nihilism

Nihilism in Seamus Heaney
Irene Gilsenan Nordin. Philosophy and Literature. Dearborn: Oct 2002.Vol.26, Iss. 2; pg. 405, 10 pgs

Nordin discusses the words of Friedrich Nietzsche's madman as he makes his famous appearance, running into the crowded marketplace in the bright morning with his lit lantern in his hand, crying out his proclamation of the death of God. These words of the madman express the abyss of despair experienced on the realization that God is dead, the state of desolation which articulates what Nietzsche himself understood to be the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment. But these words of despair sum up more than that; they sum up the underlying problems of Nietzsche's age, and indeed today's age: the basic mistrust of all previously held systems of value; the collapse of all ordering principle; and the erosion of the authority of tradition.
Full Text (3854 words)
Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Oct 2002
I WISH TO BEGIN WITH THE WORDS of Nietzsche's madman as he makes his famous appearance, running into the crowded marketplace in the bright morning with his lit lantern in his hand, crying out his proclamation of the death of God: "`Where has God gone?' he [cries]. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. We are all his murderers.'" He calls out in despair to the bemused and indifferent crowd his rhetorical questions:
How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?1
These words of the madman express the abyss of despair experienced on the realization that God is dead, the state of desolation which articulates what Nietzsche himself understood to be the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment. But these words of despair sum up more than that; they sum up the underlying problems of Nietzsche's age, and indeed our age: the basic mistrust of all previously held systems of value; the collapse of all ordering principle; and the erosion of the authority of tradition. In other words, reason has revealed the inadequacy of tradition, and has itself lost the ability to provide us with any reliable means of evaluation-since any such evaluation must be based on the very principles which are themselves under attack.
This stark realization of the absence of all sense of meaning in values previously held to be true leads to the condition that Nietzsche calls "nihilism," (Latin nihil, "nothing"), the condition that he considered to be the central problem of Modernity. This condition, Nietzsche believed, is brought about by the realization of three factors: first, the loss of faith in what he calls a "'meaning' in all events," a loss which contributes to an experience of aimlessness; second, the realization that there is no inherent pattern to the world or to history that can lend universal coherence; and third, the loss of faith in the existence of a stable world of being which can be evaluated according to steadfast, enduring principles. The rejection of these three categories, which Nietzsche terms "aim," "unity," and "being," leads to an experience of a world that appears "valueless," in other words, the experience of nihilism.2
Nietzsche, whose thought was considered by Heidegger to be the "final thought of Western metaphysics,"3 is seen as a heralding voice of postmodernism.4 In this respect, Nietzsche Is "death of God" can be seen to be about the death of modernist philosophical presuppositions, the death of the logocentric metaphysics of presence. But, parallel with the notion of crisis that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God expresses and the ensuing critique of "metanarratives" which his thought has helped to give rise to,5 Nietzsche's declaration of crisis can also be seen as a statement of faith. His interpretation of the problems of our age, while on the one hand "negatively" proclaiming the death of God and denying the possibility of shared meaning-or in Lyotard's terms "the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable" (p. 81), can, on the other hand, be viewed in a more "positive" light. The term "nihilism" itself, as Nietzsche has shown us, is ambiguous, comprising both the concepts of what he termed "active nihilism" and "passive nihilism," which involves a complex interplay between the dual forces of affirmation and negation (WP, p. 22).
As the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, points out, the most general distinction between these forces can be seen in terms of "strength of spirit," where nihilism is considered as both "a sign (Zeichen) of the strengthened power of the spirit or a sign of the spirit's fall."6 Viewed in this way, "active nihilism" is equated with the "positive" idea of "the strengthened power of the spirit," while "passive nihilism" is equated with the "negative" concept of the fall; and the whole of Nietzsche's interpretation of the philosophical problems that he wrestled with lies just in the possibility of "the transformation of passive nihilism into active nihilism" ("NRA," p. 15). Passive, or reactive nihilism, refuses to acknowledge the absence of meanings and values, while active nihilism, on the other hand, in realizing the state of nothingness that is unmasked, sets about creating new interpretations and values. Such an understanding of nothingness, he believes, is suggested by Heidegger in the concepts of what Heidegger calls the "small, marginal, unnoticeable" ("NRA," pp. 19-21).
In line with Vattimo's view of nihilism as an active force which stresses the strengthening power of the spirit, some recent assessments of postmodern thought remind us that Nietzsche himself anticipated the emergence of what he called "a divine way of thinking" from the critical tradition he helped to form.7 Nietzsche's comment that nihilism is the "uncanniest of all guests" seems to point forward to emerging new ways of thinking the "otherness," broadly termed spiritual, which the more deconstructive elements of poststructuralist literary criticism have tended to turn their back on. The tentative emergence of this changing direction in contemporary thinking can be seen in terms of enduring interest in the spiritual dimension of human existence and in matters that can be termed transcendent. I use the word "transcendent" not in a metaphysical sense but in the sense of an experiential transcendence which is discovered within one's lived experience of what Heidegger calls "being-in-the world," or what G. B. Madison calls a "transcendence within immanence."8 I define the term "spiritual" as those experiences which occur beyond our categorical frameworks for understanding the world, in what Geraldine Finn calls "the space-between," the space where the interaction takes place between what she calls "category and reality, text and context, language and being," the space which allows for our meeting with otherness.9
Against the background outlined above, this paper will explore this meeting with otherness and the spiritual elements of negativity as a governing metaphor in the poetry of the Irish, Nobel-prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney, especially in the collection Seeing Things,10 the publication of which marks a turning point in Heaney's writing. In this volume, we see a clear departure from Heaney's earlier preoccupation with the outer physicality of things to a deepened awareness of the inner landscapes of the mind, where world and word are brought together and expressed in language. In this respect the poetic utterance can be seen as bearing witness to an encounter with what Levinas calls "the face of the Other."11 This encounter with the Other that takes place in language is expressed in what Heidegger calls the "nothing" (das Nichts),12 an encounter, he believed, which is necessary if nihilism is to be overcome.
For Heidegger the problem of the "nothing" is of central interest and in this respect he shows close similarities with the mystical thinking of Meister Eckhart.13 In the mystical tradition we see examples of a negative theology which attempts to define God, not by what he is, but rather by what he is not, for to arrive at any intellectual definition of the deity is not possible. Poets of the mystical tradition, for instance, the religious mystic, St. John of the Cross, and the modern German Jewish poet, Paul Celan, pay tribute to what can be called the hidden power of Nothingness. In the words of St. John of the Cross, even if the presence of faith "brings certitude to the intellect, it does not produce clarity, but only darkness." Thus, it follows that the soul, in its search for "knowledge" and "truth," must find its journey to God by "unknowing."14 In the mystical tradition, this journey, or search, is termed the via negativa, or "the dark night of the soul," which represents the emptying, or alienation, of the self-the purification of the soul, in order to achieve closer communion with God.15 Heidegger thinks of nothingness in similar terms to this mystical concept of "detachment." He defines the "nothing" as not any thing at all but rather a "fundamental experience," by which we cut ourselves off from beings and allow ourselves to become open to the nothing, or in Heidegger's words, we allow "the total strangeness of beings to overwhelm us." This experience, or encounter, evokes a state of wonder, which calls forth a questioning, and, as Heidegger explains: "Only on the ground of wonder-the revelation of the nothing-does the `why?' loom before us. Only because the 'why' is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds, and ground them" (BW, p. 109). Thus, it follows, that only by facing the nothing and asking the question of the nothing-the basic question of the meaning of Being that Heidegger claims has been forgotten (p. 41)-that nihilism can be overcome.
In Heideggerian terms, this experience of openness is called "letting-- be" (Gelassenheit, or Releasement), an experience, as Caputo puts it, which "shakes us from our preoccupation with `what is,' which detaches us from the sphere of things" (p. 19). Caputo expresses this state of susceptibility in a spiritual sense as follows: one opens oneself up "to the presence of something which surpasses man, yet from which alone man receives his essence as man ... [one lets] the thing lie forth as the thing which it is, to break the shell of creatures to find God within" (p. 8).
In the poetry of Seamus Heaney, especially in his later poetry (from the volume, The Haw Lantern, 1987),16 we see similar moments of visionary awareness celebrated, moments which can be said to arise paradoxically from a state of absence or nothingness, where absence is perceived as the source.17 This whole concept of empty space as a generating source resurrecting new life is a metaphor that informs much of Heaney's poetry.18 The dialectic that he engages in can be seen as a constant journeying between the dual forces of absence and presence, homelessness and home-between the via negativa and the celebration of the word. We see an example of how Heaney conveys this sense of hidden presence in the following poem, "Hailstones," where the power of a particular experience of hailstones lashing against the speaker's face is, in its absence, recalled and celebrated:
I made a small hard bath
of burning water running from my hand
just as I make this now
out of the melt of the real thing
smarting into its absence.19
Here, the speaker marvels at the fact that this particular experience, which-like the hailstones-has melted away, nevertheless can be relived and reexperienced, and "out of the melt of the real thing smarting in its absence," is re-created in the language of the poem as an enactment of poetic creation.
In his essay, "The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh," Heaney reflects on the concept of absence or empty space which he refers to in terms of what he calls "a kind of luminous emptiness,"20 which carries with it visionary and spiritual connotations, where world becomes word and what he calls "solidly based phenomena are transformed" to become "a visionary presence forever" (p. 10). Thus, what Heaney terms "truly creative writing" arises not as a "reactive response to some sort of stimulus in the world out there" but rather "from a source within and it spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self' (p. 13). This empowering source is only possible through an experience of loss or withdrawal, and, in this respect, Heaney's empty space can be compared to the "nothing" of Heidegger, outlined above, since it involves the idea of detachment, or as Heaney expresses it, "an abandonment of life in order to find more abundant life" (p. 12).
The idea of the "empty centre" as the generating force is paid tribute in the image of the tree at the end of the sonnet sequence, "Clearances," in The Haw Lantern. Here, the "utterly empty" space that is left behind by the felled chestnut tree becomes "utterly a source," a "bright nowhere," from which presence emanates:

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These lines evoke the image of the chestnut tree, "deep planted ... / .. from a jam jar" long ago, which once stood firm and strong in place in the front hedge, and which has now been cut down. The tree no longer physically exists, but, in its very absence, it still manages to radiate a sense of presence in the inner world of the speaker, who remembers the tree of his childhood as it was. And, just as this absence acts as an empowering force in the empty, physical space left behind, the poem itself, in its very articulation, issues forth as textual evidence that bears witness to that absent presence. In an interview given in 1988, Heaney discusses this poem as a favorite example of the image of space in his poetry. He describes space as something "definite," something which is "both empty and full of potential." In this way, space is seen as a dialectic meeting place between two opposite forces, or, as he explains it, as "a node that is completely clear where emptiness and potential stream in opposite directions."21
Another example of empty space as source is seen in the poem "Clearances," where the vacant space created by the mother's death 22 becomes a life-force and source of "pure change" for those left gathered round her deathbed:

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Just as the word "Clearances" here is applied to the absence of the mother, it also embodies the invisible and unspoken presence that her death leaves. As the mother passes away, the space around her deathbed is transformed, and her dying spirit becomes an empowering force for the loved ones left behind. With the death of the mother, a change takes place: physically, she no longer exists, yet something "even more" remains, something intangible, which cannot be seen, but which nevertheless is deeply felt. In the "clearing," the open space which arises from her death, a new force is created which calls forth an experience of "pure change"-pure in the sense of its transformational and creative character; there emerges a hidden presence that is only possible as a result of the original loss or absence.
