out a response from their recipients, inspired by the hope a mentor has for their apprentice. The bestower wants their friends to continue their project.

Character as an impasse to friendship Is Williams correct to claim that Nietzsche’s ‘attempt to think philia through the noble self-love as modelled by self-sufficient megalopsychos … undermines

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and denies the mutuality and interdependence at the core of Aristotle’s concept’ of friendship? (Williams 2012: 64) Nietzsche’s bestower is a self-loving person of generosity whose attempts at friendship demonstrate a need for recognition from their beneficiaries. Like the megalopsychos, they are less self-sufficient than is assumed, but for different reasons. The bestower does not seek honour like the great-souled or the old aristocrat that Nietzsche wants to replace with his knowledge-seeking value-creating nobility. The bestower looks for an implicit recognition through the reactions of their recipients: how they have accepted their bestowals and what they have done with them. Nietzsche considers friendship between unequals difficult, but possible precisely because he, like Aristotle, believes that shared goals and love unite people. To examine the character of the bestower in greater detail, we should return to the text of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ (ZI), Nietzsche writes about the development of the bestowing virtue and how its acquisition is built upon learning, a controlled desire for power, and love. The bestower is a passionate knowledge-seeker who learns and grows out of their desire to offer back to others what they have gained. Their growth through learning and self-love develops the confidence necessary to have unflinching faith in their will, so much so that it is viewed as their own necessity. A feeling of power and moral independence is associated with the entrance into becoming a bestower. Nietzsche writes: ‘When you are elevated above praise and blame, and your will would command all things, as the will of a lover: there lies the origin of your virtue’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 1). Resilience and noble separation are characteristic of the bestower who distinguishes themselves from those who seek comfort. They do not share in the excessively prideful nature of the megalopsychos, however, because they must cultivate greater kindness to have their gift accepted by others. The success of their project can only be fulfilled by their recipients, so they care for them and may even change their approach of communicating their gift to gain the full attention of their recipients. The character of the bestower and their project do provide them with considerable obstacles. Although they have an ‘overfull heart’ and ‘a complete world to bestow’ (ZI ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’), it is difficult to find interested companions who are capable recipients. Zarathustra calls his wisdom ‘wild’ and states that his friends will be terrified by it, even want to run away from it (ZII ‘The Child with the Mirror’). The bestower needs friends to find fulfilment, the kind of friend who will accept their insights and provide a foundation for them so that they can have a future. What the bestower wants most of all are

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admiring, courageous and loving friends, characters that might be more akin to beneficiaries or students, who will give the bestower creative reign to shape them. The bestower is not a peer to their friends: their need for power, to teach and to guide others, means that they view themself as above their friends. For their ideas to be accepted, they must seem admirable so that others will be inspired to grow through their envy of them. Their gifts include behaviour that seems unfriendly: they communicate indirectly, express cruelty to their companions, and even abandon them to achieve desired effects of which the companions are unaware (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’). They suffer privately for their attempts at generosity (ZII ‘The Night-Song’). What redeems the bestower from their frustrations is hope in the idea of a future that their gifts will come to shape. Nietzsche outlines some positive effects of the bestowing virtue which benefit both the bestower and those of whom they are close. Acquisition of the bestowing virtue provides satisfaction for the desire to rule through the attainment of greater power, removes loneliness by finding new companions, and is, overall, a healing tonic for its holder, according to Nietzsche (ZIII ‘On the Three Evils’ 2). ‘Through knowing, the body purifies itself; experimenting with knowing, it elevates itself; for the one who understands, all drives sanctify themselves; for the one who is elevated, the soul becomes joyful’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 2). The passionate pursuit of knowledge that allows for one to gain confidence in one’s self and one’s beliefs creates a loving and joyful personality that wants to give to others. The bestower’s most important gift is to teach others to love the earth, to be this-worldly creators: ‘May your spirit and your virtue serve the sense of the earth, my brothers: and may the value of all things be posited anew by you! For that you shall be fighters! For that you shall be creators!’ (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 2). Nietzsche considers one who can complete their project as a bestower and die with ‘hopers and promisers’ around them to have the best kind of death (ZI ‘On Free Death’). The bestower is satisfied when they find companions to carry on their project when they are gone. Do the bestower and the megalopsychos have shared struggles? Nietzsche’s bestower and Aristotle’s megalopsychos appear to share the following challenges: a need for recognition in which self-value depends upon the appraisal of others and a position of superiority that makes egalitarian friendship and peer critique difficult, if not impossible. Can the experience of love, as Aristotle suggests, act as an equalizing function to make friendship possible for the megalopsychos and the bestower?

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Aristotle’s megalopsychos is caught in a self-defeating circle in his need for appraisal: he wants to achieve the greatest honours possible from the most excellent people, but his high virtue makes it unlikely that he will find those adequate to truly honour him. Aristotle states that he can measure himself but, as we have seen, this ability is placed into doubt by two factors: the values that determine that his deeds are good come from the polis, which he views as below himself, and his inability to receive honest observations about himself from others limits his self-knowledge. Whereas all human beings need recognition as social animals, the megalopsychos is compelled to perform extraordinary acts that will be celebrated and positively recognized in an unparallel fashion. The bestower, too, seeks to be correctly recognized, not for their deeds, but instead for the ideas they have to offer. Recognition in their case is connected to the ways in which their ideas are received and what their recipients do with them. Like the megalopsychos they look to a select group for affirmation, yet they accept that this recognition may not, and even should not correspond with their expectations. In Daybreak, Nietzsche suggests that it is most admirable to not require recognition as a bestower, ‘It is so unmagnanimous always to play the bestower and giver and to show one’s face when doing so! But to give and bestow and to conceal one’s name and awareness one is bestowing the favour!’ (D 464) Nietzsche values the generosity of a teacher who shares ideas with students and then encourages the students to decide the validity of their own beliefs (ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 3). The bestower aims for their recipients to take their gift and utilize it for themselves. They appear to be more comfortable with being sacrificed knowing that their self-worth was gained from the act of bestowal and all the necessary steps they took to be ready for it. Nietzsche’s notion of self-creation allows for a more flexible concept of self-worth to emerge that is not bound up in the civic community; one relies on the insights of friends, self-observation, and self-affirmation to create a meaningful life so that one can become a bestower. This does not mean that the bestower is without difficulties: once they have reached their position as a bestower, it becomes unlikely that they will receive insights or observations from others. Like the megalopsychos, they are met with an absence of equals to offer reflections on their character so that they can develop self-knowledge. The projects of both the megalopsychos and the bestower appear to take higher priority in their lives than having friends. Yet, both have people around them and they are not immune from a need to be recognized by others. They seem most capable of unequal friendship in which they have people in their life that

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facilitate their projects without offering honest observations to them. Whereas the bestower suffers from their constant giving and inability to find those they can receive from, the megalopsychos refuses to allow others to know him: this helps him maintain the appearance of an extremely virtuous man. Although Aristotle writes that friendship is unlikely between those of greatly different ranks (NE 1159a1–3), he also states that friends who love in accordance with their worth have lasting friendships (NE 1159b1–3). Friendship can be equalized through love and the correct kind of reciprocity if they can accept that they will not receive the same thing from one another (NE 1158b20). Aristotle states that love should be of a higher proportion to the one who has greater merit: ‘The better person, and the more beneficial, and each of the others likewise, must be loved more than he loves; for when the loving accords with the comparative worth of the friends, equality is achieved in a way, and this seems proper to friendship’ (NE 1158b25–9). Aristotle also claims that ‘the superior person should get more honour, and the needy person more profit, since honour is the reward of virtue and beneficence, while profit is what supplies need’ (NE 1163b3–4). How do these proposals play out for the megalopsychos and the bestower? It seems improbable that the bestower or the megalopsychos will be able to be loved in accordance with their worth because this presumes that the loving friend will be able to understand the extent of their worth. How can a friend assess the worth of someone who is so superior to them (unless it is in terms of their reputation)? Perhaps equalization can occur for the megalopsychos in a utility relationship in which he is honoured, and the other person is benefitted. The problem in this situation remains: the great-souled man may refuse to acknowledge the honour if he does not deem it fitting for his status. As for the bestower, they reject honour, so their path would be through love in Aristotelian terms: they would have to be loved more by their recipients than they love them since they occupy a higher position. Since ‘friendship seems to consist more in loving than in being loved’ (NE 1159a28), however, this means the recipients would be better friends to the bestower than the bestower is to them. Yet, the bestower views their recipients as extensions of their project and even their own creations. In this sense, their relationship to them is closer to Aristotle’s benefactor who loves his beneficiaries more than they love him or to some kind of parental love. Additionally, the bestower laments being unable to find equals and always having to give to the needy (ZII ‘The Night-Song’). They appear frustrated with being unable to find equal friends. Perhaps the friendships of the bestower and

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megalopsychos exceed classification and are exceptionally challenging to sustain because of their unique positions as great benefactors. Aristotle writes that ‘friendship seeks what is possible, not what accords with worth, since that is impossible in some cases’ (NE 1163b16–19). It is impossible to reciprocate to gods, or humans who stand well above others like the megalopsychos and the bestower. Aristotle views honour as the default offering to those of exceedingly high virtue whereas Nietzsche invests himself in the hope that great ideas can be taken up and continued by others. I suggested at the start of this discussion that one who seeks out worldly success above all is unlikely to be a good friend. Neither the bestower nor the megalopsychos can commit themselves to the kind of intimacy and time that is required for Aristotle’s virtue friendship because they are too dedicated to their work and the ideals to which they subscribe. However, Nietzsche’s agonistic friendship is exactly what the megalopsychos and the bestower need. Only another great-souled would have the courage and abilities necessary to tell their like-minded friend to be wary of their hubris. For the bestower who has been self-enclosed in their own wisdom only finding companions to mentor, they need an agonistic friend to show them their limitations and push them towards their next level of overcoming. Both of these characters have to be cautious of becoming so confident of their virtues that they are stuck, locked into the admirable habits that are prescribed by their leadership positions. They require the cruel words of an agonist friend to push them out of this unbending place.

Conclusion Aristotle proclaims that ‘no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods’ (NE 1155a5) and Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of friendship for human flourishing and self-overcoming. Although friendship may be difficult for the megalopsychos and the bestower, it is also what can save them from their respective plights. Nietzsche expresses an important insight when he recognizes that thumotic individuals require agonistic relationships to facilitate their health and growth. Without the observation of one whom he will respect and listen to, the great-souled man is prone to tragic ends of a striving character who wants, above all else, to achieve what is highest to him. The bestower’s difficulty is not the same: they need friends to teach and to mentor, and without them feels that their life lacks significance. Although the bestower does

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not appear to want peer critique, Nietzsche’s concept of wisdom implies that one who is wise will not reject a good argument: they must be open to the thoughts of others because Nietzsche believes that the pursuit of knowledge never ends. This is radically different from Aristotle’s notion of truth, which holds perfect knowledge to be possible. As one who is most interested in relinquishing their experiences and insights to others, the bestower is more open to their recipients because they must learn how to communicate their gift to them. The bestower too seeks immortality, not through worldly honour like the megalopsychos, but through the persistence of their ideas in the lives of their recipients.

5

Women, Love, and the Gendered Troubles of Friendship in Nietzsche and Irigaray

Misogynists (Weiberfeinde) – ‘Woman (Weib) is our enemy’ – out of the man who says that to other men there speaks an immoderate drive which hates not only itself but its means of satisfaction as well — Daybreak, 346 The above quote from Daybreak, originally attributed to Schopenhauer (KSA 14, 220), is one instance of many in which Nietzsche critiques the dysfunction of the male psyche while concurrently framing the female as a lower type of human being and, in this instance, as an instrument for male enjoyment. This leaves the reader confused as to Nietzsche’s intentions: Does he want men to stop conceiving of women as enemies solely for the sake of men? Is Nietzsche critiquing the misogynistic tradition of male dominance or is he merely making a cultural and psychological diagnosis? In this chapter, Nietzsche’s accounts of love and the gendered troubles of friendship will be examined in addition to a selection of his writings on women. In many passages, Nietzsche situates love as an impairment in friendship. He believes that erotic or sexual love, understood as a drive that seeks to possess and control the other, prevents two people from entering the shared project of friendship. The passionate disposition of the lover, and especially the female lover according to Nietzsche, inhibits knowledge-seeking and self-reflection. Nietzsche suggests that in love relationships the power disparity between lovers and the expectations associated with the proximity of love disrupt the possibility of mutual understanding. He writes about a lack of generosity from men which makes it difficult for women to gain the power and intelligence necessary to develop the characteristics that support friendship. Nietzsche suggests that gender roles, and the cultural expectations associated with these types, make friendship very difficult between women and men.

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In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes that friendship is not yet possible for women. Women, according to Nietzsche, are limited to loving and acting as slaves and tyrants (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Nietzsche’s writings on women reveal his own observations about the lack of autonomy women struggled with during his time due to gender inequalities. For example, Nietzsche states that women are ‘at the same time, work slaves and prisoners’ (GMIII 18). However, Nietzsche also asserts that sexual difference and the instincts associated with erotic love necessitate the predominance of male friendship and the absence of female friendships with men and each other (GS 363; ZI ‘On the Friend’). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s assessment of women turns so vitriolic that one wonders if he has not himself become the enemy of women that he warns about in Daybreak (346). In Nietzsche’s account of heterosexual love, erotic love and the limited opportunities for mutual understanding through esteem recognition perpetuate the assimilation of women into a type of woman. The reason why women in Nietzsche’s account cannot move from love relationships into friendship is because they are primarily esteemed for their fulfilment of gender stereotypes. To avoid the perils of assimilation, pointed to by Nietzsche, it is imperative to develop an ethics of friendship that changes the way people approach and love one another. Luce Irigaray presents such an alternative with her account of wonder. She argues that recognition requires a negative movement in which one acknowledges one’s limits in understanding the other. Irigaray designates a transformative and activist potential to love, as a benefit to friendship in its erotic and practical qualities. She claims that love can be cultivated. When it is expressed alongside the passion of wonder, she believes that there is a stronger potential for recognition between two people. With the assistance of Irigaray, Nietzsche’s claim that love is an impasse to friendship is questioned by asking if love need be as assimilating as Nietzsche proposes. This chapter shows that the concept of love and its association with male and female gender roles requires a re-evaluation that Nietzsche was not able to fully conceptualize.

