Nietzsche and Friendship

Willow Verkerk

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350047365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

In Nietzsche and Friendship, Willow Verkerk provides a new and provocative account of Nietzsche's philosophy which identifies him as an agonistic thinker concerned with the topics of love and friendship. She argues that Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship from Aristotle to Kant offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about friendship today. Through an examination of his free spirit texts, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science together with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Verkerk unlocks key aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on friendship, love, 'woman', the self, self-overcoming, virtue, and character. She questions Nietzsche's misogyny, but also considers the emancipatory potential of his writing by brining him into dialogue with postmodern, feminist, and transgender thinkers. This book revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's philosophy.

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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 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 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). Althoug h 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 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:

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 (yes-saying) and deconstructive and destructive (no-saying) texts. Chronologically speaking, the works of the middle period pre-Zarathustra are largely affirmative, whereas the post-Zarathustra texts are destructive (no-saying)³ with Thus Spoke Zarathustra merging the no-saying and yes-saying into one struggling synthesi s 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 ...