Thus, the encounter that takes place between the withdrawing, passive force of death, and the active, creative force of life, can be related to our earlier discussion on Vattimo. It is the "disappearance of Being" (p. 21), associated with passive nihilism, that is first necessary in order for active nihilism to call forth a transformative response. The Heideggerian concept of "Letting-be" can also be applied here, and the death of the mother can thus be compared to the "nothing" of Heidegger, which brings with it an experience of "fundamental" change, by which we allow "the total strangeness of beings [to] overwhelm us," an experience which, in turn, is given new life in the language of the poem.
In a similar way, many of the poems in Seeing Things have the motif of empty space, or nothingness, as their central theme. Heaney, himself, for instance, in "Stepping Stones," refers to the themes of "lightenings and brightening" which run through the whole collection, and comments on the poems in the subsection "Lightenings" as forming a sort of "constellation around an image of an unroofed space."23 This image of emptiness, as he sees it, is closely associated with the then-recent deaths of both his parents. Many poems indeed throughout the collection echo the cleansing, purifying transformational experience that is a central feature in the sonnets from "Clearances." An example of this is seen in the first poem of "Lightenings," where the image of the beggar in a bare, wintry setting, standing "shivering in silhouette" on the doorstep, conjures up images of the soul awaiting its "particular judgement" after death. This cold, naked image is linked in the final lines of the poem with the purifying experience of the emergence of "knowledge-freshening wind," which rises as a transformational image out of the unroofed ruin of the house where the beggar, in his state of emptiness, finds himself (ST, p. 55). Another example of the nothing as a source is the image of the "good thief' hanging on Christ's side on the cross, where he scans the "empty space." This can be seen as an image of absence, which is answered in the final line of the poem with the promise of the resurrection: "This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise" (p. 66).
There are many such examples of empty space as source throughout the collection. In these poems we see language as a source of renewal or rebirth, by which past phenomena are not only re-called, but also recreated in the empty space, and through the creative energies of the word are "seen" in a new way. A final example of this is seen in the following poem, entitled "The Settle Bed." Here, the speaker refers to that which is "given," the Noah's ark of collective memory that is passed down to us and in which we have no say-that which is "willed down" as part of our "inheritance." But, as the poem suggests, no matter how "cart-heavy, painted an ignorant brown" this inherited weight may be, it can always be reshaped and "conquered," and made new by the transformative power of language. That which is

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To conclude, I have argued that Heaney's retreat into absence and empty space bears witness to the power of the nothing, the spiritual "space-between" where word and world come together and are expressed in language. In the interplay between the dual forces of affirmation and negation, Heaney's poetry crosses the limits of conceptuality between the visible and the invisible; and in the inbetween realms of the nothing new meanings are produced which pay tribute to the mystery of the other. As we have seen, Heaney's retreat into nothingness, while it acknowledges an initial experience of absence and loss, is followed by the creation of new meanings. In this way, poetry becomes a celebration of the nothing, or-in Heideggerian terms-a celebration of "being-in-the-world."
Thus, against the philosophical background of the death of God and the aesthetically exhausted expressive tradition that postmodernism gives voice to, Heaney's poetry offers an alternative "positive" view. Against the general state of skepticism, absence of meaning, and "negative" nihilism that is reflected in much of contemporary critical discourse, Heaney offers a poetics that manifests itself by its visionary qualities: he offers a poetry of liberation that shows us a way out of the labyrinth of the text. In the makings of new meanings, loss and absence are overcome in an act of creative celebration, or in the words of Nietzsche, "To redeem the past and to transform every `it was' into an 'I wanted it thus!'-that alone do I call redemption!"24
[Footnote]
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 125.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 12; hereafter abbreviated WP.
[Footnote]
3. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 232.
4. See Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA The MIT Press, 1987), p. 85. See also, for example,Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
5. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv.
[Footnote]
6. Gianni Vattimo, "Nihilism: Reactive and Active," Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics, eds. Tom Darby, Bela Egyed, and Ben Jones (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), p. 15; hereafter abbreviated "NRA."
7. See Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds., Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
8. G. B. Madison, "A Critique of Hirsch's Validity," The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 14-15.
9. Geraldine Finn, "The Politics of Spirituality: the Spirituality of Politics," in Shadow of Spirit, eds. Berry and Wernick, p. 118.
10. Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991); hereafter abbreviated ST
[Footnote]
11. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 82.
[Footnote]
12. Martin Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?" Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), pp. 93-110; hereafter abbreviated BW
13. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), p. 8.
14. St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS, 1979), p. 119.
[Footnote]
15. For an interesting discussion on the difference between the religious practice of the via negativa and the theological concept of negative theology, see Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 174-77.
16. Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987); hereafter abbreviated HL.
[Footnote]
17. This sense of hidden presence, radiating from a state of emptiness-found also, for instance, in the work of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas-can, as Elaine Shepherd has suggested, be related also to Jean-Paul Sartre's words in Being and Nothingness. "We see nothingness making the world irridescent [sic], casting a shimmer over things." JeanPaul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 23-24. See Elaine Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence: Image of God Explored (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 152.
18. Heaney's conception of space can be compared to the "positive nothingness" of Beckett, where Beckett sees space or place (Amiran uses both terms interchangeably) as "agent, as the divine Mind, seat and germ of all." See Eyal Amiran, Wandering and Home: Beckett's Metaphysical Narrative (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 184.
19. Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (London: Faber, 1990), p. 220; hereafter abbreviated NSP.
20. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber, 1989). p. 3.
[Footnote]
21. As Heaney points out in this interview, the empty space, or "clearing," also occurs in "The Wishing Tree," in "The Frontier of Writing," and in "The Disappearing Island." And he adds disarmingly: "I'm delighted to find fit] in one of my favourite earlier poems-`Sunlight Mossbawn'-a line (I don't know where it came from)." See "Seamus Heaney: An Interview," Randy Brandes, Salmagundi (Fall, 1988): 6.
22. These eight sonnets in "Clearances," which appeared in The Haw Lantern (1987), were written in memory of the poet's mother and given the dedication: "In memoriam M. KI H., 1911-1984."
23. Seamus Heaney, "Stepping Stones" (Audio Books, 1995).
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (1961; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 161.

Democracy and the individual: To what extent is Dewey's reconstruction Nietzsche's self-overcoming?
Shannon Sullivan. Philosophy Today. Celina: Summer 1997.Vol.41, Iss. 2; pg. 299, 14 pgs
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Abstract (Document Summary)
Sullivan explores the connections between Friedrich Nietzsche and John Dewey. Sullivan finds that the question of irreconcilability of Nietzsche and Dewey's differences regarding democracy turns on the issue of Nietzsche's individualism.
Full Text (9861 words)
Copyright DePaul University Summer 1997
The mere combination of the names of John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche in the title of an essay might offend some readers. Many of the scholars of American pragmatism I have met view Nietzsche as just one more of those Continental, postmodern philosophers whose work, while perhaps stylish and currently en vogue, contributes little of value to philosophy because the issues with which they concern themselves in no way connect with the lives of the most people. The reaction of many scholars of Continental philosophy I know to American pragmatism has been to dismiss it as concerned only with "utility" narrowly conceived, e.g., with the usefulness of an idea for making money, ensuring that parking places are available at work, securing good health care, etc.1 I do not want to suggest that members of the two philosophical camps are always or necessarily antagonistic toward one other-certainly there are some who find the intersection of Continental philosophy and American pragmatism to be fruitful.2 Nonetheless, the relationship between scholars of American pragmatism and Continental philosophy is often cool, if not, at times, openly hostile.
Thus to claim, as I will here, that Dewey and Nietzsche have much in common and, furthermore, that the work of Dewey continues and perhaps even improves upon that of Nietzsche probably seems at best provocative, at worst ridiculous.3 After all, the principal aim of Dewey's work seems to be to support and promote everything Nietzsche abhorred: a humanistic, liberal democracy that has the goal of helping humans find ways to eliminate suffering in their lives. As an acquaintance at a recent meeting of the APA remarked, connecting Nietzsche and American pragmatist William James might be plausible, but not Nietzsche and Dewey. A friend and Nietzsche scholar even went so far as to claim that Dewey's pragmatist is Nietzsche's "last man."
Indeed, with only a glance, Dewey's program of pragmatic democracy does appear much like that of the "levelers" described by Nietzsche in Beyond Good And Evil and the "last," or "ultimate," man described by Zarathustra:
These falsely so-called "free spirits"--being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; they are all human beings without solitude.... What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone. . .4
The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything small. ... "We have discovered happiness," say the Ultimate Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth.... They still quarrel, but they soon make up otherwise indigestion would result.5
The levelers and last men are primarily characterized by their inability to overcome themselves. They shun the danger, pain and turmoil of the sacrifice of themselves that is necessary for the birth of the Ubermensch. They are not strong enough to produce greatness out of themselves, and so they make virtues out of their weakness and call rest, peace, and security humanity's ultimate happiness.6
If it is true that Dewey's pragmatism excludes self-transformation and extols the "virtues" of uninterrupted calmness and security, then Dewey indeed offers the democratic ideals of the last man. However, as we will see, Dewey's pragmatist is much closer to Nietzsche's free spirit than to the last man, and Dewey's promotion of democracy need not obscure this connection. The democracy that Nietzsche rejects is not the same democracy that Dewey endorses.7 Dewey's democratic pragmatism is characterized by what Dewey calls reconstruction, and reconstruction, particularly as applied to the self, is a type of selftransformation remarkably similar to the selfovercoming described by Nietzsche.8
My exploration of the connections between Nietzsche and Dewey will be composed of the following four parts. First, I will briefly review Nietzsche's self-overcoming, followed by a more detailed examination of Dewey's reconstruo tion.9 Then I will explore the similarities of Dewey's reconstruction and conception of the self as organism and Nietzsche's selfovercoming and conception of the self as body. Finally, I will return to the topic of democracy and find that the question of the irreconcilability of Nietzsche and Dewey's differences regarding democracy turns on the issue of Nietzsche's individualism. If a philosopher who is a "cultural physician" conceives the individual as atomistic (as Nietzsche appears to do), then it is possible for him or her to "cure" the culture by aristocratically caring for just a few individuals. However, if one conceives the individual as having fluid boundaries between it and others in its society (as Dewey does), then the cultural physician must democratically try to cure all individuals in the culture. If Nietzsche's individual is not atomistic (and, I will argue, we should hesitate to conclude that it is), then Nietzsche must abandon his aristocratic approach for a (Deweyan-style) democratic one so that his goal of great cultural health in the West might be reached. Dewey's democracy is not necessarily opposed to, but instead can be seen as complementing and even improving upon Nietzsche's philosophy of selfovercoming.10
Nietzsche and Self-Overcoming
To understand self-overcoming best, we must remember that for Nietzsche, the self is bodily and multiple-or, rather, because the self is bodily, it is multiple. To claim that the selfis the body is not to say that "spirit" and "consciousness" do not exist, but rather that they are (merely) outgrowths and instruments of the many drives and affects of the body and thus are secondary to the body." Through these instruments, the body organizes and simplifies its plurality to produce conscious thought. Or, we might say, conscious thought is precisely the organization and simplification of plurality, one particular perspective of the body and its multiplicity.'2 The multiplicity of the body is unified, but this unity is not the elimination of multiplicity."3 Rather, the body produces a functional unity, a temporary organization of itself in the form of an alignment of its drives that will be renegotiated again and again. We may continue to talk of the "soul," but only if we acknowledge that it is no mysterious immortal essence but instead the changing "social structure of the drives and the affects," 14 that is, the behaviors of and relations between the various bodily instincts.15
The shifting plurality of the "unified" self helps explain how self-overcoming is indeed self-overcoming. Self-overcoming is the "law of life:" "all great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming." 16 To bring about one's own destruction means that self-overcoming is not done to one by something other but is something done to oneself. One destroys what one is now to make possible the creation of the new. That which must self-overcome will be the power that fuels its self-overcoming. Because the self is a plurality and not merely the one drive or affect that dominates and gives the self its "character," the self contains within itself the possibility of a reorganization of drives, producing a new configuration of the "soul" 17 For example, our old values are the very means by which the new will be produced.18 It is our herdlike virtues, such as chastity, poverty and humility, that can provide the energy and discipline that make possible their own self-overcoming.19
The possibilities for reconfiguration of the "unity" of the self are infinite, and thus selfovercoming is never complete. In Zarathustra's words, "life itself told me this secret: `Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must overcome itself again and again." 20 While self-overcoming is a goal that Nietzsche holds out for those who are strong enough for it, it is not a goal in the sense that it can ever be finally and completely achieved. It is not something to be done once only, but rather again and again. This is why life tells Zarathustra that it is both a goal and "conflict of goals."21 Selfovercoming conflicts with the idea of goals because it interrupts all goals by requiring that they eventually self-overcome, i.e., sacrifice themselves for other, new "goals."