Nietzsche on love and the gendered troubles of friendship In The Gay Science, Nietzsche states that friends strive towards a higher ideal, beyond the incorporating drives that make lovers want to possess, or be possessed (GS 14). The orientation to achievement and shared self-overcoming

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that agonistic friends have initiate a level of mutual recognition that appears impossible in Nietzsche’s account of love. Throughout his writings on women Nietzsche implies, with a provocative and critical voice, that the kind of love that governs human relationships advantages men and harms women. In Nietzsche’s account of love, the greatest recognition that men and women can achieve is a kind of esteem experienced through the fulfilment of gender roles. Nietzsche’s analyses of heterosexual relationships expose the exploitative characteristics of romantic and erotic love, but do not provide solutions. As Simone de Beauvoir notices when she quotes Nietzsche in The Second Sex, Nietzsche is aware of the difficult predicament that women face in their relationships with men (Beauvoir 1957: 642). Nietzsche writes that whereas a woman loves with ‘total devotion’ as if it was her ‘faith’ and ‘gives herself away, man acquires more’ (GS 363). Yet, Nietzsche also states that women are incapable of friendship and are more animalistic (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Nietzsche speaks provocatively about the roles of women and men to inspire his readers into self-questioning about how they fail and exceed these gender roles in their relationships. Nietzsche’s penetrating study of love is one trajectory of his larger project of doing ‘joyful’ or ‘gay’ science in which ‘life itself has become a problem’ and must be interrogated and examined more deeply and severely than has been done before (GS P3). One of Nietzsche’s most important strategies is his questioning of the boundaries between traditional opposites through the collapsing of presumptions about their essential qualities. In this respect, love is no exception. By calling our attention to the base, vulgar, and selfish qualities of love, Nietzsche aims to remove love from its privileged status and demonstrate that what we conceive to be its opposites, such as egoism and greed, are in many instances bound up with the experience of love itself. Thus, we can recognize Nietzsche’s goal of naturalizing human nature through a provocative affirmation of the dissonance inherent in love. In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian–Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred. Nietzsche undermines the self-deceiving idealism about love through the exposure of its less attractive motivations. In The Gay Science (14), ‘The things people call love’, Nietzsche challenges romantic conceptions of love with the claim that love ‘may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism’ (GS 14). He proposes that love is much closer to greed and the lust for possession. According to Nietzsche, love is an instinctual force, one related to our biological and cultural

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drives and, as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363). Moreover, the expression and inculcation of these drives often results in prejudice and even psychological suffering, particularly for women (GS 71). However, he makes no obvious effort to convince his readers that love, in its self-serving expressions, must be changed. Nor does Nietzsche suggest that even the most pervasive delusions in love should be rectified. Instead, he observes that the strong human propensities towards illusions in love are necessary for erotic love to be successful and, in some instances, he praises the creativity in the artistry of love and its masculine and feminine roles. Nietzsche spends considerable efforts emphasizing the dramatic distance that the genders have from each other in terms of the ways in which they love. Nietzsche’s deconstructive attempts to expose the more selfish motivations that underpin love are clearly illustrated in The Gay Science (14). Here, Nietzsche claims that the urge to possess and assimilate to change ‘something new into ourselves’ (as an exercise of one’s power) is behind the experience of both love and greed. Nietzsche writes, Greed (Habsucht) and love: what different feelings these two terms evoke! Nevertheless it could be the same instinct that has two names – once deprecated by those who have, in whom the instinct has calmed down to some extent, and who are afraid for their ‘possessions’ and the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty and who therefore glorify the instinct as ‘good’. (GS 14)1

According to Nietzsche, the emotive experiences of both greed and love arise from the same drive but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named greed or love. He believes that people who feel their possessions (which includes their lover) threatened by others will name the others’ instinct for gain greed, while those who are still in search of something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on this instinct and call it love. Nietzsche states that erotic or sexual love is really a drive towards possession that ‘has been glorified and deified’ (GS 14) by those in search of acquiring something for self-enhancement. Nietzsche is speaking about what Irigaray calls ‘love of the same’: it involves reduction and incorporation ‘through our knowledge, our affection, our customs. At the limit, we no longer see the other, we no longer hear the other, we no longer perceive the others. The other is part of us’ (Irigaray 2004b: 24). Love of the same, according to Irigaray, assimilates the other into oneself. The possessive drive is a characteristic associated strongly with male love in Nietzsche’s writings.

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In Beyond Good and Evil (194), for example, Nietzsche explores the diversity (Verschiedenheit) of men through how three different kinds of men attempt to possess women: Regarding a woman (Weib), for example, those men who are more modest consider the mere use of the body and sexual gratification a sufficient and satisfactory sign of ‘having’ possession. Another type with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession, sees the ‘question-mark’, the illusory quality of such ‘having’ and wants subtler tests, above all in order to know whether the woman does not only give herself to him but also gives for his sake what she has or would like to have: only then does she seem to him ‘possessed’. A third type, however, does not reach the end of his mistrust and desire for having even so: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not possibly do this for a phantom of him. He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality. (BGE 194)

Nietzsche states that the masculine need to possess and control women is expressed through male sexual domination, the demand for personal sacrifice from the female partner, and the desire to obtain unconditional acceptance from her for his most dislikeable characteristics. As we will see, however, Nietzsche’s statements in The Gay Science (363), on the desire of women to be possessed by men in love, appear compatible with the expression of the male possessive drive. Nietzsche discusses how male and female instincts manifest themselves in love relationships in The Gay Science (363) called, ‘How each sex (Geschlecht) has its own prejudice about love’. In this section, Nietzsche asserts that men and women do not have ‘equal rights in love’. He claims that they do not approach the experience of love in the same fashion, nor do they have the same kinds of expectations about the other and the experiences of love that they will share. Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. He claims that whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, ‘to be taken and accepted as a possession’ (GS 363), male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover. He states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are ‘not men’. He proposes that ‘a man who loves like a woman (Weib) becomes

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a slave; while a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect woman’ (GS 363). Nietzsche states that a male lover can take on the character of fidelity over time due to gratitude or a specific taste, but that this is not a masculine quality. This means that if the man and woman in a relationship are behaving in congruence with their specific erotic impulses (the woman to be possessed and the man to seek her out as a possession) they should have a compatible relationship according to Nietzsche. Although there is certainly a note of irony that aims to provoke in The Gay Science (363), it also appears that Nietzsche is claiming that the oppositional modes in love relationships between men and women are based in biological differences between the sexes that correlate with gender roles. These conclusions seem perplexing considering one of the broader goals of The Gay Science highlighted in the preface, which is to undermine the presumed distinctions between traditional opposites. The question to ask in this regard is: Can Nietzsche approach the problem of sex-gender with the same critical distance that he advocates as crucial to his project of doing ‘gay science’? That is, can he undermine the presumed qualitative distinctions between traditional opposites and contribute to a re-evaluation of sexual difference and their associated gender roles, or is it the man/woman distinction an exception for him? We need only attend to the following quote to receive more evidence for this concern. In The Gay Science Nietzsche writes, Woman (Weib) gives herself away, man acquires more – I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition (Natur-Gegensatz) by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, thought of in its entirety as great and full, is nature, and being nature (Natur) it is in all eternity something ‘immoral’. (GS 363)

Nietzsche makes a considerable effort in this aphorism as well as in the aforementioned aphorism14 of The Gay Science to convince the reader that erotic love, as the expression of a natural instinct or drive, is not a ‘good’ to be esteemed, but rather is an egoistic need that gains surplus value through its romantic articulation (see also 370 and 372 for Nietzsche’s views on romanticism and idealism). In its most fundamental form, the drive that underlies love is base, it is the creative drives in culture that give it a sense of splendour or beauty (GS 57). It seems that Nietzsche thinks in the same vein about men and women : the differences are a product of instinctual force that cause them to love distinctively and, as such, we cannot expect egalitarian reciprocity in love

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relationships. However, this still does not clarify Nietzsche’s odd treatment of the ‘natural opposition’ between men and women in the context of the work’s broader challenge to the truth value of conventional opposites. Perhaps we may gain some insight into this by turning to the second part of The Gay Science, in which Nietzsche examines the relationships between men and women in greater detail. The aphorisms of Book Two of The Gay Science qualify what appear to be biological reductionism in aphorisms 14 and 363 by emphasizing the influence of culture and artistry on love. In the opening section of Book Two Nietzsche writes, ‘To the realists’ challenging them to consider how objective is their love of reality. He asks, ‘And what is “reality” for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries’ (GS 57). In this section, Nietzsche states that what one loves has a history that shapes both the concept of love and the things or people that are loved. In the following aphorism (GS 58), he explains how language forms concepts and then proceeds to discuss love between men and women. The fact that the latter discussion comes after his discussion on the impact of language, history, and culture on the perception of reality is not a coincidence: he is doing this to demonstrate that love and the gender roles that men and women play in love are shaped by the same forces. In ‘We artists’ (GS 59) Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive and tyrannical qualities of masculine love and about its fictionalizing tendencies. He states that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they disallow them complete access to her as a possession, they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. Nietzsche writes, ‘The human being under the skin is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love’ (GS 59). According to Nietzsche, one of the unhealthy consequences of this is that the body is negated in the interest of the sacred (GS 59). In this section, Nietzsche draws a parallel between love and the worship of God, suggesting that the idea of romantic love is as fictional as that of God’s omnipresence. One must ignore human physiology and empirical observation to remain faithful to the notions of God and woman: both allow for the creative drive to impose itself with such force that men dismiss any competing information that might dislodge their idealism. The irony in this predicament is that a great number of men are completely unaware of the power that their passionate attachments have on both the formation of their values and their interactions with the world. Thus, men in love are, according to Nietzsche, delusional. Women, on the other hand, are actors; their greatest skills in love rely on appearance, artistry, and the playing of the ‘correct’ gender roles.

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The status of woman as actor is addressed by Nietzsche in Book Five, ‘On the problem of the actor’, when he poses a challenge to the reader. ‘Reflect on the whole history of women (Frauen): do they not have to be first of all and above all else actresses?’ (GS 361) Nietzsche asserts that love has a comic dimension in this regard because it involves a kind of theatre that relies on the distance of women. In The Gay Science (60), Nietzsche states that ‘the magic and the most powerful effect of women (Frauen) is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this required first of all and above all – distance’. This point is reasserted in soon afterwards in The Gay Science (67), ‘Simulating – oneself’, where Nietzsche states that when women become too accessible or ‘real’ to men, men lose interest in them. Nietzsche suggests that to be successful in love women are counselled to ‘simulate a lack of love’ and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comic because it consists not in altruistic relations, nor in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of erotic fantasies in which women are esteemed for performing their gender roles. In contrast to Nietzsche’s unapologetic statements about the natural opposition between the sexes of aphorism 363, aphorisms 68-71 of The Gay Science convey concern for the quandary that women find themselves exposed to in love relationships. For example, in aphorism 68, Nietzsche states that both men and women ‘need to be educated better’ with regard to the nature of the relationship between men and women (GS 68). Although Nietzsche is confident that some women can turn against and even destroy this image (see GS 69), he continues to offer further sympathy for the fact that women are, in many respects, subjected to predetermined roles in erotic love and are required to act out a character to gain a man’s love (see GS 60, 70 and 74). In aphorism 71, ‘On female chastity’ (Von der weiblichen Keuschheit), Nietzsche comments on the lack of sexual education of upper-class women and the adverse psychological impact this lack had on them. He states that these women are made shameful and ignorant of all sexual matters to retain their feminine honour when securing a husband. However, once they are married, they are faced with the expectations of a sexual life without any preparation. The man they respected and loved most now asks of them precisely what they were previously taught was vulgar and unacceptable. Nietzsche empathizes with this paradoxical situation when he writes: ‘To catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror, and who knows what else, in the face of the unexpected neighbourliness

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of god and beast. … Thus a psychic knot (Seelen-Knoten) has been tied that may have no equal’ (GS 71). Nietzsche is stating that the gender roles that are part of the formula of courtship and erotic love are confounding and, in many instances, have an adverse psychological effect on women. Nietzsche points to problems that exists in love between men and women without making any explicitly moralizing claims about how to solve them. However, there is some ethical merit to Nietzsche’s reflections because they can help his readers to acknowledge the romantic idealizations of love as well as the performative failures of gender roles. Also, his characterization of friendship in The Gay Science (14), as a higher goal that moves beyond the other assimilating expressions of love, suggests that he considers friendship possible for women, although more difficult to achieve. This claim is further supported by his comments on men and women in Thus Spoke Zarathustra I ‘On the Friend’ where he connects the inability of women to be friends with the miserliness of men. Nietzsche views tyranny and slavery to be part of love, insofar as it is based upon the struggle to possess and be possessed. There is no equality in Nietzsche’s account of love or a shared higher goal to regulate the possessive drives of lovers. Love relationships have as their goals the possession of the two people that are a part of the relationship and, for this reason, lack the competitive reciprocity of Nietzsche’s agonistic friends and the mentor–student relationship of the bestowing friendship. In Nietzsche’s account, male and female gender roles play a key part in governing love relationships and preventing them from becoming friendships. Nietzsche had some early insights into the power dynamics between the genders and how they stifle female autonomy. Nietzsche suggests that women, who are most likely to be possessed and assimilated in love, over-identify with their lover and the experience of love. In this regard, he states that the love a woman has for her male partner is a faith and the only faith that she has (GS 363). A more developed account of how female identity is confined through love is explained by Beauvoir: She at first sought in love a confirmation of what she was, of her past, of her personality; but she also involves her future in it, and to justify her future she puts it in the hands of one who possesses all values. Thus she gives up her transcendence, subordinating it to that of the essential other, to whom she makes herself vassal and slave. It was to find herself, to save herself, that she lost herself

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in him in the first place; and the fact is that little by little she does lose herself in him wholly; for her the whole of reality is in the other. (Beauvoir 1957: 651)

When Beauvoir states that the entire reality of a woman is in the world of her male partner, she makes the same point that Nietzsche makes when he states that the love that a woman has for her male partner is an all-encompassing faith. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche reaffirms this observation when Zarathustra states, ‘Let man fear woman when she loves: for then she makes every sacrifice, and every other thing to her is worthless’ (ZI ‘On Old and Young Little Women’). Nietzsche suggests that the female need to be subsumed in the world of the man she loves means that women seek their power within love relationships instead of elsewhere. According to him, women may obtain power, esteem, and thus personal significance subversively through becoming a function of a man that is absent in him such as ‘his purse, his politics or his sociability’ (GS 119) or as an object of desire. However, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the suggestion is made that women are limited in perspective because they over-identify with their love relationship. ‘A woman’s love contains injustice and blindness towards all that she does not love’ (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Nietzsche thinks that a woman’s love relationship is her primary source of self-value and, as such, she cannot look beyond it. This is why Nietzsche writes that women treat those who they do not love with a lack of interest and fairness and why they are not yet capable of friendship (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Jacques Derrida also sees in Nietzsche’s writings about women important insights into gender inequality. He assigns political importance to Nietzsche’s reflections on the relationship between men and women, attributing the following to him: ‘Incapable of friendship, enmity, justice, war, respect for the other, whether friend or enemy, woman is not man; she is not even part of humanity’ (Derrida 1997: 283). But, is it the case that Derrida reads Nietzsche too strongly? Although Nietzsche views woman as not yet able to have friendship and respect for the other, he also suggests that women are especially capable of fighting and taking part in enmity-driven activities such as revenge (GS 69). The insight to be gained from Derrida is that Nietzsche acknowledges how the exclusion of women from friendship is related to the problems of gender inequality and an absence of female autonomy and this predicament is connected more fundamentally to the fact that female identity apart from male appropriation is largely unknown. Nietzsche thinks men lack generosity because they withhold power from women, thereby stifling the possibility of friendship between men and women, friendship between women, and the pursuit of knowledge by women

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(GS 68; ZI ‘On the Friend’). However, Nietzsche also contends that female conceptions of self and value make it unlikely for them to form friendships. He implies that women have few opportunities to gain status, and that their status is often a part of a repressive order of male dominance. It is in this sense, as Derrida writes, that women are excluded from humanity. At the end of ‘On the Friend’ in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche gives the impression that he is attempting to introduce a new kind of friendship that would be more inclusive of or even embrace women. However, he does not sustain this impression because when he mentions woman and women in other parts of Zarathustra, the female resumes her position as mother and as a symbol for what is unattainable and mysterious such as wisdom. Besides agonistic friendship, the other kind of friend that Nietzsche approaches as admirable (in terms of being value-creating) is the bestowing friend. For Nietzsche, most women lack the power necessary for becoming bestowers and are too preoccupied with love relationships to pursue a higher goal as do agonistic friends. Although there is struggle in Nietzsche’s account of love relationships, the drive to possess and be possessed means that love for him does not include the kind of recognition based on respect and wonder that are vital for Irigaray. For women to be given value or significance, Nietzsche suggests that they must search out a position that is a function of a man’s life, as a wife, a mother, or as an object of worship. Women have to find themselves a place of esteem within the already existing order of things which is patriarchal, although Nietzsche does not use this term. In Nietzsche’s writings, the figure of woman vacillates between positions of servitude and idolatry without having the ability or opportunity to consider what could be a ‘depth for her surface’ (ZI ‘On Old and Young Little Women’) that is not defined by a man or by the world of men. A woman may be positively appraised for her fulfilment of feminine characteristics, but Nietzsche suggest that implicit to this appraisal is the experience of misrecognition that she struggles with privately in relationships with herself, as well as her relationships with men and other women (GS 68). Esteem recognition through the fulfilment of a gender role is the only kind of recognition presented as an option for women in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche’s agonistic friendship differs from his account of love because it involves peers and presumes enough equality between friends so that passionate knowledge-seeking can be a shared experience. Friends implement self-control and sublimate their desires for domination of the other into competitive striving

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for a higher goal (GS 14). They must maintain an emotional distance between each other to be able to observe one another and learn. However, since agonistic friends are both invested in the same project and consider the other a worthy partner-opponent, they have admiration and respect for one another. Agonistic friends are constantly testing the limits of each other’s beliefs and emotional capacities and thus being shaped through their interactions with one another. They remain fixed on the experience of learning and overcoming which requires both empathy and spiritualized cruelty. Recognition is facilitated through the agency that both friends have to assert their ideas and arguments, to go out into the world and pursue their beliefs, and find others interested in engaging with them. These are freedoms that women do not have in Nietzsche’s writings, which, he maintains, is partially due to men’s lack of generosity (ZI ‘On the Friend’). One cannot embark upon an agonistic friendship with a person who lacks power. ‘All growth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent – or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. That task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one’s entire strength, suppleness and mastery-at-arms – opponents who are equal’ (EH ‘Why I Am So Wise’ 7). In Nietzsche’s framework, women’s powers do not allow them to be taken seriously as agonistic friends. Their limited options pressure them to conform to gender roles that may enable them in love relationships to be esteemed, but in doing so, confine them to those roles that fall under an image of woman that has been created by men (GS 68). Although Nietzsche recognizes that this predicament is harmful to women, he also seems to assign a certain degree of inevitability to it. As such, it is important to ask if there is further evidence in Nietzsche’s writings to assume that he has fixed ideas about women as a biological sex and a cultural gender that makes it particularly difficult for them to have the freedom required to experience friendship.