Dewey and Reconstruction While Dewey never uses the term "selfovercoming," he sounds remarkably similar to Zarathustra in Art as Experience when Zarathustra speaks of the role of untergang in selfovercoming.22 Dewey writes:
There is . . . an element of undergoing, of suffering in its large sense, in every experience. Otherwise there would be no taking in of what preceded. For "taking in" in any vital experience is something more than placing something on top of consciousness over what was previously known. It involves reconstruction which may be painful.23
According to Dewey, reconstruction is a transaction between self and world in which there is a "yielding of the self"24 to that which is "taken in." In and through experience, the self remakes itself and, in the process, its environment is remade as well.
To further our understanding of Dewey's notion of reconstruction, we must first realize that for Dewey, the self is an organism made up of habits and impulses. Impulses are "blind dispersive burst[s] of . energy,"75 "something primitive, yet loose, undirected, initial,"26 which push us in various and often conflicting directions. They are much like what Nietzsche refers to as the body's plurality of drives and affects and are that which we and Nietzsche often call "instincts." Dewey prefers "impulse" to "instinct" because he believes the latter is too heavily laden with the connotation of necessary and definite organization, which impulses do not have. Impulses can be organized and unified, but in and of themselves, they are chaotic and purposeless. Habits are that which provide impulses with direction; habits are the acquired patterns of activity that organize the energy of impulses. Already we can see that, for Dewey, just as "impulse" means something different from our usual use of the word, so does "habit." Habits are much different from "bad habits," and they are not, as we often think, restricted to repetition and routine. Habits are dispositions to ways that an organism responds to its world.27 For example, when I sit down in a chair, my body responds to the chair with a particular posture, say, slumping. This posture is a readiness to act in a certain fashion whenever I am presented with a situation that calls forth a response from me and thus is one of my habits.
We should note two important points in conjunction with this example: first, my bodily posture is not a conscious response to my world. Habits are more the style that an organism has than specific acts it chooses. Second, while many habits, such as slumping, are physiological, habits are mental as well. People have particular methods or styles of thinking about life, approaching and solving problems, and so on. But this second point must not be construed as affirming a firm distinction between body and mind, the physical and the mental. Like posture, thinking is a particular way an organism organizes impulses and replies to its world. Human rationality is not something located in a realm apart from habit and the body. It is "embedded" in the organism in that it is the organism's attainment of a harmonious organization of its many impulses and habits.28 It is our failure to realize rationality's relation to habit that has produced our tradition's division of mind and body. To claim that thought is a habit not only eliminates a sharp mind-body distinction, it also insists that much of our thought is not conscious. Certainly conscious thought exists, but it is only a small fraction of the thinking that humans do. Habits, both of the body and thought, are that which fund our conscious thoughts and ideas. This means that a way of thinking that is not ingrained in habit is ineffective and will be betrayed by thinking methods that are so ingained.29
We can see this point most clearly in the above example of body posture and, in particular, how I might change my posture. We tend to assume that my failure to sit up straight is a failure of reason or "will power." But Socrates was wrong when he said that to do the good, all one needed was knowledge of the good. Conscious knowledge of what good posture is, is not sufficient for the attainment of good posture. By itself, it will help me sit differently for a while, but differently as "only a different kind of badly. 30 After a brief spell of my different kind of poor posture, such as awkwardly over-arching my back in order to (over)compensate for my tendency to slump, I will likely revert to my usual bad way of sitting (i.e., slumping). The key to achieving good posture is not to consciously think my way to good posture but to find an act that keeps me from falling into my usual bad posture and that initiates the development of a new, improved posture.31 That is, I must find a way to change my habits to change my bad posture. To understand just how habits might be changed and thus how the self might reconstruct itself, we need to look more closely at the relationship of habit to impulse in the human organism.
I have said that impulses are the raw energies that are organized by our habits. As these raw energies, impulses are also that which makes the change of habits possible. "Impulses are the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality."32 The impulse of fear, for example, may become either cowardice, bravery, skepticism, respect for authority, or something else, depending on the way that fear is woven together with other impulses and existing habits.33 But how exactly is impulse the impetus for change if habit is always organizing impulses in its own image?34 That is, if my habits have developed such that I always become cowardly when scared, how can my impulse of fear help give that habit "new direction?"
We seem to have stumbled into a vicious circle in which impulses, once habituated, work only to further reinforce one's habits. How can habits change if "habits once formed perpetuate themselves, by acting unremittingly upon the native stock of abilities?"35 To see our way out of this circle, we must understand that the self is not an atomistic, but a culturally constructed self. When Dewey defines habit as a readiness to act in response to the world, he is in effect claiming that there is no self separate from the world in which it exists. Dewey compares habits to physiological functions like breathing and digesting not only to emphasize the importance of the body in his account, but also to argue that habits emerge as a product of the interaction between organism and environment. For example, bodies take things from their environment (food), which are integrated into and transform the body (nourishment), and the body in turn releases things back into the environment (excrement), which are used to transform the environment (fertilizing the soil, which produces more food). Likewise, "breathing is an affair of the air as truly as of the lungs," which means that "habits are ways of using and incorporating the environment in which the latter has its say as surely as the former."36
By "environment," Dewey not only means things like food and air. Because society and culture are human environments no less than nature is, a human organism's interaction with its physical environment is always social and cultural. An individual's habits affect social customs, and social customs, which are "widespread uniformities of habit,"37 in turn shape the personal customs and habits of individuals. Thus, because the self interacts with its environment, new material is always "entering" the self, disrupting and challenging the established self. When the organism is in a fairly stable, unchanging environment, habits can indeed become ruts in which change is nearly impossible. But when the organism finds itself in a new or unusual situation, the old habits no longer function smoothly as they did in the old situation, and the organism's peaceful coordination of impulses and habits is thrown into disarray. It is at this point, in the midst of tension, conflict and confusion, that growth and change can occur. The organism must create new patterns by which to organize its impulses, new ways of responding to its environment, which disrupt old habits and lay the groundwork for new ones. These new habits, in turn, contribute to the shaping and reshaping of larger patterns, or customs, that exist in the organism's cultural environment.
We should not confuse the interdependency of self and environment with a determinism of the self. While voluntarists might charge that the Deweyan self is determined by its environment's construction of it and thus unfree, in fact, "the self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds."38 The relationship between self and environment is that of a creative cycle. Change in the environment motivates change in the organism, which (because the organism is part of and not set apart from its environment) changes the environment in return, which stimulates yet more change in the organism, and so on. This cycle is best represented by the figure of a spiral since the organism never returns to exactly the same "place" it was before a cycle of change began.39 The interaction between organism and environment produces a new organism and a new environment. While we have been emphasizing one half of the cycle-the reconstruction of the organism--we cannot fully or adequately understand self-reconstruction unless we include the other half-he reconstruction of the environment. For Dewey, reconstruction is at once the reconstruction of the self and the reconstruction of society.
Self-Transformation in Nietzsche and Dewey For Dewey, the self is a plurality of impulses, organized and unified by its conscious and unconscious habits and constructed by means of interaction with others. The self becomes artist, sculpting herself through her transactions with her environment: "it is the office of art in the individual person, to compose differences, to do away with isolations and conflicts among the elements of our being, to utilize oppositions among them to build a richer personality." 40 Yet, as is the case for Nietzsche, the created unity of the self does not eliminate the self's multiplicity. According to Dewey, selfhood is always in the making because of "the relative fluidity and diversity of the constituents of selfhood."41 There is no one ready-made self behind activities," and in fact, "any self is capable of including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions."42 The embodiment of the Deweyan organism ensures that the organism is always a plurality, and the unity of the Deweyan organism occurs as a temporary harmony of impulses and desires that will be interrupted and reconfig ured.43 Like a good artist, the "good" self is one who blends plurality and unity such that her "work" has the capacity "to hold together within itself the greatest variety and scope of opposed elements. 44
As the earlier image of the spiral suggests, self-reconstruction includes a continuity between the old self and the new self, just as selfovercoming does. It is out of an organism's old habits that new ones are created.45 As we have seen, to create new habits is to reconfigure the plurality of impulses of the self, allowing for new expressions of impulses through new organizations of them. An organism does not "magically" create new.habits that have no connection to the old. That we often think change occurs in this way is evidence of our stubborn insistence upon the "free will."46 Habits, not free will, effect change. Without a corresponding change in habits, any decision made by the "will" is ineffectual. In that sense, habits are our will.47
Nor should we think that because impulses are fresh while habits are sometimes stale, impulse by itself effects change. A particular combination of habit and impulse must be in place for change to occur because habits without impulses are too rigid and impulses without habit are too chaotic to effect self-reconstruction. "Impulse is a source, an indispensable source, of liberation; but only as it is employed in giving habits pertinence and freshness does it liberate power."48 By themselves, impulses are unintelligent, merely "a surging, explosive discharge."49 They may instigate change, but it is habit that must carry out the hard work of making the change.50 It is only when channeled, directed, "sublimated" that impulses can become creative and intelligent forces that furnish the dynamic to carry out an organism's projects.51 The image of the spiral is also helpful for our understanding of self-reconstruction because it indicates a process without end. Reconstruction, like self-overcoming, is not a one-time procedure. It has no final goal of completion because to be alive is, to use imagery common to both Dewey and Nietzsche, to be continually growing, putting out new "leaves" and dropping the old.52 To what end is this growth? For Dewey, as for Nietzsche, the "end" of growth is growth itself; there are no final, fixed ends, no point at which the organism is finished changing and reconstructing itself.53 "If it is better to travel than arrive, it is because traveling is a constant arriving, while arrival that precludes further traveling is most easily attained by going to sleep or dyin ."54
Dewey insists that such "traveling" is important for human organisms and, furthermore, that welcoming such adventures is the sign of a particularly healthy and vibrant organism. Our account of reconstruction has been incomplete up to this point because it has implied that "traveling" occurs only because a unstable environment throws a reluctant organism onto the highway of reconstruction. Unfortunately, it is true that many people undergo self-reconstruction only because their environment forces them into it. And because so much of many people's lives is dull, uninterrupted routine, many people grow very little. Because they are still physically alive, we must acknowledge that a minimal amount of reconstruction does occur in their lives.55 But since "the process of life is variation,"56 it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that on the continuum of life, they are very near the end that is (literal and figurative) death.