Women in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche’s writings on women have significant variation and for this reason, it is easy to dismiss him as a philosopher bound by cultural and time dependant norms, norms about women and men that are expressed by him literally throughout his books. However, this is an inadequate approach to reading Nietzsche: many of his passages on women exude play, confrontation, and provocation. He writes

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to force reflection and reaction. Granted, there is good evidence from which to argue that he is severely limited in this area of his thought. For example, Nietzsche appears to express his conviction that women are indeed the inferior sex who ‘have an instinct for a secondary role’ (BGE 145). In Beyond Good and Evil, he includes a series of aphorisms on women that sound misogynistic. In a footnote to his translation, Walter Kaufmann states that Nietzsche’s writings on women that follow Beyond Good and Evil (231) are embarrassing and ‘wrong’.2 As Carol Diethe has pointed out, Nietzsche shares many of the beliefs about women prevalent in the Wilhelmine society of his time, one being that women who pursue a vocation outside of motherhood are deficient in some way (Diethe 1996: 41). Nietzsche is at times caught up in his own cultural and personal burden concerning ‘woman as such’ (Weib an sich) as he admits in Beyond Good and Evil (231). He explains that when it comes to certain topics, such as one’s beliefs about woman and man, one cannot relearn (umlernen), but only ‘finish learning’ (auslernen). However, he also states that the convictions one has about ‘woman’ can be viewed later as ‘steps to self-knowledge, sign posts to the problem we are – rather, to the great stupidity (Dummheit) we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very ‘“deep down”’ (BGE 231). This admission before Nietzsche writes a series of his seemingly most misogynistic aphorisms invites the reader to question the validity of Nietzsche’s ‘truths’ on women, and in doing so, also question oneself on the topic. Nietzsche’s disclosure that convictions about man and women reveal the extent of one’s ‘stupidity’ means that he considers individual beliefs about the gender roles to carry within them great prejudice. Nietzsche is taking a much less sympathetic tone to women in Beyond Good and Evil, as compared to that of The Gay Science. In the spirit of the no-saying deconstructive aim of Beyond, Nietzsche is expressing his thoughts about women with a dissonance that requests a response from the reader. His writings about women that follow Beyond 231 are particularly harsh and even previous to expressing his ‘truths’ about ‘woman’ he makes some pointed remarks. But, within the cruelty of these writings about women Nietzsche continues to offer insightful thoughts on the difficulties of gender roles and the challenges they present to friendship and love relationships. This is because, as Lynne Tirrell suggests, within those writings of Nietzsche’s which seem most misogynistic are the seeds for questioning and even undermining the presumptions of that misogyny (Tirrell 1994: 158).

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In a series of three short aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche reflects on the psychological turmoil that he believes women struggle with in their relationship with the figure of woman: Woman learns to hate to the extent to which her charms – decrease (Das Weib lernt hassen, in dem Maasse,in dem es zu bezaubern – verlernt). (BGE 84) The same affects (Affekte) in man and woman (Weib) are yet different in tempo: therefore man and woman do not cease to misunderstand each other. (BGE 85) Women themselves always still have in the background of all personal vanity an impersonal contempt (unpersönliche Verachtung) – for ‘woman’ (das Weib). (BGE 86)

Nietzsche is suggesting in aphorism 84 that women require charms to captivate others, to love and to be loved. Without skills of enchantment women cannot be admired because women are valued primarily for their appearances. Women are vain according to Nietzsche and their vanity, which is connected to the arts of physical beauty, is their source of power as well as a link to their ‘secondary role’ (BGE 145). Yet, women also have contempt for the woman that they cannot become (BGE 86). When Nietzsche writes that women share an impersonal contempt for woman it seems that he is pointing to a share in the collective misogyny that men and women have for the symbol of woman. These three aphorisms are asserting that women struggle with a pressure to be as feminine as possible, yet also feel great dislike for the ideal they are attempting to become. Nietzsche is linking the difference in emotional ‘tempo’ that causes misunderstandings between men and women to the identity struggles that women have in relation to their gender roles. Later, in the passages on women that follows aphorism 231, Nietzsche attacks the desire of women to become independent and develop greater selfknowledge. Nietzsche writes that one of the worst developments of Europe is the female pursuit of self-reliance and the attempt to educate men on ‘woman as such’ (BGE 232). According to Diethe, Nietzsche throughout his oeuvre expresses disapproval for women who attempt to act as an equal to men in society (Diethe 1996: 42). But, does Nietzsche not express precisely these misogynistic concerns with a degree of irony? For example, he writes: ‘Even now female (weibliche) voices are heard which – holy Aristophanes! – are frightening: they threaten with medical explicitness what woman (Weib) wants from man’ (BGE 232). Nietzsche explains that formerly the scientific discussion of woman was only done between men and he questions whether women really

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want self-enlightenment (BGE 232). Nietzsche asks: ‘What is truth to woman (Weib) … her great art is the lie (Lüge) her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honour and love precisely this art and this instinct in woman’ (BGE 232). Nietzsche is stating that men love the woman who performs her femininity and does not question it. He is also admitting that he knows this representation is a fictional one without any metaphysical foundation. In Beyond Good and Evil (232), Nietzsche is expressing his male prejudices about women and, in doing so, is making a spectacle out of them. He is pointing to the fact that men do not want women to obtain greater autonomy; men want women to remain in a ‘secondary role’ in which their identity is defined by men. Is Nietzsche admitting that he shares the miserliness of men pointed to by Zarathustra when he accuses men of lacking generosity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (ZI ‘On the Friend’)? At minimum, we can understand from reading this aphorism after Beyond Good and Evil (231) that Nietzsche is poking fun at the possessive nature of men and how much they desire to maintain women in an inferior position through controlling the image of woman. Even if women despise woman (BGE 232) and want to change her, Nietzsche explains that men will attempt to keep her a creature of appearances and treat women like birds, ‘as something one has to lock up lest it fly away’ (BGE 237a). In the last two aphorisms of the section ‘Our Virtues’ in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche is not so easily read as being critical of men. In Beyond (238), he states that there is a necessary hostility and antagonism between man and woman and encourages men to think of women as possessions. Here he addresses how woman is changing and claims that women are losing influence through becoming more equal to men. Nietzsche writes that just as women acquire greater respect from men, they stop being as fearful of men, ‘but the woman (Weib) who “unlearns fear” surrenders her most womanly instincts’ (BGE 239). The more that women become like men, Nietzsche claims, the more they degenerate and retrogress (BGE 239). Nietzsche states that in their attempts to become like men, to work as clerks and writers and discuss politics, women are relinquishing their strongest feminine attributes connected to cultural gender roles and biological sex roles associated with birthing children (BGE 239). In this section, Nietzsche claims that being a mother is the most important role for women. Nietzsche asserts that women are doing themselves a disservice by attempting an impossible feat: to be like men. In Beyond (239) he expresses his

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concern that women are rejecting the limited space that they have to obtain power (through being a wife and mother) in order to take part in work and political activities, activities that Nietzsche considers to be of a lower value and especially for women. Although Nietzsche is critical of how men approach women, he also seems remarkably conservative when it comes to offering his support for change in the gender roles. In The Gay Science (363) Nietzsche implies that the oppositional stances that men and women have in terms of how they love (women want to be possessed and men want to possess) allows for a compatibility between them, however tumultuous, that supports heterosexual love relationships. But, what occurs if women become like men and want to act the master, abandoning their ‘natural’ inclination to give birth to and raise children? Nietzsche does not seem to think it is possible for women to fulfil male roles well and also be mothers and wives. Although Nietzsche acknowledges that women suffer from their adherence to gender roles, he does not think the solution is for women to attempt to be equal to, as in the same as, men. Male desire, in Nietzsche’s account, is connected to the performance of female gender roles. As such, women who refuse to base themselves on the finery and charms of the feminine role are less desirable to men. This poses difficulties for heterosexual love relationships if women no longer want to conform to the image of desire that men want. Would a less desirable woman be one who is more likely to have friends, for Nietzsche, especially if she is well educated like her male companion? In The Gay Science (14) Nietzsche writes that friendship has a shared desire for an ideal instead of a drive for mutual possession. For a woman and man who are peers, an absence of possessive lust for each other should remove one obstacle to Nietzschean friendship especially if we follow Nietzsche’s reflections in Human, All Too Human (390) where he states that friendship is possible for women with men with ‘the assistance of a slight physical antipathy’. What seems certain from Nietzsche’s writings on women and love is that he does not think erotic love and friendship are compatible. Is this due to Nietzsche’s own limitations that he points to about himself in Beyond (231) and his inability to re-evaluate erotic love? Nietzsche writes that ‘one must learn to love’ just as ‘one has to learn to hear a figure and melody’ (GS 334). When it comes to his speculations on women and love, there are some crucial melodies that he surely misses. To learn how to re-evaluate the gendered troubles of friendship that Nietzsche exposes in his writings we must turn to Luce Irigaray who shares Nietzsche’s supposition that ‘love, too, has to be learned’ (GS 334).

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Irigaray on love of the same and friendship Instead of viewing love as an impairment to friendship as Nietzsche does, Irigaray contends that friendship requires the cultivation of love and wonder for the other. Irigaray re-evaluates the assimilating love of Nietzsche with her concept of wonder, describing wonder as ‘the appetite for knowledge of who or what awakens our appetite’ (Irigaray 2004a: 67), that believes in ‘the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world’ (Irigaray 2004a: 70).3 Irigaray claims that wonder is the feeling that must be maintained in friendship to allow for recognition to occur. Instead of attempting to reduce the other into a concept that one already has so that the friend can be controlled and defined, wonder pauses at the newness of the subject. Irigaray describes the subject of wonder as one that cannot be delimited, imposed upon, or conclusively defined; this is not to say the other is without an identity, instead it is one ‘unfinished’ (Irigaray 2004a: 95). Irigaray’s friend approaches the subject of wonder as one who is in perpetual becoming, never completely knowable. When friends love each other with a sense of wonder, there is greater leeway for variations in self-expression because one does not presume to know the other conclusively. One gives love to the other as an affirmation of the other’s fate that acquiesces to its inevitability (beyond one’s control of the other). Love, for Irigaray, becomes an expression of affirmation of the other that has emotional and rational dimensions. It includes a self-limiting move, a respect for the other, because one must admit to being unable to define the other. She explains that it also allows for one to feel delight (aesthetic, conceptual, erotic) in the threshold experience of the otherness of the other. Irigaray frames her description of love through wonder as a kind of activism because it aims to change the character of heterosexual love and friendship. Wonder provides a pathway out of the projective and assimilative inevitabilities of what Irigaray calls ‘love of the same’ that underlies Nietzsche’s concept of love. Irigaray explains love of the same as one which presumes shared identities between friends and is a love based on ‘mercantile exchanges’ (Irigaray 2004a: 85). Between men, Irigaray states that love of the same is impatient, incorporating, and goal-oriented and it uses the female as mediator, as a symbol of exchange between men (Irigaray 2004a: 86, 96). The expression of love (of the same) inhabits a vertical rather than a horizontal relationship in which intersubjective interactions involve condescension and idolatry, like the tyrant–

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slave relationship that Nietzsche believes is pervasive in women’s lives (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Irigaray explains how love of the same transforms and systemizes: ‘Instead of germination, birth, and growth in accordance with natural economy, man substitutes the instrument and the product. …The cultivation of nature becomes exploitation, which risks destroying the vitality of the soil’ (Irigaray 2004a: 85). In a love of the same framework, rather than perceiving vulnerability between friends as an opportunity for learning and sharing, it becomes an opportunity for overpowering and assimilation (as is the predicament of love in Nietzsche’s GS 14). In a selection from I Love to You, Irigaray states that her notion of recognition in love involves marking oneself with an ‘incompleteness, with the negative’ (Irigaray 2004b: 9). ‘Recognizing you means or implies respecting you as other, accepting that I stop before you as before something insurmountable, a mystery, a freedom that will never be mine, a subjectivity that will never be mine, a mine that will never be mine’ (Irigaray 2004b: 8). Irigaray argues that with a foundation of respect, the experience of wonder can be expressed as ‘I love to you’ which resists the incorporation of two into one. Irigaray’s re-evaluation of love involves bringing attention to the necessity of self-restraint, as well as appreciation for the distance that is between two people due to their unknowability. In doing so, Irigaray’s notion of love denies the possessive drives associated with the male gender role in Nietzsche’s works (BGE 194). According to Nietzsche, erotic love enacts a possessive drive in which the pursuer attempts to possess their lover (GS 14). Irigaray’s notion of wonder provides a necessary self-limitation for approaching the other. Yet, she also acknowledges, along with Nietzsche and Beauvoir, that female identity revolves around male entitlement. Held to the image of woman, women seek to become the other of the male and, in doing so, enact and perpetuate a love framework that is assimilating. Whereas Nietzsche fails to provide remedies for the gendered troubles of friendship, Irigaray suggests a re-evaluation of heterosexual love and friendship through her accounts of wonder and sexual difference. Irigaray conceives of sexual difference as the most significant and universal difference of human beings and (one of) the most serious philosophical problem of our time. She claims that each person belongs to a gender, ‘which means to a sexuate universal and to a relation between two universals’ (Irigaray 2004b: 10). Irigaray acknowledges that gender is constructed and does not necessarily correspond to sex, but she claims that this disconnect is attributed to male cultural domination.4 She explains that women lack an understanding of

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difference because difference has been neutralized through a patriarchal love of the same. Relationships that arise from but cannot be reduced to female biology such as the mother–daughter relationship, are productive sources for generating notions of womanhood that are less inculcated by the patriarchal hegemony. Irigaray claims that for recognition to occur between men and women, women must find their own cultures and identities, a self-love that is not earned through their usefulness to men. Irigaray states that when the goal of feminist activism is ‘change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order. This latter gesture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women’ (Irigaray 1985: 81). Obtaining a symbolically masculine status is not enough. Irigaray takes issue with the attempt of women to be like men. Irigaray is adamant that women need a history and a genealogy that is their own. She thinks male and female roles should no longer be viewed in a hierarchical schema (Irigaray 2004b: 9). In addition to developing a self-love in which a woman views herself as both daughter and mother engaged in a reciprocating love,5 Irigaray thinks there are public changes that need to occur. For instance, value systems need be modified so that paternal and maternal functions are not structured hierarchically; also, love and eroticism must be connected, not disassociated. However, Irigaray’s intent is not to ‘reify woman as mother, wife, muse, natural caregiver, sensitive companion’ (Deutscher 2002: 48) as it appears to be Nietzsche’s aim in Beyond Good and Evil (239). The claim for sexual difference, if it perpetuates these old stereotypes, can be a means from which to exclude the sufficient development of sexual difference. According to Irigaray, women need to be (allowed to) become a diverse social group, a multiplicity that does not presume sameness (Irigaray 2004a: 57–8) and is not driven by feminine rivalry. Irigaray claims that feminine love between women has been based on a rivalry that circulates between three poles: the ‘prototype of maternity’ that only one can occupy, the real mother, and male desire (from son, brother, father) (Irigaray 2004a: 87). When women speak to one another, Irigaray states they use an assimilating language that reinstates both rivalry and sameness: ‘like you’, ‘me too’, ‘me more’ or ‘me less’, and ‘just like everyone else’ (Irigaray 2004a: 88). She explains that women measure each other under a masculine hegemony, reducing each other into ‘a sameness that is not their own’, and in doing so are instruments of their own oppression (Irigaray 2004a: 88). When women love