It is these reluctant "travelers" that are very similar to Nietzsche's last man. They want sleep, peace, and rest. Conflict, turmoil and upheaval are viewed by them as only extremely painful disruptions and never also as opportunities for new growth. Strife is something to be avoided at all costs, not something to be welcomed for the change that is made possible by it. But not all avoid self-reconstruction. The main difference between those who shun and those who welcome reconstruction is in the type of habits that each has. Habits can be either unintelligent and routine or intelligent and artful.57 The former are enslaved, stuck in old ruts. They are mechanical, inflexible and stubbornly resist any sort of change. The latter, on the other hand, are flexible and plastic. Much like Nietzsche's free spirits, those with artful habits see resistance, obstacles, and the resulting tension within themselves as enriching elements and moments.
As is the case for Nietzsche, the artist and the scientist are models for and often instances of Dewey's free-spirited pragmatist.58Their creativity and experimentalism are styles of living and thinking-habits-that ideally all organisms would have in all aspects of their lives.59 In learning habits, these organisms have learned the habit of on-going learning and growth.60 Dewey, like Nietzsche, refers to the child when describing what he hopes humanity might become: "for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little children."61 While Dewey's uses of the figure of the child may be more literal than Nietzsche's, Dewey also finds in the child a type of life in which originality and playfulness have not been tamed or transformed into seriousness.62 According to Dewey, childhood "remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrinkage."63
However, Dewey's use of the imagery of childhood does not signal a brand-new beginning for the organism in which the organism is free to adopt any beliefor habit at will.64 The organism is never a "clean slate" on which a new picture is painted. Recalling that old habits are the material for the creation of new habits, to insist upon change is not to abandon the past for the future but to insist upon the alteration of the past in order to make possible the future.65 Dewey's pragmatist is a questioning experimenter who lives knowing that when "we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out,"66 but she also realizes that habits are the medium through which change occurs. At any one time, some habits must be taken for granted in order for the organism's project of self-questioning to be possible.67 Total plasticity of the self does not turn the pragmatist into a more free, more spontaneous adventurer but instead into chaotic, ineffectual pulp.68
Zarathustra, on the other hand, tells us that the child is "a new beginning" and "a first motion," 69 suggesting that for Nietzsche, the self overcomes herself entirely all at once. Many of Nietzsche's other descriptions of the free spirit make it easy to think that his experimentalism calls everything into question at the same time. In The Gay Science, the free spirit is one who, having not just left behind but destroyed the secure land she once stood on, is now afloat on the ocean, amazed and excited (as well as somewhat scared) at the vast openness of her new seas. 70 In that work, Nietzsche also tells us that the degree that one needs something firm to believe in is an indication of one's weakness. 71 Even more striking is the description of the habitual as a net of spider webs in Human, All Too Human. These webs, which we have spun around ourselves, turn into cords that choke and bind, so much so that we are dying because of them. For that reason, the free spirit "hates all habituation and rules" and thus rips apart the net that surrounds him.72 And Nietzsche's admonition against getting trapped by some belief or conviction is repeated later in his passage on "stuckness" in section 41 of Beyond Good and Evil, as well as in several passages in The Anti-Christ.73
These various passages suggest another, related difference between Nietzsche and Dewey. Nietzsche's free spirit not only welcomes the turmoil that accompanies self-overcoming, she seems deliberately to disrupt any tranquillity in her life in an effort to ensure that,she never becomes stuck. Any need for security appears to mark one as a member of the herd and thus is something to be overcome. Unlike Nietzsche's free spirit, however, Dewey's pragmatist does not seem to seek out turmoil. This is explained by Dewey's claim that life is very difficult for organisms if there is no structure or stability in their world. Because the world is precarious, unstable and thus provides little stability apart from human control of it, humans seek out the stable, organized and unified.74 In the midst of the turmoil of self-reconstruction, what is sought after is not ongoing fluctuation but the restoration of the stability of self and environment, habit and impulse. And in the midst of such stability, in which activity and belief are confident and undisturbed, the human organism tends merely to "march on;' enjoying his uninterrupted life.75
The pragmatist's restriction of experimentation and her appreciation for security may make her seem more like a member of the herd than a free spirit, but only until we remember the positive role that Nietzsche tells us habit plays in his life, and thus, presumably, in the life of a free spirit. After explaining that he loves brief habits but hates enduring ones, Nietzsche says that "most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation."76 Walter Kaufmann is correct when he says that this passage indicates that Nietzsche holds that "some stability and temporary equilibrium are needed to permit the concentration of all mental and emotional resources on the most important problems."77 Questioning everything all at once would not produce a playful irreverence but instead a chaotic anarchy. To have perpetually to improvise means that one never has the luxury of a directed focus, which is what makes all projects and creations possible.
While we often think of the artist as one who creates in a frenzied, uncontrolled moment of inspiration, Nietzsche tells us that her creation is made possible by strict and subtle obedience to a "thousandfold laws," which order and give form to the creation.78 Those "laws" are the artist's habits. They are the order and pattern that the artist gives to her creation, not as a result of conscious decision (hence our use of the term "inspiration") but because they have become the way by which the artist handles her brush, her paints, her values, and her virtues. In the midst of creating, she does not, indeed must not question those particular laws for they are that by which her creation is possible. Without those laws, vulgarity, not artistry is the result. "This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one's control.... All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus."79 To recognize the need for laws or habits is not to say that they are never to be questioned. Nietzsche, like Dewey, grants nothing permanent immunity to questioning. But, like Dewey, Nietzsche does qualify the experimentalism of free-spiritedness: we cannot question everything at once.
There is no Archimedean point for either philosopher. The creative free spirit as much as the creative pragmatist must have a place of stability within her fluid and shifting self from which she can "move" herself. But this place of stability is no more permanent for Dewey than it is for Nietzsche. While restoration of the stability of the self is a "goal" for the pragmatist, it is not a final goal because it is soon surpassed by the next unsettling of the self. Stability and security are important to the pragmatist, but only as part of the whole of rhythm of life, which is a movement from disruption to recovery, to disruption again, and so on.so By itself, "love for security, translated into a desire not to be disturbed and unsettled, leads to dogmatism,"81 not pragmatism.
Does this then mean that Dewey's pragmatist, like Nietzsche's free spirit, has "a desire to be disturbed and unsettled" and thus seeks out turmoil? Dewey is ambiguous on this point. We have seen why it seems that the pragmatist does not have such a desire. Significantly, Dewey characterizes "scrupulous" thinking (as distinct from "ordinary" thinking) as thinking which "takes delight" and "enjoys" disruption,s2 which implies that pragmatism welcomes but not necessarily pursues strife. However, he also claims that the artist "cultivates" "moments of tension and resistance" and that the scientific person "does not rest in [resolution]" but "passes on to another problem using an attained solution only as a stepping stone from which to set on foot further inquiries,"ss which suggests that the pragmatist does deliberately bring upheaval into her life.
I will not be able to resolve this ambiguity here. While Nietzsche and Dewey may differ in their views on strife, because they both value and promote an openness and questioning attitude toward even that which is most precious to us, the difference is perhaps one of degree only. Both appreciate the important role that both upheaval and stability play in life. Without periods of turmoil and chaos, the self would never remake itself and thus would stagnate and die. And without periods of harmony, the self would never be able to concentrate its energies into its projects, making creation impossible. Albeit, perhaps with different emphases upon self-destruction, both Nietzsche and Dewey establish a balance in the self and in the process of self-transformation between strife and calm, chaos and harmony, plurality and unity.
Nietzsche, Dewey, and Democracy
In exploring the connections between Dewey's reconstruction and Nietzsche's selfovercoming, I have suggested that there are great similarities between the two philosophers' visions of what humanity could become. Like Nietzsche, Dewey presents continuous selftransformation as a "goal" for human beings. Dewey's pragmatism is about growth and the creation of meaning and value in life, not about mere practicality, efficiency or commonsensical business practices, as it often misunderstood to mean.84 Dewey, as much as Nietzsche, holds out hope for the regeneration and transfiguration of Western culture through the greatness of individuals.85
However, in Nietzsche's case, we must add that self-overcoming can be a "goal" only for certain individuals because, according to Nietzsche, the masses are too weak to self-overcome. In fact, most people are so sickly that Nietzsche has already declared them virtually dead: too weary to die and thus living on in sepulchers.86 Because a "pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata" is crucial for those who would self-overcome,87 the sick should care for the sick, leaving the healthy ones free to pursue their "great health." To associate with the rotting corpses of the herd is for the free spirit to risk becoming fatally ill herself.
The sickliness of most people explains why Nietzsche's books are written only for the very few, that is, for fellow free spirits.ss Nietzsche explains that "all the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against `the others."'89 In contrast to the exclusivity of Nietzsche's audience, the audience for Dewey's books is everyone. This is not to say that Dewey's books were not written for academic philosophers-many of them were-but rather that they are addressed to everyone in that all people have the potential for selftransformation. While Dewey admits that much of us avoid self-transformation and thus might even grant that some of us are closer to dead than alive,9 every person is at least minimally capable of self-reconstruction. The difference between Dewey's and Nietzsche's intended audiences is an important one. "Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books,"9' according to Nietzsche, and thus from his perspective, the fact that Dewey does not limit his audience only seems to prove that Dewey's philosophy of selfreconstruction is tainted by the uncleanliness of the last man. Dewey's appeal to everyone is irreconcilable with Nietzsche's aristocratic disdain for the herd, making reconstruction and selfovercoming, for all their similarities, crucially different.
To be fair to Dewey, it must be acknowledged that reconstruction is not meant to reduce all to the level of the lowest but to lift even the lowest to the level of the experimental and daring pragmatist. In that sense, Dewey's democracy is a democracy of aristocrats. But this means that Dewey has transformed aristocracy into a club to which all can belong. Thus, Deweyan aristocracy eliminates the hierarchical distance between types of people, something that Nietzsche insisted was necessary to generate the tension needed to propel humanity upward into the greatness of the Ubermensch. There seems to be no way to avoid a fundamental clash between the catholicism of Dewey's reconstruction and the elitism of Nietzsche's self-overcoming.
The issue of Dewey and Nietzsche's different views of human nature is at heart a conflict between the social philosophy of the former and the individualism of the latter. While Dewey wanted to change social institutions so that individuals could transform themselves, Nietzsche thought free spirits had a future only if they separated themselves from society. When the issue is recast in this way, however, it becomes clear that the fundamental difference between Dewey and Nietzsche's ideas about self-transformation is in their differing conceptions of individuality. As we have seen, for Dewey, the individual is transactional, not atomistic. Instead of the "old" individualism that strictly divides the individual from society, Dewey's "new" individualism holds that the boundaries between the individual and society are always fluid.92 If Nietzsche's concept of individuality is fundamentally atomistic, then the differences between self-overcoming and reconstruction are indeed irreconcilable.