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each other within this framework they do not love the other for who she is but rather for that place she occupies (as desirable, as an ideal of maternity, etc.) (Irigaray 2004a: 89). For this to shift, women must learn to take critical distance from their gender roles and develop new kinds of female identities (Irigaray 2004a: 93). Irigaray proposes that new forms of female subjectivity can be developed by women seeing themselves as horizontally, rather than vertically transcendent to themselves and to men. She considers the ‘epistemological threshold’ (Gourgouris 2010: 140) of difference to be most decipherable between the male–female relationships and locates this arena as the one that is fertile for the transformation of values. Through a ‘labour of the negative’, one perceives limitation and, in doing so, gives birth to new possibilities (Oliver 2007: 131). The development of wonder between friends and lovers challenges the positivistic approach to knowledge because it rejects the presumption that complete intersubjective knowing is possible or desirable. Wonder accepts the impossibility of sameness and views the inter-relations of friends as an opportunity for sharing that generates greater mutual understanding. Irigaray states that when we approach something that still has mystery for us we feel ‘astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation’ (Irigaray 2004b: 23). Kelly Oliver points out that for Irigaray, it is the movement of realizing that one cannot know the other that allows for relationships to live outside of a space ruled by power struggles and the need for domination (Oliver 2007: 132). This is why Irigaray finds it so important to cultivate wonder in human relationships: by refusing to see the other as part of one’s own universe, one’s obscurity is given room to be expressed and perceived by others, thereby opening the possibility for greater intimacy.6 In Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Nietzsche also seems to understand the importance of practising self-limitation in love when he writes about the necessities of celebrating differences in love relationships (AOM 75). Yet, in his later texts when speaking about love (GS, Z, BGE) Nietzsche’s focus shifts to the predilection of (male) lovers to incorporate the loved one, to seek out that which is most familiar and to view the other as an extension of one’s owns tastes and interests. A greedy lover in The Gay Science (14) is analogous to a knowledgeseeker who fails to engage their intellectual conscience (GS 335) because both follow their impulses without self-reflection and pursue those ends that appear to be the most convenient.

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Irigaray problematizes the presumption of knowing the other as an end that presumes learning is finished. Both men and women are restricted by their presumptions about each other, but women are doubly limited because they view themselves through a model that has not been produced by them. Nietzsche appears to agree with this view when he writes that woman forms herself according to the image of woman created by man (GS 68). Irigaray emphasizes the need for women to develop more female-centred knowledge sources, specifically a genealogy and a culture from which to develop selfunderstanding.

Reading Irigaray with Nietzsche on wonder and assimilation The Nietzschean question remains whether the propensity for projection and assimilation in love can be rectified through wonder. Can the assimilating drive of love, which is an expression of the will to power for Nietzsche, be mediated through the activation of wonder as described by Irigaray? Or do the impulses of erotic love that are reified through culturally entrenched gender roles require more than a self-limiting move that expresses an open-ended love to the otherness of the other? If Nietzsche were to attempt to overcome the gendered troubles of friendship, which have their sources in love, it is more likely that he would recommend the exercising of the intellectual conscience (GS 2, 335). In other words, he would advocate discipline and self-observation during the passionate pursuit of knowledge rather than self-restraint in the cultivation of wonder. When Irigaray discusses how we reason and love she acknowledges that we have been educated to do so as an appropriation (Irigaray 2004b: 23). She claims that the pursuit of knowledge of a concept or a person involves a method of learning in which one attempts to control and dominate information so that it becomes decipherable to the knowledge-seeker. Irigaray explains that in the attempt to understand the other there is often a refusal to accept limitations even when limits are shown to be necessary for co-existence and co-creation (Irigaray 2004b: 25). Irigaray goes so far as to associate the attempt to make things definitively knowable with a totalizing action that is synonymous to death: ‘We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us’ (Irigaray 2004b: 23). In Irigaray’s terms, the attempt

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to definitively know the other means that recognition fails because one makes the other symbolically ‘dead’. To bring life back into the equation and learn how to include wonder in the experience of love, one must first understand that there is no final solution or answer to knowing, one must learn how to habituate the labour of the negative or ‘vigilant self-limitation’ (Oliver 2007: 133). Irigaray’s approach to knowledge shares with Nietzsche the belief that selflimitation is important for wisdom. However, as noted above, in Nietzsche’s account it is engagement of the intellectual conscience that motivates questioning and restraint (GS 2, 335), not a sense of wonder for the subject of interest. In addition, Nietzsche does not consider the relevance of employing the intellectual conscience when it comes to matters of love. He makes a clear delineation between the emotional and physical impulses of love relations verses the intellectual and creative potentials of friendship (GS 14). The notion that one can bring friendship into love is not seriously considered by Nietzsche because he believes that the selfish greed of love destroys one’s ability to approach the other with the measure required for a good friendship (AOM 241). For Nietzsche, friendship resists assimilations to a degree that is not possible in love. Yet, Nietzsche and Irigaray also appear to share in the opinion that assimilation always happens in human relationships. Perhaps a more realistic question to ask is: Can we assimilate more ethically? This question suggests that even with the experiences of projection and assimilation some recognition occurs in love relationships precisely because the other always exceeds incorporation. As Irigaray writes, ‘One sex is not entirely consumable by the other. There is always a remainder’ (Irigaray 2004a: 14). When writing about Irigaray and the problem of assimilation, Penelope Deutscher and Catherine Peebles point to Derrida’s claim that assimilation or cannibalization of the other is inevitable, but also impossible (Deutscher 2002: 133; Peebles 2007: 236). Assimilation is impossible because one can never completely make the other one’s own: there is always some excess or ‘remainder’. Although Irigaray is attempting to develop an ethics that moves away from incorporation, she remains aware of its prevalence; however, her notion of sexual difference means that she, like Derrida, does not think one’s projections have the capacity to swallow the other completely (although they do modify them). For example, within a love of the same relationship, when a woman becomes a mirror to her male lover, reflecting back to him an image of ‘woman’ that he has created, she is restrained through this experience, but Irigaray does not think she is reducible to the experience or his image of her.

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In fact, it is precisely by way of the failures to become that perfect mother or object of desire that women create breaks in what their gender is perceived to be and from this, open themselves up to new possibilities. When he cannot understand her and when she does not become synonymous with his expectations, it indicates a new becoming. In Nietzschean terms we can explain the failures of the drive towards incorporation through his analysis of the will to power. When there is a struggle between two forces no matter the difference in level of power, both forces will influence and modify the other (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’). The hope for Irigaray is that within these failures and modifications, the loverfriends learn how to love with a sense of wonder that resists love of the same.

Beyond Nietzsche and Irigaray: Thoughts on the future of friendship To conclude, I would like to push the question of the gendered troubles of friendship into a new sphere by questioning Irigaray’s privileging of heterosexual relationships as the activist location for change in love and friendship. Wonder as self-limitation may be a partial remedy to the assimilating practices most prevalent in heterosexual love, but why does Irigaray choose heterosexual relationship as the primary location for re-evaluation? Do female relationships not also have vital contributions to make to overcoming the gendered troubles of friendship? In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray claims that love between women is dangerous because they confuse their identities: there is a ‘lack of respect for or the perception of differences’ (Irigaray 2004a: 55). She also states that taking a separatist or egalitarian approach to female subjectivity will not work. As we have seen, Irigaray does not think equality as the redistribution of power is sufficient because women are forced to find places in a symbolic order that is ultimately masculine. By separatism, it seems likely she is referring to lesbian relationships, women who choose to live without men and concentrate on female friendship. Irigaray argues, ‘What can assist the woman in becoming subject is the discovery of the other, the masculine, as horizontally transcendent, and not vertically transcendent, to her’ (Irigaray 2004b: 27). Irigaray’s reasoning seems to be that women are too similar to one another and they miss that epistemological threshold of difference that is more obvious in the male–female relationship. In addition, she contends that the failures that women experience in their heterosexual relationships when they are not able to become what their

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male others expect of them is instructive of places from which to seek out their own identities. However, she also states in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that women require female genealogies and cultures. Following her observations about the importance of building diverse female-centred social groups, it seems legitimate for women to look for sources of subjectivity in their relationships with other women. Instead of looking to male companions, who Irigaray claims are the producers of the love of the same, women require the company of other women to develop new senses of subjectivity. By insisting on sexual difference as the universal difference, Irigaray appears to homogenize the diversity of women and makes invisible the power disparities between women (class, race, age, ability, and sexual orientation, among others). As Penelope Deutscher notes, Irigaray’s notion of friendship as ideally male–female may have the aim of displacing the male–male model but it replaces it with a heteronormative ideal (Deutscher 2002: 128) that effaces the diversity of women and, I would add, the reality that masculine and feminine gender roles can be taken up by both women and men. Irigaray’s emphasis on heterosexual relationships as the ideal location for change ignores her own observations that projection and assimilation happen in all kinds of relationships. If Irigaray does indeed want to think about difference nonhierarchically, it is problematic for her to prioritize hetero-relationships as the site of difference and the greatest possibility for change. Then otherness has within itself a vertical model of value. When Irigaray concentrates on heterosexual relationships as the source for gaining greater insight into difference, recognition through wonder, and female subjectivity, she de-legitimizes the importance of female friendship and reinstates heteronormative values. To think beyond Nietzsche and Irigaray into the future of friendship that is occurring right now, it is important to remember Adrienne Rich’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality. Rich argues that heterosexuality must be ‘recognized and studied as a political institution’ (Rich 1980: 637). Considering that women are the primary sources of ‘emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children’ it is important to ask whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead to women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why speciessurvival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. (Rich 1980: 637)

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Irigaray’s concentration on heterosexual relationships as the location for learning about female subjectivity presumes that men have the ability to facilitate this change. Following Rich and Kathleen Gough, this entails ignoring or obscuring the extent to which men perpetuate the subjection of women through exercising and guarding male power. Rich takes eight characteristics of Gough’s that Gough outlines as generating sexual inequalities and modifies them subtly, claiming that they also produce compulsory heterosexuality. She explains that men guard their power by denying women access to their sexuality (clitoridectomy, punishment for alternative sexualities, erasure of lesbian experience); forcing male sexuality upon women (rape, idealization of heterosexuality, sex slavery); the exploitation and command of female labour to control production (unpaid work as mother and wife, female infanticide which robs daughters from mothers and devalues women); physical confinement of women (‘feminine’ dress codes, sexual harassment, expectation of full time mothering); the use of women as objects in male transactions (arranged marriage, women as entertainers, sex workers); the limitation of female creativity (male pursuits overvalued compared to female; female subjectivity restricted to motherhood and marriage, sexual exploitation by male artists and teachers); the withholding of large areas of society’s knowledge and culture (under-education of women, lack of female histories, exclusion of women from ‘male pursuits’ workplace discrimination) (Rich 1980: 638–40). As Rich points out, this list is not limited to physical brutality, but it certainly exemplifies how men attempt to keep women in the position that Nietzsche explains is one of ‘work slaves and prisoners’ (GMIII 18). Why then would women want to seek their lost or hidden subjectivities in those who are the guardians of these violent practices? There are ethical, ontological, and political reasons why women should first look to each other. It is obvious that women need to develop relationships with men in which men cultivate respect and wonder (not idolatry) towards women. Nietzsche’s analysis of women and love demonstrates the dehumanizing consequences of being limited to esteem recognition and gender roles that are created by a misogynistic order. Perhaps Irigaray’s emphasis on the importance of heterosexual relationships is aimed at, what Nietzsche (and Derrida) call, greater generosity from men. However, when she places male–female love–friendship at the centre of her ethics she does not sufficiently consider how this move perpetuates the expectations of compulsory heterosexuality and its associated gender inequalities. Following Nietzsche’s account of self-overcoming, one can ask Irigaray if she does not think women require solitude away from men to

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really engage in self-questioning so that the image of woman that fuels love of the same can be destroyed and recreated. Irigaray chooses to focus on symbols of self-love (two lips touching or virginity) or male–female sexual difference instead of looking for concepts that could help to build sources of knowledge and power for women through female friendships. She does not sufficiently consider the extent to which women need to build greater solidarity with each other to resist the gender inequalities that harm them. This is not to presume that female relationships are without projection and assimilation. However, in the shared experiences of gender roles that women experience under the patriarchal hegemony there is a source for female-centred understanding and mobilization. It would be false to presume that sharing the same sex-gender is a sufficient ground from which to facilitate friendship: as has already been mentioned, there is so much more to consider. Since, however, the history of philosophy has many accounts of friendship that are exclusive to men, it is due time that we start thinking about friendship between women. Irigaray’s claim that heterosexual friendships are the most powerful location from which to practice wonder and activist love fails to consider the significance of female friendship for building political solidarity to combat the phallocentric order.

Conclusion Nietzsche provides a provocative and critical view of love that helps us to consider the extent to which love and friendship are shaped by gender constructs and inequalities. He identifies the power disparities between men and women and how women are exploited by men. Nietzsche suggests that the love that directs relationships advantages men and harms women. Yet, in Nietzsche’s writings on love the only source for recognition open to women is through being esteemed for some fulfilment of their gender roles. Nietzsche’s woman swings between servitude and idolatry without having the ability or opportunity to consider what she might be outside of a world that is defined by men. Nietzsche points to a lack of generosity of men: men deny women an access to the powers that would allow them to develop female sources of self, undetermined by their relationship to men. Nietzsche’s observations on the perils and comedies of love and the gender roles performed around love help to elucidate the gendered troubles of friendship. Yet he offers no substantial suggestions on how to improve the

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‘psychic knot’ (GS 71) that women must grapple with when it comes to navigating love relationships or attempting to be friends. To learn how to love with a greater sense of mutual understanding, we can turn to Irigaray whose notion of wonder provides new pathways from which to pursue a love that is less assimilating. One of Irigaray’s most vital contributions to developing a richer notion of intersubjective recognition that includes love relationships and friendship between men and women is her belief that we must relinquish the need to definitively know the other. This opens up friendship to a more generative sharing. Irigaray’s concept of wonder encourages one to pause at the other; it resists projection. Wonder is important because it acknowledges the notion of respect as self-limitation and utilizes this concept alongside love to foster greater self-knowledge and understanding of the other in friendship. Although Irigaray’s concept of love–friendship between men and women challenges the fraternal model of friendship, it prioritizes heterosexual friendship. During points in Irigaray’s texts it seems as if she is rejecting a fixed notion of sexual difference, but she also returns to the heterosexual relationship repeatedly, claiming that it is the most vital location in which to experience intersubjective recognition. Like Nietzsche, she fails to sufficiently consider the potential of female friendships. By treating sexual difference as the universal difference, she obscures the relevance of other kinds of differences, as well as the potential among women to facilitate change. She also fails to sufficiently consider the extent to which self-overcoming requires solitude, especially from the ideological structures and people that have been the source of one’s oppression which in the case of women are mostly men. Still, her discussion of wonder alongside Nietzsche’s critique of love helps us to consider how to foster greater understanding through the cultivation of wonder, and in doing so, change how we relate to one another in friendship.