Nietzsche's endorsements of an "old"-style, radical individualism are too numerous and well known to repeat here. There is little in Nietzsche's corpus that explicitly encourages us to label his individualism "new."93 However, perhaps implicit in Nietzsche's demand that we go beyond dualisms such as good and evil is an acknowledgment of lack of fundamental opposition between the dualism of individual and society. Also, Nietzsche's claim that a self is primarily a body implies at least a minimal commitment to a transactional self on his part if it is true that the body is only able to live and grow by means of its interactions with its environment. Furthermore, as Nietzsche's comments about the artist demonstrate, Nietzsche's call for a return to the body is not a demand that we "return to nature" in the sense of a "return" to an unbridled "raw" world of instincts.9 This suggests that Nietzsche does not subscribe to a sharp natureculture division, which means he would agree with Dewey that the body never interacts with a purely "natural" environment. Thus Nietzsche's emphasis upon the body might ultimately translate into an implicit claim that the human body must and does interact with its social, as well as physical environment in order to live. If so, the boundaries between the individual and society cannot be rigid, impermeable ones for Nietzsche. This is not to claim that Nietzsche himself held that the boundaries are not rigid. Rather, it is to say that, given Nietzsche's emphasis upon the body, the boundaries should not be considered rigid. Whether Nietzsche fully thought through the implications of his "return to the body" will not be established here. However, if we think through his emphasis upon the body, we must abandon "old"-style, atomistic individualism.
While much more needs to be said in support of these suggestions and, in particular, the last claim, I will not be able to pursue the question of the nature of Nietzsche's individuality further.95 However, we have reason to wonder if Nietzsche's individualism is closer to the "new" variety than his explicit remarks on the individual suggest. If Nietzsche's individual is transactional rather than atomistic, then Nietzsche must broaden the audience for his work if selfovercoming is to have a chance at success. Poor soil will only produce unhealthy plants. If one's social and cultural, as well as physical environments are important components in an individual's self-transformation, then they need to be as rich, vibrant, and diverse as possible. The environment becomes richest only if all the individuals in it are growing, enriching and transforming themselves. The more thriving individuals there are in society, the more rich the social environment for each individual. A rich environment offers individuals, in the form of other individuals, the greatest "diversity of stimuli" to which they must respond, thus promoting the greatest amount of disruption and subsequent growth on their part.96 If the boundaries between Nietzsche's individual and society are fluid, then Nietzsche's refusal to include all people as candidates for self-transformation only depletes the soil in which his free spirit grows.
Dewey's philosophy is a social one not because he does not value the individual and not because he is too weak to maintain a height for his pragmatist to look down upon the masses, but because the pragmatist can only reach such heights if those around him attain them too. Democracy, for Dewey, is just such a community in which social structures are such that they encourage and even enable all to attain such heights. Dewey's democracy is like the spiral described above, in which growth of individuals leads to growth of the culture which produces even greater growth of individuals, and so on. And the spiral includes all individuals, even the weak "herd." Of course, if the individual is atomistic and thus must begin the process of self-transformation purely on her own, the weak individual will not have enough strength to do so and thus must be written off as a hopeless case. But if one holds that the self is transactional, no person necessarily need be considered incapable of reconstruction. Granted, changing habits such that growth itself is a habit will be difficult and take time, but changing social structures so that they encourage rather than discourage critical inquiry will begin the process of the spiral of change.97
Whether Nietzsche can embrace Dewey's democracy ultimately becomes a question of the construction of the self for Nietzsche.98 However, even if Nietzsche's individuality is atomistic, we have reason to believe that the democracy that Dewey promotes is not the "foul-smelling" democracy that Nietzsche scorns. As Dewey scholar Thomas Alexander puts it, Dewey's "democratic community takes itself experimentally and therefore artistically and intelligently."99 Because of its experimentalism, Dewey's democracy perpetually disrupts and ideally eliminates the comfortable, unchallenging happiness of the last man. As Dewey puts it, "to `make others happy' except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the meaning of life is to harm them."'l Dewey's democracy is so radical in its emphasis upon the continual growth and self-reconstruction of the individual that we can embrace it as a continuation of Nietzsche's own ideas about what a vibrant and flourishing culture should be. And if we reject atomistic individuality, Dewey's philosophy can even be considered an improvement of that of Nietzsche. Because Dewey explicitly acknowledges the interaction between individual and society, he is able to address both halves of the cycle of reconstruction. Rather than focus solely on changing the individual so that humanity might have a transformed future, Dewey gives us a double-barreled approach to transformation by demonstrating that change can and should start at once on the part ofthe individual and society.
No doubt Nietzsche and Dewey differ in many ways not addressed here and in which Deweyans might well profit from Nietzsche. 101However, the striking similarities between self-overcoming and reconstruction have shown us that exploration of the intersections of their work can be fruitful. Dewey once wrote that "ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensity its own qualities."'02 Reconstruction, as well as selfovercoming are examples of the philosophy Dewey describes. We could say that Dewey's pragmatist has recovered from the death of God because she welcomes the free-spirited experimentalism with life that comes from a rejection of our tradition's quest for certainty. For that reason, Nietzscheans should recognize a kindred spirit in Dewey's pragmatist.'03
[Footnote]
ENDNOTES
[Footnote]
1. Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) notes a similar reaction to pragmatism on the part of Continental philosophers in the dictionary's entry on "pragmatism" ( p. 712).
2. See, for example, Vincent M. Colapietro, "The Vanishing
[Footnote]
Subject of Contemporary Discourse: A Pragmatic Response," The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 644-55; Victor Kestenbaum, The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977); Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Richard Rorty, "Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey," The Review of Metaphysics 30 (December 1976): 280-305; Sandra B. Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Common Vision (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); R. W. Sleeper, "The Pragmatics of Deconstruction and the End of Metaphysics," in John J. Stuhr, ed., Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 241-56; John J. Stuhr, "Can Pragmatism Appropriate the Resources of Postmodernism? A Response to Nielsen," Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 29 (Fall 1993): 561-72; Michael A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical
[Footnote]
Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), especially chapter 7; Cornel West, "Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodem American Philosophy," boundary 2 9 (Spring/Fall 1981): 241-69; Michael Zimmerman, "Dewey, Heidegger, and the Quest for Certainty," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 9 (Spring 1978): 87-95.
For discussions of the particular question of whether Nietzsche's epistemology and conception of truth are pragmatic, which I will not address in this essay, see Alfred L. Castle, "Dewey and Nietzsche: Their Alethiology Compared," Southwest Philosophical Studies 3 (April 1978): 25-29; Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (March 1992): 47-65; Max O. Hallman, "Nietzsche and Pragmatism," Kinesis 14 (Spring 1985): 63-78; Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche 's Notebooks of the early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp, xxxi-xxxviii, and footnote 38 on page 17; George J. Stack, "Nietzsche's Influence on Pragmatic Humanism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (October 1982): 369406; John T. Wilcox, "A Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 12 (Spring 1980): 77-80; John T. Wilcox, "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent
[Footnote]
American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (Summer 1983): 67-77.
3. I have found only one instance of such a suggestion. See David Michael Levin, The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 230. Levin discusses Dewey's progress beyond Nietzsche (only) in the area of education. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 44, emphasis in original. Hereafter cited as BGE. I will cite section numbers for all of Nietzsche's works except Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for which I will give section and page numbers. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1969)1:46. Hereafter cited as PSZ.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals I, passim (in Basic Writings of Nietzsche). Hereafter cited as GM. 7. Stuhr, "Can Pragmatisni Appropriate the Resources of Postmodernism?" p. 569.
[Footnote]
8. My focus on the reconstruction of the self and selfovercoming ofthe self is not meant to imply that these concepts apply only to the self. Both concepts relate to much more in the work of Dewey and Nietzsche (e.g., society, morality and values); however, in this essay I will focus on their application to the self.
9. The reason for my unequal treatment of Nietzsche and Dewey in these first two sections is that I assume a contemporary audience more familiar with Nietzsche than Dewey.
[Footnote]
10. At least, upon Nietzsche's philosophy prior to 1888. Nietzsche apparently rejected the notion of self-overcoming in the preface of his 1888 work The Case of Wagner (in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 611). Nietzsche writes there, "If I were a moralist, who knows what I might call it [his fight against "Wagnerizing")? Perhaps selfovercoming.-But the philosopher has no love for moralists. Neither does he love pretty words." However, whether this indeed means that he rejected self-overcoming is not clear since he goes on to describe his fight as a demand "to overcome his time in himself ' and a requirement to "take sides against everything sick in [himself]" (ibid.descriptions which sound like a warring, destructive and creative multiplicity overcoming itself. In any case, Dewey's self-reconstruction can be profitably connected to Nietzsche's self-overcoming as described prior to 1888 in his main works.
[Footnote]
I1. TSZ 1:61-62; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufran (New York: Random House, 1974), 333. Hereafter cited as GS.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 518. Hereafter cited as WP
13. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 206-08.
14. BGE 12. See also WP 490, 492.
[Footnote]
15. For more on Nietzsche's self as embodied and multiplicitous, see Walter A. Brogan, "The Decentered Self: Nietzsche's Transgression of Metaphysical Subjectivity," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (1991): 41 30; Daniel W. Conway, "Disembodied Perspectives: Nietzsche contra Rorty," in Nietzsche Studien, vol. 21 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 281-89; Michel Haar, "Heidegger and the Nietzschean `Physiology of Art"' in David Farrell Krell and David Wood, eds. Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 130; David Michael Levin, The Body's Recollection of Being (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 34-35; David Owen, "Nietzsche's Squandered Seductions: Feminism, the Body, and the Politics of Genealogy," in Keith Ansell-Pearson and Howard Caygill, eds., The Fate of the New Nietzsche (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993), pp.189-209.
16 GM III:27, emphasis added.
17. This also means that the self contains within itself the pos
sibility of disorganization, chaos and decadence. 18. TSZII:139
[Footnote]
19. GM III:8. This is not to say that Nietzsche simply rejects these qualities when encouraging their self-overcoming. Rather, through their overcoming as ascetic virtues, they can become conditions for the strength and fruitfulness of the Obermensch. 20. TSZ II:138. 21. Ibid.
22.See ibid., I:44: "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across [ubergang] and a down-going [untergang]. . . . I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down [untergehen] and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman [lbermensch"
[Footnote]
23. John Dewey, Art as Experience in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1953, vol. IO, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 47-48. Hereafter cited as AE. While one of Dewey's main goals in this passage is to demonstrate that viewing artwork is just as creative and active a process as the production of a piece of art, his comments, and indeed the entire book, do not apply to the experience of viewing artwork only. They apply to all of experience because all of experience is a reconstructive interaction between self and world. 24. Ibid., p. 59.
[Footnote]
25. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 65. Hereafter cited as HNC.
26. Ibid., p. 75, note 1. 27. Ibid., p. 32.
28. Ibid., p. 136; John Dewey, Experience and Nature in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 61. Hereafter cited as EN.
[Footnote]
29. HNC, p. 49. 30. Ibid., p. 24.
31. Ibid., p. 28. For more on the relation of body and consciousness in Dewey's thought, see Bruce Wilshire, "Body-Mind and Subconsciousness: Tragedy in Dewey's Life and Work," in Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Essays after Dewey, pp. 257-72.
[Footnote]
32. HNC, p. 67. 33. Ibid., p. 69. 34. Ibid., p. 88. 35. Ibid., p. 88. 36. Ibid., p. 15. 37. Ibid., p. 43. 38. AEp. 251.
[Footnote]
39. Ibid., p. 19. Dewey uses the image of a spiral in HNC, p. 225.
40. AE, p. 253.
41. HNC, p. 96. Dewey talks at length of the (re)creation of the self in the chapter "The Moral Self," in Ethics in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern IIlinois University Press, 1989), pp. 285-310. Hereafter cited as Ethics. See also John Dewey, "Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder," in John Dewey: The
[Footnote]
Later Works, 19251953, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 70-71.