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Abducting Woman? An Agonistic Reception of Nietzsche’s (and Derrida’s) Gifts

As Derrida himself notes, Nietzsche is a thinker who appears both misogynistic and sympathetic (Derrida 1979: 57). Nietzsche’s misogyny is exemplified in his masculine drive to assimilate the concept of woman into him, to become her conceptual lover who incorporates her through a masculine mimesis. His sympathy can be found in his acts as an agonistic friend who points out the collective violence that is projected onto her. But, is there also an emancipatory character to Nietzsche’s writings on woman? This is a contentious question; however, it is one that Derrida entertains by his proposal that Nietzsche’s feminisms and anti-feminisms are connected or have a larger ‘congruence’ (Derrida 1979: 57). Nietzsche’s attack on feminism is done in defence of what he and Derrida conceive to be feminine power. In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles this is reflected in two threads: one in which the concept of woman is opened up to those who are not cisgender women through a masculine mimesis; the second in which cisgender women are disciplined into femininity as their ideal location for power. Derrida draws mostly on The Gay Science in Spurs but he is also interested in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche declares, ‘Supposing truth is a woman—what then?’ Derrida turns to the preface of Beyond Good and Evil to show that there is a close relationship between woman and truth and that Nietzsche is utilizing the concept of woman as such (Weib an sich) in order to question the coherence of ‘truth’ and the presumptions of the philosopher ‘who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman’ (Derrida 1979: 53). After reading transgender thinkers like Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein, and Julia Serano, as well as the work of Judith Butler, we can rewrite Derrida’s statement and replace the word woman with gender. Then

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it reads like this: ‘The presumption of the philosopher who believes in the truth that is a gender, who believes in truth just as he believes in gender’. In Spurs, Derrida, through Nietzsche, is demonstrating that truth is multiple and varied just as woman is so. He is pointing out that we, like the philosopher who fetishizes truth, fetishize woman. Derrida’s response, as is Nietzsche’s, to the fetishization of woman is to both affirm it and undermine it. In other words, neither philosopher entirely escapes from their own fetishizations of the concept of woman, but they do proliferate these fetishizations and thus lay the groundwork for others to exceed them. Nietzsche is a thinker open to diverse receptions because, as Derrida notices, Nietzsche’s writings purposively yield multiple interpretations. Derrida thinks that Nietzsche’s writing is a kind of pharmakon because it produces both heterogeneity and parody of the norm and in doing so allows for difference. In addition to Derrida’s reading, the rethinking of femininity and the metaphysics of sexual difference through transgender theory and feminist theory attests to the relevance of opening up the concept of woman to multiple positions. Still, the political potential of Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche’s woman and Nietzsche’s writings about woman/women must be considered alongside earlier critique voiced soon after Derrida’s Spurs was translated into English by feminists who found Derrida’s attempt to philosophize as a woman, while concurrently critiquing feminism, highly suspicious. First, I will discuss Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche as a performative thinker and examine three feminist readings of the Nietzschean woman; next, I will speak about Derrida’s analysis of Nietzsche’s notion of woman and her relationship with power and truth; last, I will pursue an emancipatory account of the Nietzschean woman through drawing on some of the interpretive tools found in transgender studies. In Spurs, Derrida states that while reading Nietzsche on woman ‘we shall bear witness to her abduction’ (Derrida 1979: 41). This may mean that Derrida himself is abducting Nietzsche’s concept of woman through rewriting her, more simply that Nietzsche is abducting woman through becoming feminine as a stylist and in doing so is rewriting woman. Then again, it may mean that we as readers are abducting woman, namely during the reading of Spurs we inscribe more layers of meaning onto woman’s form: veils upon veils on Derrida on top of Nietzsche. This is one reason why Nietzsche writes that ‘woman is so artistic’ (GS 361). The position of woman is one that he believes is performative so when she is taken up she recalls her previous articulations and failures and then enacts new ones. Nietzsche claims that we should allow ourselves to be hypnotized by

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women: they too are performing the position of woman or putting on a mask even when they appear to be revealing something about themselves (GS 361). The woman that Nietzsche and Derrida write about and attempt to become as masculine lovers of the feminine is one that Derrida explains acts to both open and close the notion that we have of woman as an intelligible figure (Derrida 1979: 41). But, must the figure of woman be abducted by male philosophers for her to gain greater polyvalence? Are Derrida and Nietzsche attempting to occupy the place of woman through assimilating her into themselves and, in doing so, taking woman away from women? This is a concern that Kelly Oliver voices when she claims that the consequence of Nietzsche and Derrida, ‘dressing up like woman’ to write as her is that ‘philosophy has no need for women. Feminist philosophy, then, also becomes the domain of men’ (Oliver 1988: 25). Oliver claims that Nietzsche does not only want to become woman, he wants to possess her (Oliver 1988: 25). There is evidence for this reading in Nietzsche’s writing: not only does he think men want to possess and control woman and women, he considers it human nature to want to shape and transform objects of knowledge to one’s advantage (GS 14, 363). Whereas the ‘truth’ of ‘woman’ is repetitively denied by both Derrida and Nietzsche, feminine behaviour is celebrated and even coveted by them. The consequence of this is that woman as a performative category is re-fetishized yet in a domain that is no longer exclusive to cis women. Do Nietzsche and Derrida think they know woman better than women? There seems to be evidence for this in both Derrida’s and Nietzsche’s texts. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, ‘Do I dare to suggest that I know women [Weiblein]? This is part of my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternal-feminine [Ewig-Weiblichen]’ (EH ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’ 5). In addition, in The Gay Science (68) Nietzsche makes a diagnostic claim about the way in which female identity is formed. Are Nietzsche and Derrida then doing, as Oliver charges and Nietzsche admits, creating images of woman through their fetishist articulations of her? Are they men manipulating the image of woman for their own benefits and desires rather than affirming or facilitating the performative representations of woman by women which would be the role of a friend or an ally? The proposal that woman gains polyvalence through Nietzsche and Derrida can also be disputed by their comments about feminism. Both thinkers critique the feminist movements of their times with the charge that feminists want to be too much like men (BGE 232; Derrida 1979: 65).

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The urge to be like men, to make claims about science and objectivity, is said to be a break from the artistry and power that women have as great actors; it is conceived as a loss to their feminine styles (Derrida 1979: 65). Derrida attempts to defend Nietzsche from this move by claiming that the feminists who Nietzsche attacks are also men because they believe in the ‘truth’ of ‘woman’. In other words, if they were ‘real’ women they would understand the untruth of woman as do Derrida and Nietzsche. The irony that one cannot help but point to here is that while women are critiqued for wanting to be like men by Derrida and Nietzsche, both male philosophers attempt to become feminine or like woman themselves. We find ourselves returning to Oliver’s concern that there is no place for women in philosophy, but not only because men are writing about and embodying her through styles and feminine discourses. The primary issue today when reading Derrida and Nietzsche on woman is not that male philosophers want to write as woman and thus occupy both masculine and feminine positions. The more concerning issue at stake is that when women ‘want to be like men’ and speak about science and objectivity or ‘the truth’ the consequence is that they that are said to lose their feminine styles (Derrida 1979: 65). It is as if Nietzsche and Derrida are repeating the flaw that Zarathustra chastises men about in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (ZI ‘On the Friend’): they are being miserly towards women by wanting woman to remain in the position of the feminine lover. In Nietzsche (and Derrida) a double gendered position is open to men but not to women. If woman really does become more malleable through Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche why is it that she also becomes less accessible to women who take on masculine qualities? How is it that masculine women are barred from woman yet men who wear feminine masks have access to her? This demonstrates a perhaps unexpected consequence that Oliver’s reading implicitly suggests: the polyvalence brought to woman by Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche makes her more accessible to male philosophers, but less available to women, and particularly those who would compete with the abilities of the male philosophers as agonistic friends. It is also worth considering if Derrida’s treatment of woman, as well as Nietzsche’s, is time dependent and, as such, may not have the same level of philosophical reflections to offer us today on the position of woman. Jane Gallop makes this argument about Derrida when she states that Spurs was an attempt to critique 1970s feminism, namely the tendency of it to essentialize woman as a broad category for mobilization. Although Gallop concedes that Derrida

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does demonstrate that Nietzsche’s woman must not be read as singular (Gallop 1995: 127), she states that Derrida fails to consider Nietzsche’s use of the terms Frau, Weib, Frauenzimmer, and Weiblein (Gallop 1995: 130, 133) and their class associations. Gallop’s charge is that Derrida in reading Nietzsche’s woman overlooks, as did 1970s feminism more generally, issues of class, age, and race which are necessary for both understanding Nietzsche’s terminology and the process of fetishization. Gallop’s conclusion is that Spurs is a text for the 1970s, a mark of that era, not one which continues to offer us timeless philosophical reflection (Gallop 1995: 134). There is no dispute that Gallop is correct in that we require other categories in addition to sex/gender in order to understand fetishization. She is also correct that Nietzsche’s choice of words for woman and women affect his critical commentary which sometimes involves a statement about class and race. However, what Gallop characterizes as outdated, namely the mobilization of women as a group, seems still to be important even if these groups are more specialized with their specific interests. The world continues to be overwhelmingly delimited by two genders with those who are or who want to become women experiencing higher degrees of violence. Furthermore, the masculine mimesis of woman by cisgender men is one that continues today and requires further analysis. ‘Woman’ requires more openings, further simulations. The concept of woman must be allowed to remain performative yet it is also important that woman be distanced from the misogynies of cis men, male philosophers, and their heteronormative assumptions. If Nietzsche’s statement in The Gay Science (68) that man forms the image of woman and woman forms herself according to this image is still relevant, then performatives of woman by cisgender male philosophers are suspicious. In the language of Kate Bornstein, Nietzsche and Derrida are ‘gender defenders’: they do ‘defend the status quo of the existing gender system’ (Bornstein 2006: 237) because they suggest that women should find their location and power within the feminine gender. In doing so, they deny women the position of friendship and push them back towards the role of feminine lover. The third reception of the Nietzschean woman is one that is much more positive. Frances Nesbitt Oppel claims that ‘in the case of ‘woman’, we don’t need to ask whether Nietzsche is erecting an ideal or knocking one down: woman is taking the knocks, and being carted off the dump with other old and now worthless ideals’ (Oppel 2005: 15). Oppel thinks that Nietzsche is undermining ‘woman’ and ‘man’ just as he is questioning through his genealogy ‘good’ and

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‘evil’. Reading Derrida’s notion of abduction through Oppel, we may propose that Nietzsche is abducting woman so that he can destroy her, he is attempting to undermine our passionate attachments to woman through showing how she is much more bound up in the concept of man than any of us would like to admit. In doing so, he can be seen to be acting as an agonistic friend to incite questioning about the metaphysics of sexual difference. This is very much in line with the aims that Nietzsche articulates for himself in Beyond Good and Evil (2) to investigate the metaphysical faith in opposite values through demonstrating how they are ‘insidiously related’. To create new concepts of woman and man, the old ones must be first destroyed. Nietzsche’s writings on woman in Beyond Good and Evil do much to dispute Oppel, yet her reading is not without some evidence, especially if we read Beyond Good and Evil as a provocative work that performs and confronts sex and gender prejudices to promote overcoming. Perhaps in defence of what is considered to be Nietzsche’s misogyny, Derrida states that when Nietzsche speaks of the relationship between men and women it is in reference to an ‘already formalized law’ (Derrida 1979: 109), what we may call today the heterosexual hegemony. A charitable reading of Nietzsche would be that he is diagnosing the heterosexual relation and the limited positions that women have to occupy within it as embodiments of ‘woman’. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida addresses this issue more directly when he states that there is political merit to Zarathustra’s statement that men are not generous enough when it comes to women and, related to this, women are not free enough to be friends. Derrida writes that for Zarathustra woman is the ‘outlaw of humanity’ (Derrida 1997: 283). In Spurs, published more than fifteen years earlier, Derrida articulates the Nietzschean woman through three positions that reflect Zarathustra’s sentiment. The first position of woman that Derrida sees in Nietzsche’s text is her representation as a figure of falsehood. This woman is a subjugated woman that Derrida states is condemned and told that she does not represent the truth. The man ‘offers truth and his phallus as his own proper credentials’ (Derrida 1979: 97). This figure of woman is most present in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche writes severe and provocative reflections on the woman who fails: not only does she fail at being woman, she is incapable of offering any knowledge about what being a woman entails. This is the woman that Nietzsche writes ‘compromises herself ’ when she attempts to seek enlightenment (BGE 232). This woman as a representation of falsehood has a double position in Nietzsche’s philosophy because her ignorance is one which he both reifies and illuminates.

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The second position of woman that Derrida reads in Nietzsche is as a figure of truth. Derrida states that woman is again condemned, but she has two reactive options. In the first reaction, woman identifies with her representation of truth which is a Christian–Platonic one and attempts to become it. This is a slavish position for Nietzsche in which woman gives herself as a truth that man has defined and man takes and possesses her. Although Nietzsche is critical of this representation of woman, it is one that he pushes women towards through his disciplining of femininity. Derrida states that the positions of woman as both falsehood and truth are located within a phallogocentric economy. However, in the second reaction to woman as truth, which is considered more liberating for both Derrida and Nietzsche, woman performs the truths of woman, manipulating them for her own advantage (Derrida 1979: 97). This is the woman who passes as an ideal figure of woman with her femininity; she is the great actor that Nietzsche celebrates and can be read as a phallic woman because she plays the phallogocentric economy as a means to gain power (Derrida 1979: 67). In other words, she takes up the phallic language of the position of woman for her own benefit and in doing so is able to employ the masks of woman with a degree of agency. What is indicative for the second position of woman as truth is that she does not believe in the truth of woman as such, but she understands that enacting the feminine seductive power is in her interest (Derrida 1979: 67). Nietzsche considers the position of the actor to be one that is most gratifying for women. He explains the characteristics of the actor as ‘falseness with a good conscience; the delight in simulation exploding as a power that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”, flooding it and at times extinguishing it; the inner craving for a role and mask, for appearance; an excess of the capacity for all kinds of adaptation’ (GS 361). Derrida’s agreement with Nietzsche is evidenced when he writes that woman in ‘giving’ is simulating herself and in doing so assures herself of a kind of self-mastery. As she performs her characteristics of the feminine as a ‘seductive power’, Derrida states that she ‘rules over dogmatism, and disorients and routs those credulous men, the philosophers’ (Derrida 1979: 67). As an appropriator, Derrida thinks that this woman upsets the distinctions between giver/taker, possessed/possessor, master/slave. The suggestion made by Derrida is that the taking up of the position of woman as mask involves a doing rather than a being which upsets the regime of sexual difference. The third position of woman that Derrida articulates is woman as an affirmative power. He explains her as creative, ‘recognized and affirmed as an

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affirmative power, a dissimulatress, an artist, a dionysiac’ (Derrida 1979: 97). Derrida claims that this affirmation is done not by man but by herself. He distinguishes this from the previous two reactive positions as an active position. Derrida refers to The Gay Science (361) as evidence for this reading of Nietzsche. However, this section is the same one that reveals woman’s position as actor, as one that is reactionary as a mode of survival. As such, it is debatable whether this section can show the position of woman as affirmative to the extent that Derrida supposes. In The Gay Science (361) Nietzsche writes that women have to be actresses and this suggests a reactive rather than an active position.1 One must look elsewhere to Nietzsche’s writings on pregnancy and motherhood for an active account of the feminine. Woman’s creativity rests in the power to birth children for Nietzsche. Specifically, he thinks that giving birth to the Übermensch is the most important role of woman and this is where she can find her highest affirmation (ZI ‘On Old and Young Little Women’). Nietzsche uses the notion of pregnancy to explain creativity in general but makes spiritual pregnancy exclusive to men (GS 72). When it comes to the affirmative power of woman, Derrida’s reading is much kinder than what Nietzsche himself writes. Derrida states that Nietzsche is ‘a thinker of pregnancy which, for him, is no less praiseworthy in a man than it is in a woman’ (Derrida 1979: 65). Although this statement appears as salutary, it has the effect of once again bringing a feminine characteristic over to men and praising it, but without making a reciprocal move for women. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that if a woman chooses another life pursuit instead of motherhood, it is likely due to some deficiency (BGE 144, 239). He claims that women are abandoning their most important and natural roles to attempt to be like men. Nietzsche implies that there is a serious consequence to this. Nietzsche proclaims: ‘What? And this should be the end? And the breaking of woman’s magic spell [Entzauberung des Weibes] is at work?’ (BGE 239). There is evidence in both Nietzsche and Derrida that they want to do precisely what Nietzsche cautions about, namely attempt to break the spell of woman through becoming feminine themselves and also undermine the truth of woman. At the same time, however, they reify the feminine as style and in doing so tinge it with exoticism, claiming it to be the most desirable mode of enactment for women. We have already seen some of the problems with this; in conclusion I will explore an emancipatory reading of the Nietzschean woman through dialogue with transgender theory.