42. HNC, p. 96. See John Dewey, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 311-12 for a discussion of identity issues relate to a plural self in which internal struggle occurs. Hereafter cited as Early Ethics. 43. For the role that imagination and faith play in effecting the unity of the self, see John Dewey, A Common Faith, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 14, 23. 44. AE, p. 184.
45. Early Ethics, pp. 312-13.
[Footnote]
46. Nietzsche is also critical of the "free will;" see, e.g., BGE 17-21. As is the case for Dewey, Nietzsche's emphasis upon the plurality of the drives and affects of the body and his account of the intellect as (merely) an instrument of the body works to disrupt our tradition's notions of agency by eliminating the "free will." Of course, this is not to say that Nietzsche (or Dewey) is a determinist or that agency of all kinds has been eliminated. Rather, for both Nietzsche and Dewey, agency becomes bodily, instead of disembodied.
[Footnote]
47. HNC, p. 32. 48. Ibid., p. 75. 49. Ibid., p. 108. 50. Ibid., p:176.
51. Ibid., p. 108. Much like Nietzsche, Dewey talks of undi
[Footnote]
rected, sublimated and suppressed impulses on ibid., pp. 10809. And Nietzsche would agree with Dewey that transforming oneself into an Ubermensch is not about an undirected release of animal drives and instincts, which would be a sensualism far removed from the ordered formgiving of the artist (see BGE 188; TSZ 1:71). 52. HNC, p. 204; BGE, 44.
53. HNC, p. 159; Robert L. Holmes, "John Dewey's Social Ethics," The Journal of Value Inquiry 7 (Winter 1973): 27480.
54. HNC, p. 195. Cf. TSZ 1:56-58, 1:71-73. 55. Since Nietzsche would not be willing to grant that members of the herd undergo even a minimal amount of selfovercoming, this point differentiates his self-overcoming from Dewey's self-reconstruction. I will return to this difference in the final section of this paper when I examine the two philosophers' conceptions of the individual. 56. AE, p.173. See also John Dewey, Democracy and Educa
[Footnote]
tion, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 18991924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 54, 56. Hereafter cited as DE. 57. HNC 48, 51, 55. See also DE 57.
58. For Nietzsche, the scientist can be just another version of the ascetic ideal (GM III, passim; GS, 344). I refer here to Nietzsche's "gay scientist," who has called his remaining piety-the will to truth-into question.
[Footnote]
59. AE, pp. 21,148. 60. HNC, p. 75, note 1; DE, p. 50. 61. Ibid., p. 47.
62. HNC, pp. 70-72; AE, p. 294; cf. TSZ 1:55. 63. HNC, p. 71. 64. EN, pp.169-170. 65. HNC, p.168.
66. EN, p.172. See also ibid., pp.18889. 67. HNC, pp. 30-31.
68. HNC, pp. 72,125; Early Ethics, p. 312. 69. TSZ 1:55. 70. GS, 124, 343. 71. Ibid., , 347.
[Footnote]
72. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 427. Hereafter cited as HATH. See also ibid., 483, 629-38.
73. See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking Penguin, 1968), 54-55. Hereafter cited individually as TI and AC.
74. See AE, pp. 19-20; EN, chapter two; John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. x and chapter one (hereafter cited as QC).
[Footnote]
75. HNC, p. 127. 76. GS, 295. 77. Ibid., note 18. 78. BGE, 188. 79. TI, p. 65.
80. HNC, p. 125; AE, pp. 1920. 81. QC, pp. 181-82. 82. Ibid., p. 182. 83. AE, p. 21.
[Footnote]
84. Mary L. Coolidge, "The Experimental Temper in Contemporary European Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955): 493; Sidney Hook, "Pragmatism and Existentialism," The Antioch Review 19 (1959): 155.
[Footnote]
85. Wilshire, "Body-Mind and Subconsciousness," p. 261. Cf. Richard Rorty, "Nietzsche, Socrates and Pragmatism," South African Journal of Philosophy 10:3 (1991): 63. 86. TSZ II:156. See also GM 1:12. 87. BGE, 257.
88. Nietzsche is explicit on this point in HATH, which is sub
titled "A Book For Free Spirits." 89. GS, 381.
[Footnote]
90. See John Dewey, Individualism, Old and New, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illlinois University Press, 1984), pp. 52-53. Hereafter cited as ION. 91. BGE, 30.
92. While it is true the category of the individual is given very little role to play in Dewey's early work, by the time of his middle and late works, the asymmetry between the social and the individual had been balanced out (see Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower's Introduction to Ethics, pp. xviii-xix). The individual plays an important role in Dewey's mature philosophy for it is the locus of change for our culture (HNC, p. 62; Ethics, p. xix). 93. He does comment cryptically in The Will to Power about the "false dogmatism regarding the 'ego': it is taken in an atomistic sense, in a false antithesis to the `non-ego"'and "the false autonomy of the `individual," as atom" (WP, 786).
[Footnote]
94. Cf. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 342. 95. See Haar, "Heidegger and the Nietzschean `Physiology of Art,"' and Mary Elizabeth Windham, "Nietzsche's Philosopher of the Future as an Ethicist: Experimentalism in Ethics," International Studies in Philosophy 24 (1992): l lS 1524, for arguments that Nietzsche's individual is not isolated from the world in which she lives. For an example of the view that Nietzsche's body-self does remain separate from the world, see Arifuku Kogaku, "The Problem of the Body in Nietzsche and Dogen," trans. Graham Parkes, in Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 224.
[Footnote]
96. DE, p. 93. 97. ION, p. 74.
98. For an argument for the compatibility of Nietzsche's self-overcoming and (a non-Deweyan) democracy that is very different from the one that I have presented, see Aharon Aviram, "Nietzsche as Educator?" JoUrnal ofPhilosophy of Education 25 (1991): 226-31. Aviram claims
[Footnote]
that it is precisely Nietzsche's individualism that allows his philosophy to complement the goals of democracy. 99. Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience & Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 19&7), p. 273. 100. HNC, p. 202.
101. The difference of "tempo" is the most obvious one and one which Nietzsche would find very important. Dewey's writing has been described as "swimming through oat
[Footnote]
meal" (Alexander, p. xii--hardly the brisk and playful allegrissimo of Nietzsche's work. The different tempos of their work are probably related to the different audiences intended for it, a suggestion that I will not be able to pursue here. See BGE, 27-28 for instances of Nietzsche's views on tempo and style. 102. AE, p. 41.
103. 1 wish to thank Phillip McReynolds and Brian Domino for their helpful suggestions and comments and Miami University for its support of this project through the award of a Summer Research Grant.
[Author Affiliation]
Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056

"Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God's Deep Blue Sea: The Erotic Valence of Art and the Artist as Actor-- Jew-- Woman." Continental Philosophy Review. 33 (2000): 159-188.
Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God's Deep Blue Sea:
The Problem of the Artist as Actor--Jew--Woman
Babette E. Babich
Department of Philosophy, Fordham University; 113 West 60th Street, NYC, NY 10023 USA
Tel: (212) 636-6297; Fax: (212) 927-7551; Babich@Fordham.edu
Although in what follows I address the question of erotic love (that is: the domain of sexuality), it is important to emphasise that I will offer as oblique an approach to the issue of eros and sex as any other philosophical discussion. In philosophic reviews of the erotic (particularly analytic treatments),(1) abstraction invariably ablates the wings of the god.(2) Here, however, the obliquity of my approach has less to with the philosophic elusiveness of the subject matter than with the complex of problems expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche under the name of the repressed problem of the artist. Nietzsche articulates the problem of the artist as the problem no less of the actor as the problem of the Jew (GS 361) and because all three problems are ultimately expressed as the problem of woman, the erotic element is key in this constellation.(3) In many of its particulars, the "problem" of the artist (or actor or Jew or woman) has marked affinities with what educators are fond of calling the problem child. The artist is imbued with semblance: false, if not as child psychologists are likely to be false, but given to acting-out or to precocity or preciousness. This "falseness with a good conscience" (GS 361) expresses itself in the child's characteristic (and, characteristically, sometimes over-exagerrated or feigned) delight in appearance, talent for mimicry, and inclination to affect as such. In strikingly postmodern terms, Nietzsche presents the "problem artist" as the problem of mass culture and -- although the age of psychoanalysis is rapidly waning -- articulates the latter problem as the problem of the hysteric.
For Nietzsche, "The Problem of the Artist" is a problem that can only be understood in affine terms. Impossible to parse in itself, the problem of culture is the problem of the individual artist: the problem of cultivation and genius, the conditions of production and reception, and so on. The problem of the artist is the problem of representation as the problem of dissimulation and semblance: the problem of truth and lie, reality and illusion. Yet the goal is not to highlight the dissimulating or illusory character of the artist (actor, Jew, woman). Articulating a cadenced account that runs from artist to actor to the Jew and the diplomatic heart of truth/lie and precisely as an account ending with the problem of woman (in erotic love and in life), Nietzsche also adumbrates a parallel reading of democracy in accord with his own transfigurationally democratic sensibility.(4)
In one dense, evocative aphorism, Nietzsche resolves the artist's problem into a cascading tessellation of what might seem to be modernity's every problem with the other. Posing the problem of the actor (or "fool") together with the Jew yields an epistemic tension (with reference to "falseness") and, given the intercalation of "diplomacy" and the pragmatics of rhetoric, recollects the origin of scholarship in general (GS 348), culminating in the problem of woman outlined against the cultural phantasm of genius and contra the more virulent opposition between philosophy and science. Given the paradox of Nietzsche's profoundly democratic sensibility (precisely in its emphatically anti-democratic character), this reticulated register recapitulates and consummates almost the entirety of The Gay Science. In this same way, the "problem of the artist" (qua actor, fool, Jew, diplomat, rhetorician, woman) culminates with the hysterical sarcasm that embodies Nietzsche's ultimate word on the problem as a whole: "Woman is so artistic."
This hysteric resonance articulates a precisely or deliberately overwrought determinism: an excess to excess to excess.(5) The critical and dangerous significance of this associative cadence for contemporary reflection(6) is Nietzsche's metonymic transfer of the problem of the Jew to the nineteenth century image of woman as a coy, fainting, fashion conscious lie (BGE 145; 148; 237).(7) It is in this way worth remembering the ordinary reference of the histrionic (to the theatre) and the hysteric in the jokes of everyday life, whereby the apotheosisation of the artist as focal point for the question that is the problem of the actor (or the mask) is transformed into the question of woman. And not only feminist scholars but philosophic chameleons like Jacques Derrida and his many imitators have made a good deal of the allusive resonance of this last connection, replaying the music box of Nietzsche's twilight theme wherein it becomes Platonic truth, taking a Jewish detour to become Christian love, subsequently becoming sufficiently female for the eternal German ideal of woman, ending via the enlightenment, Königsberg, and socialist sentimentality aground on its own evolutionary peak or loss of values. For Nietzsche, the evolution of the ideal is the decay, the decadence of the ideal. It is at once Plato's conversion (as/into Christianity) into the province of popular enlightenment values and as such an inversion, it is also the instrument of Plato's revenge: "what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? ... But no! With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world."(8)
Innocence and Becoming
From the beginning, Nietzsche regarded the modern scientific progress ideal as the optimistic fulfillment of Socrates' invention of modern scientific thinking, i.e., a rational inversion of tragic culture characterized by a profound hatred of change or becoming. The same antipathy to process and becoming undergirds the technological enthusiasm of contemporary Western culture. Our horror of the desultory effects of the corruptions of becoming and time means that we want technological fixes in our cosmetics and in our medicines for aging, sickness, death, and decay; we want the same fixes on the same values in our engineering science for environmental disorders and contamination. In this way, the cult of the new refuses (mortal) change. This is the contemporary cult of juvenile perfection: all promise and potential, but nothing actual -- unsullied by the real exhaustions and banal detours of procreative investment or the costs of consummation and growth, not to speak of the desultory transformations of illness and decadence.