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In The Gay Science (69) Nietzsche writes, ‘Would a woman [Weibe] be able to hold us (or, as they say, “enthral” us) if we did not consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against us? Or against herself – which in certain cases would be crueller revenge’ (GS 69). In reference to this quote Derrida writes, ‘The exchange of stylistic blows or the thrust of a dagger confuses sexual identity’ (Derrida 1979: 53). The notion that woman as actor has the ability to destroy herself and in doing so challenge the coherence of woman is a power that Nietzsche and Derrida find admirable. Today, those who are most actively involved in the project of reforming the figure of woman are transgender thinkers and activists who dispute as Susan Stryker puts it, ‘The stability of the material referent “sex” and the relationship of that unstable category to the linguistic, social, and psychic categories of “gender”’ (Stryker 2006a: 9). Following what Derrida and Nietzsche write about the actor who simulates the truth of woman, one can claim that the transgender woman is a new enactment of woman who redefines the embodiment of woman and multiplies its truths. Trans women together with nonbinary people and trans men are showing us that sexual difference can no longer be understood within a binary structure. The transgender woman as a conceptual figure goes further than the cis woman of Nietzsche’s philosophy because she must, in order to survive, move from the position of a reactive figure of truth who enacts what Nietzsche calls ‘falseness with a good conscience’ (GS 361) to an affirmative position of power in which being woman is a doing that she creates. Since her location as woman defies the metaphysics of sexual difference, her very being, which is a doing and a becoming, actively disrupts and transforms the category of woman surpassing the third position of woman that Derrida articulates. It is important to recognize that transgender people are up against great resistance as evidenced by the disproportionately high level of violence they experience. This violence is perpetuated by the ‘naturalized heterosexual order’ (Stryker 2006b: 248) and its ‘gender defenders’ (Bornstein 2006: 237) who condemn transgender people as, in Derrida’s language, figures of falsehood (Derrida 1979: 97). Stryker explains, ‘Transgender people who problematize the assumed correlation of a particular biological sex with a particular social gender are often considered to make false representations of an underlying material truth, through the wilful distortion of surface appearance. Their gender presentation is seen as a lie rather than as an expression of a deep, essential truth’ (Stryker 2006a: 9). Transgender identities are considered a threat to the

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cisgender heterosexual hegemony and the metaphysics of sexual difference because their very presence divulges the cultural imperialism of gender, its flaws, and the fact that gender is unfinished. In a patriarchal society, in which masculine characteristics are valued more than feminine ones, Julia Serano points out that trans women are perceived of as a serious threat because in affirming their femaleness and femininity they question ‘the supposed supremacy of maleness and masculinity’ (Serano 2016: 15). Politically speaking, the point is not to reject the figure of woman. The reality that feminine people of all genders experience the highest levels of violence is not a reason to neutralize gender expressions. Instead, we must allow for women to occupy more positions within and outside of ‘woman’. Woman must be abducted by multiple bodies so that her presence no longer exerts the cissexist heteronormative violence of a phallogocentric economy. As Derrida writes, when it comes to woman, ‘One can no longer seek her. … And she is certainly not to be found in any of the familiar modes of concept or knowledge. Yet it is impossible to resist looking at her’ (Derrida 1979: 71). This need of the cisgender philosopher to ‘look at’ and specify woman in narrow terms is one that must continue to be challenged. As a writer, Nietzsche is made into both a male mother and a phallic woman by Derrida and also by himself. Nietzsche praises both male mothers as creative types and phallic women, namely women who master the masters, women who are great actors, and women who take as they give, and Derrida recognizes this. In addition to these movements acting to destabilize woman and with it gender as a dualistic metaphysical category, Nietzsche is attempting to become woman in so far as she is the one who challenges the coherence of the truth. This becoming feminine as a writer defies the notion that there is one correct way of reading a text. Potentially, it also challenges the assumption that the category of woman is one that is exclusive to those designated as female at birth. While this enactment of the feminine through Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche remains problematic because of its misogyny, it may offer us new productions that align themselves symbiotically with the transgender thinkers, feminist theorists, and activists who want to disrupt and expand the category of woman today.

Conclusion: Further Re-evaluations Nietzsche’s writings on friendship, love, and women pose a challenge to these concepts in the received philosophical canon, and more specifically in terms of their coherence within a Christian–Platonic metaphysical order. Nietzsche inverts Diotima’s teaching from Plato’s Symposium that all profane love is sacred through showing how all love conceived of as sacred is driven by a profane will to power. He claims that love is an egoistic impulse that seeks possession of the other and that friendship is that which sublimates this impulse into a shared higher goal. Nietzsche’s re-evaluations of love and friendship are part of his postmetaphysical project outlined in Beyond Good and Evil (2) to undermine what he calls the ‘grounding faith of the metaphysicians’ which is the belief in ‘the opposition of values’. This project is connected to his task as a self-proclaimed physician of culture who seeks to diagnose the ideological malaises that he believes perpetuate the weak nihilism of the last human. His diagnoses of these malaises allow for him to propose re-evaluative concepts such as the free spirit, the intellectual conscience, and agonistic friendship as means for healing and change. Nietzsche’s writings on love and friendship, men and women speak to the restrictions imposed on these concepts in the history of philosophy by thinkers such as Aristotle, Montaigne, and Kant, among others, who thought women capable of only lower friendships or all together incapable of friendship. This position is well articulated by Montaigne when he writes that women are not normally capable of friendship because they do not know how to cope with the ‘familiarity and mutual confidence’ of friendship nor know how to sustain longterm dedicated relationships which come about by free will (Montaigne 1991: 210). Montaigne notes that this perspective reflects those opinions shared by ancient philosophers. Aristotle writes, for example, in the Politics that women are inferior to men and in the Nicomachean Ethics he turns to the relationship between a husband and a wife as an example of a lower kind of friendship in which one person (the wife) offers to the superior (the husband) more affection to equalize the relationship (NE 1158b11–13).

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Nietzsche’s analysis of friendship is androcentric, and it encourages traditionally masculine qualities such as competition and toughness. However, he also takes many jabs at men throughout his writings on friendship and love, claiming that men are responsible both for the image of woman (GS 68) and for withholding friendship from women (ZI ‘On the Friend’). Furthermore, Nietzsche’s critical examination of woman as lover and actor disrupts the fantasies of romantic and courtly love. His provocative writings on love, which reveal the idiosyncratic practices of lovers, compels his readers to question love’s association with ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’. Nietzsche disputes the coherence of the concept of woman through revealing her phallogocentric genealogy and also by abducting her as a performative fiction (as both a male mother and a phallic woman), but without going so far as to release her from the straitjacket of misogyny. There are many moments in Nietzsche’s free spirit texts and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which one is inclined to believe that he wanted to start an Epicurean garden in which free spirits would be welcomed regardless of gender, ethnicity, and class. They would share the values of the free spirit and joyful friendship, in which play, community, and rest are central to the experience. Yet, there are numerous other points where this seems impossible for Nietzsche, where he writes that women as slaves or artists (and sometimes both at the same time) lack the intellectual probity required to move from being fettered to free. When Nietzsche writes about sharing joy, cheerfulness, and repose between friends, he comes closest to a notion of openheartedness in friendship, something that Kant surprisingly spoke about during his Lectures on Ethics on friendship. According to Kant, friendship can involve the enjoyment of each other’s humanity through sharing thoughts and emotions which leads to ‘openheartedness’ (LE Vigilantius 27:677). However, he follows this by stating that one must be careful that too much transparency does not occur since this can cause a loss of respect (LE Vigilantius 27:679). Kant states that ‘even to our best friends, we must not discover ourselves as we naturally know ourselves to be, for that would be a nasty business’ (LE Collins 27:427). Love in Kant and in Nietzsche is often associated with this kind of ‘nasty business’ in which people are consumed by the need to possess or be possessed by their lover and, in doing so, expose too much of themselves. Respect and distance are deemed important for healthy friendship, for bringing measure in to displace, modify, and control affects. Both the agonistic and the bestowing friend in Nietzsche’s writings use spiritualized cruelty to push the drives of the

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other towards something that exceeds the people involved. Whereas this push is reciprocal for friends of agon, with the bestower it is expressed from above to the one who receives. In agonistic friendship, the cruel and selfish drives of love are not neutralized but they do receive measure through the practices of agonistics. Friendship transforms the emotive aspects of the instinctual wills to power that make up all human beings, according to Nietzsche, into struggles of overcoming. Friendship, then, is not free of affect or possessive impulses but the impulses that Nietzsche thinks motivate love are turned towards a shared project in which friends require one another to achieve it. Irigaray has questioned the emphasis on the displacement of emotion and of eros in friendship, suggesting that we need to change the choreography of love by re-evaluating it from a feminine perspective. By bringing a sense of wonder into one’s relationships, Irigaray explains that one develops a curiosity which includes understanding that one cannot ever know the other conclusively. She states that there is enjoyment to be had at this threshold experience because it supports the position of unknowability and affection for the newness of the other. This is why Irigaray uses the expression, ‘I love to you’ instead of ‘I love you’ because she believes this statement articulates more precisely an affirmative and giving affection which resists assimilation. Like Kant and Nietzsche, Irigaray’s notion of friendship requires that the friends exercise self-restraint; however, she articulates this restraint in new terms through the enjoyment of a recognition of boundaries and the cultivation of wonder and love for the differences of the friend. It may be salutary to apply Irigaray’s principle of wonder to friendships of all kinds (so long as it resists exoticization) even though her focus is on heterosexual friendships. Her concern with female friendships is that women over-identify with one another and thus cannot glean that threshold experience of wonder with the same intensity that she believes occurs in heterosexual relationships. The problem is that her move to place sexual difference at the top of the hierarchies of difference overlooks the other critical categories of race, class, ability, and age. In addition, her emphasis on the heterosexual relation ignores important questions about female friendship (as well as gender non-binary people). In doing so, she repeats the error of exclusion so common to philosophers writing about friendship in the received canon, but she does it through inversion, by replacing the homosocial with the heterosocial. Our current time is one in which gender is not fixed within the binary that was presupposed by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and even Irigaray. Yet we still suffer

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from the consequences of living in a patriarchal society in which women’s lives are valued less than those of men which means that their relationships, creative practices, and professions are treated as less relevant. There is an ongoing need to think about female empowerment and friendship and to consider what kinds of philosophical sources are available to support this at an intellectual level. We may find it worthwhile to apply the principles of agonistic friendship to our professional and creative lives and, in fact, many of us already do and were initiated into these kinds of striving and argumentative relationships by those who resemble Nietzsche’s bestowing friend, perhaps a teacher, supervisor, or mentor. However, to sustain ourselves as friends, lovers, parents, and teachers, and to learn how to thrive in a world in which the female body is othered, women need sources of energy and power that provide support and affirmation. One practical source can be found in female friendships of solidarity in which the sisterhood is understood to be a politically powerful force and women maintain spaces in which to hear and support each other’s concerns. Theoretical sources can be found in the writings of feminist authors such as Adrienne Rich, Shulamith Firestone, Bell Hooks, Adriana Cavarero, Sara Ahmed, and Audre Lorde, among many others. While Irigaray writes about the importance of the erotic in friendship, it is Lorde who articulates the power of the erotic for women as an energy which sustain female life and friendship at an ontological level. Lorde explains the erotic as a source of power and knowledge for women, connected to one’s foundational being that is non-rational. She states that the erotic has been distorted and associated with the pornographic which is ‘plasticized sensation’ that is ‘without feeling’ (Lorde 1984: 54). Lorde thinks that connecting to the erotic is a way to experience action with feelings that are grounded in a strong sense of embodiment so one’s vitality can be affirmed and enjoyed. ‘When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives’ (Lorde 1984: 55). One can experience the erotic when one enters into any kind of meaningful pursuit with another person and shares joy. Lorde states that this joy which can be emotional, intellectual, physical, or psychic becomes a bridge for the shared understanding of what is not shared between two people ‘and lessens the threat of their difference’ (Lorde 1984: 56). It is less difficult than might be expected to find parallels between Lorde’s account of the power of the erotic and Nietzsche’s writings. An emphasis on a return to the knowledge of the body (ZI ‘Despisers of the Body’) and to the

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immanent joy that can be experienced within it (and most especially when it is shared) can be found in Nietzsche’s writings on the self, self-overcoming, and joyful friendship. He too illuminates the pleasure to be found in sharing joy and connects it to something fundamental to the human because it allows for a fuller expression of the self (D 422). What appears to inhibit Nietzsche from exploring the full generative potential of the body as an erotic power is that he associates the erotic most often with the masculine possessive drive in its sexual expression. Although he connects the erotic with artistry (GS 361) and even laments how Christianity has vilified Eros (D 76), when it comes to writing about women’s erotic powers they are related to their mothering activities or to their role as fetish/actor (GS 361). One who, in Nietzsche’s words, displays falsity ‘with a good conscience’ (GS 361) is not enacting the power of the erotic in Lorde’s terms, but is instead experiencing a plastic sensation that she associates with the pornographic. This is the trap of Nietzsche’s feminine lover whose greatest freedom is found in her performance of those gender roles that have been prescribed by a patriarchal economy. To the question of Nietzsche’s challenge to the bivalent logic of man and woman, it seems that he does create fissures in its opposition which have continued to fray with the development of postmodern, feminist, queer, and transgender theories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, the man/woman dichotomy and the metaphysics of sexual difference are far from being overcome in his writings (or in society today). What of Nietzsche’s attempt to bring more enmity into friendship and to reinvent the notion of friendship as a practice in therapeutics that supports shared self-overcoming? It seems that we are still living in the wake of Nietzsche’s last human and require the spiritualized cruelty of agonistic friendship as medicine to wake up our apathetic souls. The challenge is to find a way to nourish that struggle with a foundation in the erotic power and joy that both Lorde and Nietzsche write about. This requires that we return to traditionally feminine virtues such as care and co-operation and rethink them as human virtues so that spiritual cruelty can be delivered with the tenderness we need to support health and life. It also requires that we continue to interrogate the notion of the human so that is shifts away from its androcentric model. In Nietzsche’s words, we still require new articulations of the soul hypothesis. These new postulations of the self must speak to the ways in which human beings of all genders and backgrounds are re-evaluating themselves today.

Notes Introduction 1 The expression ‘gendered troubles of friendship’ is inspired by the title of Judith Butler’s well-known book Gender Trouble (Butler 1999).