It is capital (it also extraordinarily difficult) to note that Nietzsche does not simply oppose the optimistic status quo of this Socratic inversion qua life-stasis or cultural stagnation. Instead, Nietzsche opposes the remedial programme of Socratic knowing to the life-affirming potency of the artist who would consecrate or immortalise (and so imprint or stamp) not ideal reality but becoming in the image of being. The key note will be a pure moment of abundance or joy. Without this excess, without what Nietzsche names flowing out or abundance, his word for affirmation (amor fati) is impossible. And I shall argue that failing Nietzsche's careful, constant attention to the disagreeable, to pain, suffering, or -- equally -- to banality or pointlessness, any expression of the affirmative ideal is empty because redundant. Without suffering, pain, anxiety and despair, that is, failing the intrusive presence of an oppressive and hard edge in life and love, Nietzsche's teaching of affirmation reduces to cliché-quality therapeutic counseling or television evangelism or new-age consolation (Write your life as literature! You create your own reality, you are responsible for -- you cause your own illness) offered to the victims of cancer or other terminal illness. The placebo new-age spirituality of popular culture blandly, blindly declares: There is no suffering.
Although we are, of course, as liable to suffering and mortality as in Socrates' own time, and, for all its fanfare, modern medical science has done not a thing to eliminate the ultimate threats of disease and death, it is conspicuously easy to maintain the opposite. In the culture of techno-scientific modernity, the first thing we assert is a triumph over pain and disease and we are sure that a remedy is in the offing for old age, perhaps even for death.
We are committed to a celebration of accomplished permanence -- what Heidegger is pleased to tease out of Nietzsche's Nachlaß notes as the ideal imprinting of becoming with the still form or image of being. This means that we celebrate what becomes in a measure that reflects our best ownmost possibility not according to any tragic accounting of being as and in time, but as good, little Platonic footprints or footnotes. Following in the wake of the inversion of Platonism by way of the Hellenic invention of Judeao-Christianity and the latter's conversion into Western scientific rationality and techno-culture, we today are careful to reserve our enthusiasm not for a tragic affirmation of becoming (i.e., with a choral affirmation of coming undone, being inevitably undone), but we keep our rounds for the latest banausic invention and preservation. Adverting to the ordinary images of consumer culture, we will buy anything that promises to keep us healthy or beautiful and if we might avoid illness, accidents, or age, anyone of us could spare a curse for a demon arrived to sell the eternal return of the same. The eternal ideal: eternal love, eternal life, eternal youth, yes; but the eternal return, life as it is/was, just as it is/was, no.
We want, because we desperately need, a non-literal, more than metaphorical interpretation of Nietzsche's teaching of the Eternal Return of the Same.(9) Yet the basic pattern of eternal recurrence is the ancient Greek insight into the tragic essence of life as the breath or flow of birth and emergence, spontaneous growth, persistence and pain, failure and a wide array of possible deaths. For Nietzsche, the fundamental characteristics of life-- growth, procreation, aging, and dyin-- inherently involve difficulty and are ineluctably doomed in the exactly Schopenhauerian dynamic of what cannot be sustained. The enterprises of life entail failure.(10) In exactly this connection, in a "myth" invented by Plato, we have Eros the god conceived precisely as compensation: a "gift" born of life's poverty in its calculating concourse with resourcefulness.(11) From such a Platonic standpoint, "becoming" regarded in all its aspects, includes growth and procreation as much as death and persists as an earthly, sullying process of inconsequent beginnings, obscured innocence, fallen ideals.(12)
Against enduring values (Parmenidean stasis, the Platonic weight of being: an impossible value for breathing, organic creatures), Nietzsche wishes to install (or poetically to name as best and so musically to bless) "the values of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita --" (XII, 348). But it is indispensable to an understanding of the meaning of such values to underscore them as the values of appearance and these are values without (real) value: a shining glint of gold, rather less than a gleam on the belly of a metaphor. Only poetry or the music of artistic invention can achieve the highest will to power: marking becoming with the character of being, the seeming or appearance of being.
We will need poetry to stamp becoming with timeless, inalterable value because "in truth" for Nietzsche -- as for Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles -- there can only be alteration. Science and mathematical logic do not and cannot secure the becoming of what is real as perdurant being. Like poetry and like art, both science (and this includes the human or the social as well as the natural sciences) and mathematics work as conventions or inventions but lie about and most perniciously to themselves.(13) Inventing itself, dressing itself to seduce its own expectations of reality, science's unshaken confidence embraces the metaphysical reality of its own invention.
The real -- the experienced or lived -- world exemplifies nothing but the very unremitting change or becoming Nietzsche celebrates in his most unsettling descriptions of the same world Plato deplores. Contrary to Plato's protest against physical life, the secret of tragic wisdom is the knowledge of ineluctable perdition.(14) Opposing becoming, philosophers seek unchanging truths or logical forms in the same (Lacanian) locus where theologians seek God or purpose, and scientists pursue a unified theory of everything. Nietzsche's project to restore the innocence of becoming, or to stamp becoming itself with being thus affirms neither the scientific mummification of the present moment nor the eschatological dream of the full time of an eternally ultimate life but the music of mere becoming as not only the native character of the physical or natural world but the best possible truth of the world.(15) This is the determinate scheme of the erotic -- here conceived as the valence of art. Speaking of eros, or speaking of art, or, indeed, advocating the renewal of innocence, should not obscure what remains transfigured but not for that redeemed as the tragic character of becoming.
Nietzsche thus returns at the end of his published reflections to his original tragic insight: "All becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain" (TI, What I Owe the Ancients 4) -- as the very deliberate affirmation of subjective pain in every process and needful in every innocence. One is oneself a piece of fate, but -- and this is the heart of Nietzsche's insight -- not fated by any determining power as a power that might intercede or change anything. Thus everything and anything that happens must be imagined as it is without blame. What is crucial in such an amor fati is the unremitting emphasis on what is "disagreeable" or challenging (which is not necessarily difficulty) in the doctrine.(16) What is must be as it is not because it follows the law of God or nature (the point of the claim 'ni Dieu, ni maître' [BGE 22], affirms the substitutive logic of secularity where the regularity of the law substitutes for both God as father and master and/as nature) but rather because it is without plan (beyond God or law) and that is also to say without recourse (or salvation/scientific remedy).(17) The erotic domain illuminates this insight as both attained in ecstasy and to be sacrified in death.
Nietzsche's teaching of amor fati must be conceived as erotic affirmation. The key to such an affirmation will be consummation, i.e., works not faith. As eros, such affirmation has no part in the resignation endemic either to vulgar nihilism or to positivist determinism. Independently of one another, Howard Caygill and Tracy B. Strong have recently emphasised the secret to this teaching as what what everyone, Nietzsche too, would call love.(18) And yet the word of love alone is meaningless. As an erotic, Dionysian affirmation of life, Nietzschean amor fati teaches an eros more demanding than agape and perhaps an eros even more impossible for the devotees of the cult of sexual distraction.(19) Love, just love, or the idea of sex (the image of eros or pornography) is meaningless unless immediately, really affirmed in praxis, declared, enacted in what we do. Whatever one's confessional standpoint on the question of faith and works, it is the working or the practice, that is: the act of love that counts in the real world.
In other more philosophical words, the danger of talking about love is that it easily becomes a fainting aesthete's (we remember that Kierkegaard was a television evangelist manque: i.e., in the age not of the internet or music video but only the novel--and the Danish novel at that), that is: love-talk is exactly not an artist's musical politics. As an Empedoclean nisus, love does not sit and catch an affective emphasis, gushing over the love of the world inspired by a night at the theater but like Hölderlin's Napoleon or Nietzsche's own derivative "Caesar with the soul of Christ" lives and acts in the world.(20) This needful eros is the same as the Nietzschean program of reconstrued or restored innocence, or amor fati, which teaches the musical necessity of every individual and every event.
The idea of restoring the innocence of becoming is every bit as counter-intuitive and as implausible (or pointless) a notion as the restitution of virginity. And in reference to love in particular, it is likewise essential to emphasise the contextual reference to the presocratic understanding of erotic love, particularly Empedoclean love, as a physical not a psycho-sociological dynamic innocent of the constructions of both the anti-materialist Platonic Eros and the Pauline eristic. Becoming is the crime or fault of change, aging, and death. Thus the innocence of becoming Nietzsche seeks to restore is an erotic innocence and the purity in question is the chastity of true love (cf. BGE 142). To regard becoming in such erotic innocence presupposes nothing like an acceptance or passive tolerance but an unconditional passion for the world, where the unconditional, impossible impetuosity of real love is a prerequisite for attaining an affirmative disposition toward the world as it is, where affirmation means desire and not resignation. In a Nachlaß note from 1883, Nietzsche proposes the "most important viewpoint: to attain the innocence of becoming, by means of excluding purposes [or ends]" (X, 245).(21)
Given the cruelest interpretation of becoming, excluding the concept of God or of truth, unchanging Being or the ordinal laws of nature, affirms the lack of ultimate purpose -- as Nietzsche has it: "We invented the concept." Life becomes, in all its becoming, transformations, its decaying in sickness, age, and death, very like the cherubinic rose -- without why. Pure blooming: not only buzzing confusion as James's pragmaticism winces, but also pure gift. Again and yet: to really see this, even once, that is really to catch the aspect of life as excess, as growth and decay, joy and pain inextricably mixed will require at least one good day. You "have" as casual language puts it, "to be there" and, in a passage entitled "Vita femina" in The Gay Science, as Nietzsche reminds us in his most rueful tonality, the raw odds against any such revelation are extraordinarily high (GS 339). Even then: the mischief will be to fight the fade.
The sour note of normal indigence here, as it is this that has produced the world altering contours of slave morality and culture, is that for the most part, for most of us there are hardly any moments that remain or can stay present as such a divine moment. For this reason, what Nietzsche recommends as consecration and blessing remains impossible or inconceivable for us until we catch what is given on such a needful day as may perhaps and yet still be born for us. For I argue that just such a transformational (not salvific) day of neediness is nothing other than the day of longing: real desire (even Lacanian desire will do), the temptation to the expression of passionate love. And here we are thinking exactly of actors, of artists, and particularly of women -- and I will add the necessary twist -- not romantically but exactly as problematic.