Chapter 1 1 This is in the process of changing. See Stanford University Press, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. 2 Translation modified. The German is, Wie man wird, was man ist. 3 Paul van Tongeren claims that Z is ‘the pivot’ of Nietzsche’s writings for several reasons, one of which is because it ‘draws a line between two parts of his writings (he calls them affirmative before and destructive after)’ (Van Tongeren 2000: 38). I agree with this assessment mostly but understand it slightly differently: Z is a bridge between the two periods embodying elements of both and joining them together rather than drawing a line between them. 4 The nihilism of last human in Z is weak and reactive as opposed to a strong active nihilism that destroys in order to create. Nietzsche turns to the figure of the lion to represent active nihilism (ZI 1) which occurs when one’s highest values turn against oneself so that new values can emerge. 5 ‘Free spirit a relative concept. – He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him’ (HAH 225). 6 Ansell-Pearson argues that Nietzsche’s goal is not to reject morality all together. He cites Nietzsche’s own statement that going beyond good and evil does not mean going beyond good and bad (GMI 17). Nietzsche is attempting to transform the transcendent model of morality and judgement into an immanent ethics of selfshaping (see Ansell-Pearson 2011: 180, footnote 3). 7 Citing GS P2, Paul van Tongeren claims that Nietzsche approaches philosophy as ‘a physician of culture’, both as a psychologist and a physiologist. Nietzsche did so because he was influenced by the medical Greek approach to doing

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Notes philosophy and also because he endured much suffering through illness in his life and his philosophical approach was admittedly affected by this (Van Tongeren 2000: 2–3). Nietzsche writes that great pain ‘compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium – things in which formerly we have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound’ (GS P3). Translation modified. The quote is: ‘The psychological problem apparent in the Zarathustra type is how someone who to an unprecedented degree says no and does no to everything everyone has said yes to so far, – how somebody like this can nevertheless be the opposite of a no-saying spirit; how a spirit who carries everything that is most difficult about fate, a destiny of a task, can nonetheless be the lightest, spinning out into the beyond – Zarathustra is a dancer’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 6). Nietzsche also writes that during his writing of Z , ‘the affirmative pathos par excellence, which I have named the tragic pathos, was alive in me to the highest degree’ (EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ 1). This interpretation of Z is inspired by Hutter’s reading of Nietzsche in Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (2006). ‘All my writings from this point on have been fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone? … It was not my fault if nothing was caught. There weren’t any fish.’ (EH ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ 1). Nietzsche writes, ‘One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something”. “Rather do anything than nothing”: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste’ (GS 329). For an explanation of the intellectual conscience, also see GS 319, 335, and 344. Lampert claims that ‘the esoteric view is unattainable or inaccessible to anyone who is not the kind for it: no one can be carried to the view from the height’ (Lampert 2001: 72–3). The use of ‘we’ is seductive. Van Tongeren explains who are the ‘we’: ‘different from contemporary people, they have liberated themselves at least to some extent from the illnesses, the prejudices, the beliefs and convictions which are being criticized by Nietzsche’. They are ‘transitional figures’ who will bring about a new dawn (Van Tongeren 2000: 90–1). On the autobiographical, very personal, and performative quality of his work Nietzsche writes: ‘My writings speak only of my overcomings: “I” am in them, together with everything that was inimical to me’ (HAHII P1).

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18 My reading of Nietzsche is inspired by Pierre Hadot’s notion of the philosophical ‘art of living’ in which philosophy become a daily exercise in which ‘the whole of existence is engaged’ (Hadot 1995: 83).

Chapter 2 1 Both Abbey (1999) and Miner (2010) emphasize the importance of the middle period texts for understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy of friendship. Although these texts are very important, later books such as Z and BGE should not be overlooked. Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997); Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974); Hutter, Shaping the Future (2006); and Van Tongeren, ‘On Friends in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’ (2003) recognize the importance of Z for understanding Nietzschean friendship. Kaufmann states that Nietzsche’s concept of friendship reached its maturation in Z (Kaufmann 1974: 366). Friendship is a prominent theme in Z and one which correlates to Nietzsche’s comments on friendship elsewhere. 2 See NE Books VIII and IX. Both Abbey (1999: 50) and Miner (2010: 48) acknowledge the fact that Nietzsche has higher and lower forms of friendship like Aristotle. Kant discusses different kinds of friendship in his Lectures on Ethics (1997) and in The Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy (1996). Other hierarchical interpretations of friendship include Cicero, On Friendship and the Dream of Scipio [Laelius de Amicitia and Somnium Scipionis] (1990) and Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1991), Book 1, Chapter 28 ‘De l’amitié’ or ‘On Friendship’. 3 See GS 21, 296. 4 In a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, Nietzsche expresses frustration with Lanzky who was visiting him in Nice, calling him the ‘German who revered me’ (KSB III.3, 29–31). 5 In D 309 Nietzsche discusses how love tends to focus on as much beauty as possible, even to the point of self-deception. See also HAHI P1. 6 See GS 14, 283; ZI ‘On the Friend’. 7 See also ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ 3; ZII ‘On the Tarantulas’. 8 Nietzsche describes a genius as someone who ‘begets or gives birth, taking both terms in their most elevated sense’ (BGE 206). 9 Aristotle describes utility friendship in these terms when he writes that ‘those who are friends because of utility part when the advantage is at an end; for they were lovers not of each other but of profit’ (NE 1157a12–15). 10 Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Book 3, chap. 8, ‘On the Art of Conversation’, 1046.

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11 In GMII 16 Nietzsche writes: ‘Lacking external enemies and obstacles, and forced into the oppressive narrowness and conformity of custom, man impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace.’ 12 Miner (2010: 57). Miner fails to explain how Nietzsche problematizes truth and ‘the Truth’; he also does not give an account of how Nietzschean knowledge-seeking differs from the pursuit of truth. 13 In BGE 220 Nietzsche disputes the concept that love is unegoistic and emphasizes the importance of self-interest in giving to others. In HAH 37 Nietzsche writes that on the basis of erroneous analysis such as so-called unegoistic actions false ethics are erected. Later in GM P2, he states that its project to examine the ‘descent of our moral prejudices’ was first laid out in HAH. Nietzsche’s sustained critical evaluation of unegoism from HAH into GM justifies my use of the texts from these periods to examine the relationship between friendship and self-interest in Nietzsche. See the following selections as an example of this continuity: HAH 37, 133, 96; D 145, 514; GS 21, 119, 373; BGE 220–1, 265; GM: P5, I: 2, II: 18. 14 See also D 143 in which Nietzsche describes how life would be unsupportable if the sympathy for others doubled. 15 See also ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’: in this section Nietzsche writes about the importance of becoming full enough first before giving to others. 16 See also GS 307, ‘When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm – something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet’. 17 See D 18, ‘Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys’. Also, D 30 about how cruelty has been refined over time. 18 See GMII 3 for how cruelty ingrained the bad conscience into memory. 19 ‘But so that I do not whirl round, my friends, tie me fast to this column here! Rather would I even be a stylite than a whirlpool of vengeance!’ (ZII ‘On the Tarantulas’). 20 See ZII ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’ and ‘On Those Who Pity’. 21 ‘For Nietzsche, every advance in life is an overcoming of some obstacle or counterforce, so that conflict is a mutual co-constitution of contending forces’ (Hatab 2002: 134). 22 Walter Kaufmann states that Nietzsche ‘renounced Christian love for the sake of Greek friendship’ (Kaufmann 1974: 366). 23 In Acampora’s most recent work on agon, Contesting Nietzsche, she explains different descriptions of competition found in HC and other early works of Nietzsche: one form of competition attempts to win through the destruction of the opponent and the other aims to win ‘by excelling what opposes (i.e. it engages the activity of elevating above [erheben] opposition)’. Nietzsche’s notion of agon relates

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28

29 30

31

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to this second kind which can be understood as good because it supports general and individual welfare ( Acampora 2013a: 22). See D 412, GS 14 and BGE 192. See AOM 75. See HAHI P1 and BGE 25. In ZI ‘On Believers in a World Behind’ Zarathustra discusses ‘the one who understands (Erkennenden)’ as one who practices the youngest virtue of honesty (Redlichkeit). Nietzsche states many times that one must become what one is. This saying taken from Pindar is the subtitle to EH and is repeated in GS and Z . See GS 270, 335 and ZIV ‘The Honey Sacrifice’. Tracy Strong states that, for Nietzsche, one can be judged based on how much one becomes who one is. He describes this as involving an agonistic pluralism in which superiority of strength or intellect is not the criteria. Instead, it means to have awareness of the imperatives one follows and will respond to in the future and to discover which imperative is meaningful to you. See Strong, ‘Philosophy of the Morning: Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration’, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 39 (2010): 51–65, 56, 63. GS 110. See also Rayman (2007: 158). Both John Richardson and João Constâncio have pointed out that Nietzsche’s approach to thinking is agonistic and empathetic. See Richardson (1996: 264–5) and Constâncio (2012: 36). See GMIII 12 in which Nietzsche explains his notion of objectivity: by having as many perspectives as possible, one can come to have a fuller understanding of something. Constâncio explains what Nietzsche’s notion of objectivity means as ‘seeing from the standpoint of others and at the same time striving to overcome the standpoints of others’ (2012: 136–40). This involves an analysis of the motivations of the standpoints, one which Richardson calls ‘drive diagnosis’ (1996: 273). Read together, they provide a detailed account of what Nietzschean objectivity involves. See EH ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, 1. Marsden states that the übermenschlich cannot be conceptualized but rather must be sensed or felt and that ‘the Overhuman is to be sensed in Nietzsche’s thinking at the very point where cognition fails’ (2005: 108–9). Abbey (1999: 67) argues that Nietzsche’s writings on friendship in the middle period are irreconcilable with his concept of the Overhuman active in the later works. I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s notion of the Overhuman is very compatible with and even dependent upon Nietzsche’s conception of friendship. See ZII ‘On the Virtuous’. An exception is discussed in BGE (225) when Nietzsche discusses a ‘farsighted pity’ that praises the necessity of suffering. This ‘higher’ pity opposes the pity that thinks

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Notes only of the poor suffering human creature by stating that the creature must suffer so that the creator can come into being. It seems to be a pity for those who cannot comprehend the tonic of struggle and its vital role in overcoming. Miner provides a very good account of sympathy, opposing it to pity (Miner 2010: 64–6). See WS 27, D 224. See GS 14. See ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’ and ZIV ‘The Ugliest Man’.

Chapter 3 1 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was a French naturalist and an early evolutionary theorist who claimed that acquired characteristics were inheritable. He believed that a change in one’s environment could shift an organisms needs and also change its behaviour, resulting in a change in organ use and development which would bring a change in form from one generation to the next and gradual species change as well. One example of Lamarckism is that a blacksmith who strengthened his muscles in his arms during his lifetime would pass on this muscular development to his sons as they matured. What has come to be known as Lamarckism or soft inheritance was widely believed during Lamarck’s time and was modified and adopted by Darwin as the use and disuse theory. Although August Weismann (1834–1914) rejected Lamarckism and claimed that only the germ cells and not the other cells of the body, the somatic cells, could pass on traits to the next generation, it was only with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s research in genetics after 1900 that Lamarckism was thoroughly discredited. More recently, however, interests in Lamarckism have emerged in epigenetics with the claim that certain behavioural traits acquired by past generations are inheritable. See Jablonka and Lamb (1995, 2005) and Richards (2006). 2 ‘Dies ist der große Umschwung. Lamarck und Hegel – Darwin ist nur eine Nachwirkung’ (KSA 34[73]). 3 The German is hinzuvererbt und angezüchtet from the verbs vererben which means to hand something down or bequeath and züchten which means to breed. 4 In this section, the soul can be understood to mean one’s character or psychological self that is composed of values, beliefs, and drives. The notion of the soul is not to be understood as something that is separate from the body because they are one and the same for Nietzsche (ZI ‘On the Despisers of the Body’). 5 Hutter explains Nietzsche’s concept of nutrition as involving ‘food’ for all aspects of the human being; in addition to actual food, he conceives of intellectual material

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and environmental interaction as different kinds of nutrition that sustain or hinder development (Hutter 2006: 154). Hutter claims that ‘Nietzsche’s vision is thoroughly materialistic and hence refuses to distinguish between the three part of the totality as either ontologically or existentially separate. The living human being always remains one whole, and this received Christian division of body, soul, and spirit or mind is not a division in reality but only an analytical distinction and cultural fiction’ (Hutter 2006: 147). In GM III 15, Nietzsche discusses the tendency of people to blame others for their suffering. KSA 6, 295, my translation. My translation, KSA 3, 275. The Hollingdale translation missed a crucial point of Nietzsche’s that the second nature is acquired first through education. Schacht explains Nietzsche’s notion of consciousness by opposing it to biological processes and unconscious or subconscious events (Schacht 1983: 284). Gardner writes, ‘In one regard Nietzsche’s view that selfhood is illusory follows directly from his general view that consciousness is epiphenomenal: Nietzsche thinks that we take the I of self-consciousness to be a cause – we construe its relation to our actions in agent-causationist terms; thus if consciousness is epiphenomenal, so must be the I’ (Gardner 2009: 3). Leiter explains ‘type-facts’ as drives and attributes corresponding to the unconscious mental states as well as to the physiology of the person that motivates action (Leiter 2009: 122). Katsafanas argues that for Nietzsche both conscious and unconscious mental states have structure, but of different kinds: whereas an unconscious perception may see an object in all of its details and sensations it represents only a ‘discriminatory ability’ or ‘a perceptual sensitivity to features of the environment’; a conscious state will subsume an image into a category that overlooks details in order to generalize, as known as ‘categorical perception’ or ‘a token of some type’ (Katsafanas 2014: 10–12). See also Katsafanas (2005). Katsafanas distinguishes unconscious perceptions as having a ‘discriminatory ability’ (2014: 11). Aydin claims that the forces of will to power are ‘intelligent’ and judge other forces to determine how to overpower other forces (Aydin 2007: 29). Constâncio explains the inner drives as being ‘perceptual, perspectival, interpretative and intelligent’ (2011: 30). Richardson claims that the incomplete nature of the drive synthesis is why Nietzsche can make the claim that there is no self (1996: 48). Paul Katsafanas makes a different, but also important point about one’s ability to not simply act out or succumb to the drives when he points out that Nietzsche

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states that what makes one a strong individual is one’s ability to resist impulses and stimulus so that one can ‘suspend decision’ (Katsafanas 2013: 749). 17 ‘For this is the secret of the soul: only when the hero has abandoned her is she approached, in a dream, by – the over-hero’ (ZII ‘On Those Who Are Sublime’). 18 ‘And this secret did Life herself tell to me. “Behold”, she said, “I am that which must always overcome itself”’’ (ZII ‘On Self-Overcoming’).

Chapter 4 1 It is important to note that although they both reject the connection between Aristotelian virtue and Nietzsche’s ethics, they read Nietzsche as his own kind of virtue ethicist. See Daigle (2006) and Hunt (1991). 2 Aristotle’s writings on greatness of soul and friendship postulate megalopsychia as a masculine virtue which is why I have kept the translation as great-souled man (and not modified it to great-souled person). His writings about virtue and friendship in Nicomachean Ethics also suggest that he believes women incapable of being greatsouled. This differs for Nietzsche’s bestower, because Nietzsche states that women are not yet capable of friendship which suggests that the position of the bestower, as a kind of friend, is open to women too. 3 See ZI ‘On the Despisers of the Body’. 4 Zarathustra challenges his companions to rethink their notions of virtue, calling himself a ‘ploughshare’ whose ‘words tear open the ground of your souls’ (ZII ‘On the Virtuous’). 5 ‘That your virtue may be your Self and not something foreign’ (ZII ‘On the Virtuous’). 6 See Aristotle NE IX.4; ZI ‘On the Friend’. 7 Aristotle writes ‘all the features of friendship extend from oneself to others’ (NE 1168b5). 8 See D 335, 516, 552; ZI ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’; and ZII ‘On Those Who Pity’. 9 For example, Aristotle writes: ‘The excellent person labours for his friends and for his native country and will die for them if he must; he will sacrifice money, honours, and contested goods in general, in achieving the fine for himself ’ (NE 1169a19–25). 10 It is also important to recognize that Nietzsche is problematizing Zarathustra’s bestowing need to be like the star. ‘“Greetings, Great star”, he said, as he had said before, “you deep happiness-eye. What would all your happiness be, had you not those whom you illumine! And if they stayed in their chambers while you are already awake and come and bestow and distribute: how your proud modesty

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would be angry! Well then! They are still asleep, these superior humans, while I am awake: they are not my rightful companions! Not for them am I waiting here in my mountains”’ (ZIV ‘The Sign’). In this passage, Nietzsche demonstrates that the bestower is dependent upon finding the right kind of recipients for his teachings and without this discovery he is unable to flourish. Jacob Howland reads Aristotle differently. He claims that Aristotle implies that friendship is a corrective, even for men of virtue. All men can suffer from moral weakness and the friend can, if the other is willing to listen, help the other recognize his mistake(s). He refers to NE 9.12.1172a1–12 where Aristotle writes that friends ‘seem to become still better from their activities and their mutual correction’ (Howland 2002: 52). Howard J. Curzer states that Aristotle’s concept of megalopsychia takes the Homeric notion of greatness and attempts to merge it with the ‘newer value of moderation’. He argues that Aristotle fails to accomplish this (Curzer 1990: 518). Robert Crisp points out that from a Christian or post-Christian perspective there are particular characteristics of the great-souled man that makes him disturbing: his extreme confidence and self-concern, lack of humility, and his ‘commitment to an aesthetics of virtue, with moral beauty or nobility of the agent’s character being his dominant aim’ (Crisp 2006: 172, 176). Christopher Cordner claims that Aristotle’s notion of the good in relation to greatsouled man as a lover of the noble is a worldly one: Aristotle adds to the Platonic good and reasonable the heroic (heroic excellence + reason). He states that Aristotle does not fully succeed in this attempt (Cordner 1994: 297). Happiness is dependent upon having excellent friends for Aristotle (NE 1170b19). Aristotle writes that ‘good people’s life together allows for the cultivation of virtue’ (NE 1170a12). Crisp states that the problem with the great-souled is that he is ‘ungrateful’ and he wants to repay any generosity given to him, but not out of gratitude or reciprocity but instead to maintain his position of superiority; however, his desire for superiority is in regards to ‘that which is in itself noble and honourable’ (Crisp 2006: 171). Aristotle writes that the great-souled will display his talents when he meets others of worth ‘since superiority over them is difficult’ (NE 1124b20–2). Although he does not discuss competition here, it is reasonable to assume that it would naturally occur between two men of similar nature who both aim to have the more powerful position but are more or less equal. In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle mentions the name of some men who are thought to be great-souled: they include Alcibiades, Achilles, Ajax, Lysander, and Socrates. Jonathan Barnes, trans. Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 97b16–25. Socrates and Alcibiades were friends so it would be

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Notes interesting in light of the discussion of how difficult it is for great-souled men to be friends to discuss what kind of friendship they had. Aristotle states that friendship between unequals is possible so long as the superior person is loved more (1158b25–9 and 1159b38–40). In English translation the German words edel, Adel, and vornehm are all rendered as ‘noble’ although each word has different associations. Edel means noble in the sense of that which is precious and is highly valued; vornehm is associated with a higher rank, someone who acts nobly in terms of behaviour, gestures, and character; Adel refers to a noble class or aristocracy. Part Nine: What Is Noble (vornehm)? of BGE is an important, but insufficient indication of what nobility consists of for Nietzsche. To understand how creativity is of higher value to the bestower than honour, as well as how the quality of nobility figures in the character of the bestower, compared to the great-souled man, it is necessary to also examine Nietzsche’s concept of nobility active in his other texts. ‘Human society: this is an experiment, thus I teach – a lengthy searching: but the search is for commanders! – an experiment, O my brothers! And not a “contract”! Shatter, shatter for me such words of the soft-hearted and half-and-halfers!’ (ZIII ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 25). Zarathustra states that he is searching for a new nobility (ZIII ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 11–12). Although Nietzsche does not discuss the vulnerability of the noble in BGE 260, the way in which the noble is described suggests that their self-determining character makes them prone to self-error. Nietzsche writes: ‘The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself ”; it knows itself to be that which first accord honour to things; it is value creating. Everything it knows as part of itself it honours: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by excess of power. The noble human being honours himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness.’ ‘The spiritual haughtiness and nausea of every man who has suffered profoundly – it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer – his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been “at home” in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing” – this spiritual and silent

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haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge of the “initiated”, of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates’ (BGE 270). 26 ‘The capacity for and the duty of, long gratitude and long revenge – both only among one’s peers – refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necessity for having enemies (as it were, as drainage ditches for the affects of envy, quarrelsomeness, exuberance – at bottom, in order to be capable of being good friends): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality which, as suggested, is not the morality of “modern ideas” and therefore is hard to empathize with today, also hard to dig up and uncover’ (BGE 260).

Chapter 5 1 KSA 3, 386, translation modified. 2 Walter Kaufmann, trans. BGE 167, footnote 31. 3 Also see Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991) in which Irigaray poses as Nietzsche’s lover and confronts his misogyny. For the purposes of this study, I’ve chosen to concentrate on more demonstrative texts of Irigaray because they are much more accessible and speak more directly to the topics of love and friendship. 4 ‘And so to be born a girl in a culture dominated by the masculine is not necessarily to be born with a sensibility appropriate to my gender. No doubt female physiology is present but not identity, which remains to be constructed’ (Irigaray 2004b: 11). 5 ‘Innerness, self-intimacy, for a woman, can be established or re-established only through the mother–daughter, daughter–mother relationship which woman re-plays with herself. Herself with herself, in advance of any procreation. This way she becomes capable of respecting herself in her childhood and in her maternal creative function. This is one of the most difficult gestures for our culture. According to our traditions, which for centuries have stayed faithful to a God-father who engenders a God-son by means of a virgin-mother, the maternal function serves to mediate the generation of the son. This function, which is certainly divine, sets up no genealogy of the divine among women, and in particular between mother and daughter’ (Irigaray 2004a: 58–9). 6 ‘To include the other in my universe prevents meeting with the other, whereas safeguarding the obscurity and the silence that the other remains for me aids in discovering proximity’ (Irigaray 2004b: 29).

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Chapter 6 1 ‘Such an instinct will have developed most easily in families of the lower classes who had to survive under changing pressures and coercions, in deep dependency, who had to cut their coat according to the cloth, always adapting themselves again to new circumstances, who always had to change their mien and posture, until they learnt gradually to turn their coat with every wind and thus virtually to become a coat – and masters of the incorporated and inveterate art of eternally playing hide-andseek, which in the case of animals is called mimicry’ (GS 361).

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Index Abbey, Ruth 29, 30, 36 Acampora, Christa Davis 48, 49, 51, 87, 89 actor 82, 131–2, 156, 159–62, 164, 167 affirmation 14, 19, 27, 106, 110–14, 120, 127, 141, 160, 166 agency 68, 86–7, 89, 93, 136, 159 agon 10, 13–14, 20–1, 25–40, 48–51, 55–8, 65, 88, 91–2, 96–7, 100, 106–9, 117, 122, 127, 135–6, 153, 156, 158 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 17, 59, 65, 78, 108 aphorism 7, 10–13, 24 aristocrat 116, 118 Aristotle 30, 51, 99–123, 163 artistry 18, 55, 60, 128, 131, 156, 167 autonomy 33, 102, 126, 133–4, 139 Beauvoir, Simone de 127, 133–4, 142 benefactor 111, 113–15, 121–2 bestowing 10, 28, 117; friend 38–9, 100–4, 108, 133, 135, 164, 166; virtue 39, 99–105, 108–9, 118–19 body 67–9, 71, 73–81, 83–4, 127, 166–7; of woman/women 129, 131, 166 Bornstein, Kate 153, 157, 161 camel 93–6, 103–4 character 38–9, 55, 68–74, 80–4, 92, 95–7, 100–23 child 93–5, 104; children 70, 72–4, 80–1, 139, 148, 160 Christian/Christianity 49, 52, 58, 69, 78, 90, 102–3, 167 Christian-Platonic 16, 20, 77, 103, 127, 159, 163 Clark, Maudemarie 23, 25, 70, 73–4 class 32, 73, 79, 81, 116, 132, 148, 157, 164–5 competition 26, 29, 31, 38, 42, 47–9, 108–9, 114

conflict 16, 27, 45, 49, 51, 68, 101, 106, 109; of drives 79, 91 consciousness 83–7, 89, 91, 93, 96 Constâncio, João 57, 85 consumerism 4, 37, 41 Conway, Daniel 73, 106 courage 24, 26, 38, 102–3, 115, 122 Crisp, Robert 111, 114 cruelty 29, 38–40, 45–9, 70–3, 80, 86, 91, 101, 108, 119, 164 culture 13, 14, 45, 71, 73, 75, 78, 90, 116, 130–1 Daigle, Christine 99, 101 death 62, 119, 145 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 52, 70 Derrida, Jacques 134–5, 146, 149, 153–62 destruction 20, 32, 52, 59, 93–4, 115 Deutscher, Penelope 143, 146, 148 Diethe, Carol 137, 138 Dionysian 14, 18, 59, 79–80, 93, 101–2 drive(s). See will to power ego 44, 76–7, 79, 86, 93, 96–7 egoism 12, 27–9, 40, 43, 58, 108, 127 egoistic/unegoistic 16–17, 27, 44, 130, 163 emotion(s) 14, 21–3, 26, 37, 42, 44, 47, 55, 61–2, 70–5, 79–80, 82, 96, 109, 136, 138, 141, 146, 148, 164–6 enemy/enmity 14, 31, 38–40, 42, 45–8, 109, 125–6, 134 envy 34, 38, 42, 48–9, 72, 90, 108, 119 Epicurus 15–17, 31–2, 36, 63, 164 equality/inequality 34, 110, 121, 133–5, 147 erotic 128, 130–3, 140 esoteric 9, 23–4 esteem 64, 110–12, 115, 126–7, 132, 134–6, 149–50 excellence 30, 48–50, 107, 110

188

Index

faith 20, 32, 53–4, 58–9, 77–8, 118, 127, 129, 131, 133–4, 163 feminine 32, 128–9, 132, 135, 138–40, 143, 148, 153–7, 159–60, 162, 165, 167 feminism 153–7 flourishing 39, 61, 99–101, 105, 109, 122 food 75, 77–8 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 11, 23 freedom 39, 64, 93–4, 101, 142; of women 136, 167 free spirit 4, 10–11, 14–16, 18–25, 31–2, 35–7, 51, 58, 94–5, 115, 163–4 Gallop, Jane 156–7 gender 79, 81–2, 125–45, 147–54, 156–8, 161–7 genealogy 9–10, 26, 157; phallocentric 164; for women 143–5 generosity 28, 100, 105, 111, 114–15, 117–20; lack of 33, 125, 134, 136, 139, 149–50 gift-giving virtue. See bestowing virtue God 53–4, 56, 58–60, 63, 77, 94, 96, 131; death of 1, 14 good 48–9, 164; life 99 greatness of soul (megalopsychia) and the great-souled man (megalopsychos) 99–124 greed 28, 33–4, 40, 44, 61, 64, 127–8, 144, 146 habit 17, 32, 36, 57, 59–60, 70–1, 81, 93, 95, 122, 146 happiness 14, 31, 35, 99, 100, 107, 112, 116 Hatab, Lawrence 48–9, 84 health 16–19, 26, 30–1, 44–5, 47–8, 76–9, 107–108 Heidegger, Martin 11, 15 hero 58, 60, 94–5, 110, 112, 114 honesty 27–8, 35–6, 53–5, 60, 91, 113 honour 100, 109–12, 114–18, 120–3, 132 Horst, Hutter 12, 24, 26, 28, 75, 77 identity 67–70, 74–6, 79–83, 87, 89–90, 96, 161; of women 133–4, 138–9, 141–2, 155 illness 15, 18, 27, 62, 77–8, 102 inheritance 54, 69–74, 79, 83, 96

intellectual conscience 22, 25, 29, 32, 36, 40, 46–7, 53–60, 91–6, 101–4, 144–6 Irigaray, Luce 33, 125–8, 135, 140–51, 165–6 joy/joyful 166–7

17, 29, 36–7, 51, 119, 127, 164,

Kant, Immanuel 29–30, 51, 106, 163–5 Kaufmann, Walter 35, 52, 72, 99, 137 knowledge 18, 22, 24, 26–7, 46–7, 50, 53–7, 59–61, 84, 103–5, 123, 128, 144–6, 149–50; knowledge-seeking 22–4, 32, 36–8, 53–60, 101, 115–18, 125, 135 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 70–9 Lampert, Laurence 19, 23, 93–4 last human 14–15, 31, 36, 52, 59, 94, 163, 167 lion 93–5, 103–4 loneliness 3, 21, 41, 105, 119 Lorde, Audre 166–7 love 33, 35, 40–5, 49–50, 53, 106–8, 111–12, 119, 121, 125–51, 163–7 lover 125, 126, 128–31, 133, 142–7, 153, 155–7, 164 masculine 42, 129–31, 143, 147–8, 153, 155–7, 162, 164 mask 155–6, 159 mastery 88, 90–1, 97, 101, 136, 159; of self 18, 38–9, 84, 105 mentor 35, 38, 117, 122, 133 metaphysics 8, 27, 53–5; of sexual difference 154–67 middle period 15–18 mirror 56, 83, 86, 105–6, 146 misogyny 137–8, 153, 158, 162, 164 Montagne, Michel de 26, 29, 42 morality 16–18, 90; of custom 17; slave 20 mortality 37, 59, 62, 69, 117 mother 135, 137, 139–40, 143, 147, 149, 160, 162, 167 neighbour 28, 35, 40–1, 52–3 nihilism 14–15, 27, 59, 78

Index noble 109, 114–18; nobility 20, 107, 109, 115–18 nutrition 75, 77–9, 96–7 Oliver, Kelly 144, 146, 155–6 Oppel, Frances Nesbitt 157–8 overcoming 13–14, 30, 36, 40, 47–52, 59–61, 65–8, 84, 87–97, 100–3, 115, 122, 126, 136, 149–51, 165–7 Overhuman 29, 52, 58–61, 65, 94–6, 98, 163 performative 25, 82, 133, 154–5, 157, 164 philosopher 13, 14, 18, 89–90, 136, 153–9, 162 pity 14, 23, 27, 37, 44–6, 62–3, 132 play 37, 51–2, 95, 131, 136, 159, 164 post-metaphysical 58–9, 163 prejudice 16, 25, 70, 82, 128, 129, 137, 139, 158 pride 34, 63, 110–13, 115–16, 118 probity 10, 21–2 psychologist 10, 16–17, 26–8, 79, 155 psychology 10, 19, 90 race 70, 72–4, 148, 157, 165 reciprocity 38–9, 41, 49, 100, 106, 121, 130, 133 recognition 42, 110–12, 114, 118–20, 126–7, 135–6, 141–3, 146, 148–51, 165 Redlichkeit 21–2, 46–7, 52–5 respect 33, 42, 45, 62–4, 107, 134–6, 139, 141–2, 147–51, 164; revenge 28, 34, 47, 61, 63, 80, 134, 161 Rich, Adrienne 148–9, 166 Richardson, John 70, 72 romanticism 16, 103, 130 Schacht, Richard 70, 72–3 self-artistry 92, 95–6 self-awareness 28, 83, 86 self-cultivation 17, 24, 30, 45, 62, 65, 68, 86–7, 92, 107 selfish/selfishness 17, 34, 43–5, 48, 61–3, 79, 102, 108; and love 127–8, 146, 165 self-love 38–9, 45, 61, 99–100, 105–9, 117–18, 143, 150

189

self-overcoming. See overcoming self-shaping 25, 84, 88 self-worth 111–12, 114, 120 sexual difference 126, 130, 142–67 sickness 15, 26, 37, 77–8 slavery 32, 133, 149; slave morality 20 solitude 21, 31, 35–6, 41, 47, 51, 55–9, 93–6, 100, 103–4, 112, 115; of women 149–51 Stryker, Susan 153, 161 style 9–12, 17, 20, 24–5, 84, 156, 160 suffering 15, 17–18, 26–7, 34–7, 48, 59, 62–5, 77–8, 116, 128 talent 48, 71–2, 74, 81 taste 22, 56, 60–1, 75, 92 teacher 26, 35, 38, 117, 120, 166 tragedy 23, 55, 112 tragic 55, 59, 69, 110, 115; philosopher 14; pity 46; poet 19 transgender 153–4, 160–2, 167 truth 18–20, 43, 46–7, 53–60, 69, 86, 111, 116, 123, 153–62 Tuncel, Yunus 25, 49 Ubermensch 59, 160. See also Overhuman Van Tongeren, Paul 19–20, 24–5 violence 48, 153, 157, 161–2 virtue 27, 49, 53, 61, 70, 99–122, 167 warrior 52, 91 Williams, Robert 99, 108, 117–18 will to power 6, 67–8, 87–93, 95–7, 100–1 wisdom 38, 49, 57–8, 76–8, 100, 104–5, 108, 116, 118, 122–3, 146 woman/women 32–3, 82, 125–62, 164, 167 wonder 126, 135, 141–51, 165 Zarathustra: and bestowing 105–8, 118; and his ape 22; and his friends 33–6, 57–8, 64; and Nietzsche 18–20, 25; and overcoming 93–6, 104; and the Overhuman 59; and solitude 57; and truth 54–6; and woman/women 134–5, 158