For desire to work as the everyday model of the Dionysian intoxication Nietzsche proposes, it must be a sensualist, aesthetic desire, felt and lived in the world -- not merely lust played at, and not at all -- and this is the heart of the problem of the Jew, of woman, of actors, and of artists -- and not ever the slavish seduction of another's desire. In the case of woman (not only in the West but in a diachronic extension the world over), the problem here is that she is rarely "genuine" but always an actor, a "Vertreter" (TI, Arrows 38), a guise in her own space, in place of herself. And, according to Simone de Beauvoir, this disingenuousness is endemic to the traditional cultural "situation" (or manner) of literally "becoming" a woman. Even in the act of love. To affect desire (which is what it is to be the object of erotic desire) in the heat of desire is the eternal sexual calling card of "women," Nietzsche claims, and that no matter whether one speaks of a male or female "woman" --"Dass sie 'sich geben,' selbst noch wenn sie -- sich geben" (GS 361).(22) Nevertheless, in his ideal description of passionate love, what Nietzsche imagines is the spiritualization of sensuality: the music or realization of art. Key to this spiritualization is that the putative fact that he had so little experience of love in his life does not invalidate this insight; much rather this lack of experience may well have been what ennabled him to hold to it not because one must be naïve to love (nor does naïveté help) but rather because the work and the working of love is hard. Lacking experience, Nietzsche could escape the compromise, and compensation, negotium of disappointed, misappointed love -- where what one so often learns in the experience of love is not how to love but how not to love: the art of compromise or giving up on one's desire. Thus Nietzsche too, like the Napoleon he imagined himself to be (with the soul of Christ), might have imagined himself the martyr of love's ideal.
What the artist realizes in art -- this is its erotic valence -- is the external in himself, "the eternal joy of becoming." And everyone of us can and everyone of us does do just this impossible thing in those moments of sexual arousal and intoxication that are not cancelled by nihilation and fear. The mischief is that it does not stay and the evil is that we rarely mark it as such. Yet in such abandon -- and I am not saying it is not so rare that it were not almost as if one never has and may never yet experience such a possibility -- one realizes what Nietzsche calls the "joy encompassing joy in destruction" (EH, Birth of Tragedy 3), as a joy with nothing to do with violence, a cruelty which is also a rueful name for sadness. Such a tragic joy is the affirmation of life because no affirmation, no love, can choose any one part, such as life and not also death, or ecstasy and not also longing, disappointment, and consummate sadness, or joy and not also suffering, or being and not much rather becoming. "Pleasure in tragedy characterizes strong ages and natures .... It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty: they are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure" (WP 852). What must be celebrated and affirmed, what must be loved as desirable, as sheer delight, is life as living: life, twisting like the serpent, a ribbon of change flickering with wonder and much more banality. "Those imposing artists who let a harmony sound forth from every conflict are those who bestow upon things their own power and self-redemption: they express their innermost experience in the symbolism of every work of art they produce -- their creativity is gratitude for their existence" (WP 852). To have such an artist's joy encompassing "a joy in destruction" would be at once to realize and to love both pain and pleasure, affirming the inherent deception in all seduction, the consonance of Rilke's terror: the meaning of beauty as violence, which the French poets of the last century saw in the Hellenic smile and the face of dreaming stone.(23)
The aesthetic significance of Nietzsche's teaching of love or joy may be found in the tragic insight as the becoming which, again, in Nietzsche's words, postulates pain. Thus it is because the erotic is consummately, irredeemably wrong feeling -- gluko-pikron, as one antique voice sings the oldest song of erotic love -- that a tragically erotic aesthetic necessarly avoids the focus on "right feeling" so prominent in recent readings of the politics of Nietzsche's eternal return. Against this radically wrong feeling, more than one specialist has proffered the same profoundly simplistic solution to the moral quandary underscored by Bernd Magnus as the irreducible danger of thinking Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of the same as affirmation. Nietzsche wishes to teach the will to will backward -- that is amor fati. But would such an ambition be morally justifiable? Ought one, as Nietzsche seems to suggest, affirm what has been as it was exactly as it was? Strong readings of Nietzsche's teaching of the eternal return of the same, like that of Karl Löwith or Wolfgang Müller-Lauter or even Alexander Nehamas's benignly exact rendering of the eternal return tend to a universally affirmative, unreservedly positive response. Scholars like Magnus (and, more simplistically, Julian Young)(24) have scruples regarding such a literal reading. The thought query that is the moralizing problem of the eternal return asks whether one ought to (without minding here about how one ever could) affirm what has been (as the test case of retrospective amor fati)? Would one have to be able to will exactly everything -- great and, what was Nietzsche's word? unutterably small -- or could one not simply limit one's affirmation to the "good parts"? Young thinks it reasonable enough to dispense with a ticket fluttering to the ground in Red Square; Magnus would like to make a sharp (and politically impeccable) exception for the case or historical fact of the Holocaust.
Arguing in good analytic fashion -- that is to say employing a philosophic interpretive style that could not be more antipathic to Nietzsche's spirit-- Magnus critiques and Young corrects Nietzsche's (aesthetic) account to find (at least in Young's case) a more plausible middle way.(25) For Magnus, seeking to catch but ultimately missing Adorno, "post-Auschwitz," one may not creditably countenance the moral insensitivity of a doctrine like the eternal return of the same. Young, for his part, thinks the issue a matter of the purely aesthetic justification of suffering. (26) It to Young's considerable credit that he has (bothered to) read (or to pretend to have read) Schopenhauer in order to catch the full sense of the riddle Nietzsche poses here as it is Nietzsche also names the tragic insight. Where Young goes wrong is where he converts Nietzsche's joyful scientist into the unhappy Cavellian image of a properly New England Emersonian. And Young declares: "there is, in fact, no such suffering at all."(27) This claim may accord with Emerson's Brahmin blindness, but despite a Cantabridgean tendency (originating in the Cambridge in the US and disseminated by way of Pittsburgh) to read Nietzsche as a Saxon Emerson, it is foreign to Nietzsche. For the Nietzsche who observed that naming suffering illusory eliminated no part of it, suffering is much more than merely real.
For Nietzsche as for other contemporary philosophers otherwise unrelated to him, such as Levinas and Theunissen but also such as Adorno, philosophy can hardly do better than to begin (and to end) with the problem of suffering. This is what Karl Reinhardt in his reflection on the legacy of ancient Greece meant when he took pains to qualify Nietzsche's conception of life (precisely contra Winckelmann and Goethe) as "disagreeable" and uncompromising.(28) This is, once again, the very same enduring question of every theodicy, here reworked as the question of difficulty, pain, banality. In the wake of the death of God (i.e., in modern, postmodern times), it is a question Nietzsche poses not to theologians but artists. The key to Nietzsche's thinking, early and late, is his understanding of the tragic as suffering but no less as a poetic or musical (archically Greek) understanding.
But if one means to teach the love of the world or life one must first learn love. And learning love is not an excercise in the mindlessness of a platitude, be it the result of new age thinking or the insular postmodern academicism that seems to have so much in common with it, especially as disguised as a conservative (exactly) right, postive style of thinking. To affirm what was, to love the past and to call it good is to see that everything of what was and is, is all necessary, equally needful, and that one is oneself not apart from but a part of, an instrinsic piece of the whole.
To love something, to call something good, to bless it or to be astonished by and grateful for its being as such, is not to teach an other than Sophoclean lesson. Joy is spoken exactly as the cruelest draught of tragic suffering, as Hölderlin reminds us with sustained amazement.(29) This does not make tragic suffering any less tragic and it is not supposed that there is "no" suffering -- or that suffering is an illusion. This is the unconquerable, lasting difference between Nietzsche's Greek sensibility and Eastern sensibilities.
What is to be loved is life, as it is, as it was and as it must inevitably be in what is to come. What is to be loved is the disappointment of the ideal, star-cursed. That is, the task is to learn to love everything nearest to you. And it is that affection for what lies closest to us, in Nietzsche's telling of the Syrian gospel, that remains hard to gain, not automatic, and not already accomplished. What Christianity's teachers remanded to the paradisiacal heights of the after-life, Nietzsche returns to the realm that is mortal immortality: the heaven all about us. That is: immediacy and memory, that is: the spare domain between blessing and curse in the human heart.
Young, Magnus, Strong, et al., are unified in their contention that what Nietzsche wants (and that what he should want) is to teach right feeling. By contrast, what Nietzsche offers in place of merely right feeling is the affirmation of the great and of the utterably small as the kind of yes-saying or blessing shedding an aura of shining gold on even the poorest fisherman, exceeding such a spectator's aesthetics.(30) For this and other reasons, it is ultimately fatal that Young's account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art turns out to be neither an artist's nor (more critically) a musician's view. And if Nietzsche advocated music as the ultimate redemption from the perception of life as error, he also distinguished between the music of the theatre or mass-culture -- the hysteric or melodramatic music of high society -- and the heart's music: an ingenious resonance which transforms the hearer and makes of him too a musician. This answering resonance is the esoteric key to Nietzsche's resolution of the problem of actor, artist, and it is also key to the problem of the other as such, the problem of the Jew and the problem of woman. What is transformed is the reactive spirit, rendered, and for the first time, in artibus, echoing the song of life in its own desire.
Thus Nietzsche simply never abandons the problem of tragedy (blindness, stupidity, cursedness, injustice, extra-human pain and ordinary sorrow) as music, as art, as life. Nor may one render the tripartite division of Nietzsche's life in four installments (as Young claims), exactly because Nietzsche always comes round again to his own beginnings. It is as mistaken to divide Nietzsche into three as it is to break him down into four parts because Nietzsche has never left his starting point. And what is more, with the poets, with Heidegger, Nietzsche claims that none of us ever do. Every advance consists in coming to own what one is, in winning and in losing the self, as Nietzsche teaches, with Pindar, with Hölderlin.(31)
It will not do to redeem Nietzsche's "wrongness," neither the wrongness of his feeling (the erotic as royally wrong) nor the wrongness of his doctrine of amor fati. This is not only because it involves an injustice to Nietzsche's thinking but because what is of lasting importance in his thinking turns exactly on the redemption not of right feeling or beauty but of wrong feeling and the transformative power of art in the question of "how we can make things beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not" (GS 299) as what it is that can ultimately best be learned from art. This is the meaning of what we name Nietzsche's aesthetic gnomon as it is variously expressed: "Art is worth more than truth" (XIII, 522) or, "We have art so that we do not perish of the truth" (XIII, 500) or, as Nietzsche writes in the last of his Untimely Meditations, where Wagner's Schopenhauerian Bayreuth is rendered beyond itself with a quintessentially and sweetly Hölderlinian insight -- "Art exists so that the bow shall not break."(32) Bent by life, alive, we are the bow, lancing forth. Nietzsche continues in this context to explain the meaning of tragedy: "The individual must be consecrated to something higher than himself ... he must be free of the terrible anxiety which death and time evoke in the individual: for at any moment, in the briefest atom of his life's course he may encounter something holy that endlessly outweighs all his struggle and all his distress -- this is what it means to have a sense of the tragic." Or, "There is only one hope and one guarantee for the future of humanity: it consists in his retention of the sense for the tragic" (UM, Richard Wagner in Beyreuth 4).
Yet and again it is crucial to emphasize that Nietzsche supposes that the ideal of the tragic is not simply "the sense of" greater (militarily Jesuit or Protestant) glory added to one's actions. As Nietzsche reflects on Shakespeare (and indeed Shakespeare's Macbeth, as the quintessential morality play on ambition thereby catching an obvious riff between Wagner and Aeschylus), "Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head."(33) In this wise, exactly embracing or pushing the tragic envelope (to use today's metaphor) the tragic poet celebrates life's Saturnalia: "Not so as to get rid of pity and terror ... but beyond pity and terror, to realise in onself, the eternal joy of becoming -- that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction" (TI, What I Owe the Ancients 5).

The Problem of the Actor-Artist
The problem of the artist is yoked to the problem of art and life. Because the problem of the artist (and the problem of art) exceeds the artist -- if only via the actor, Jew, diplomat, woman -- more is at stake than a turn to an active, or virile, or creative aesthetics in Nietzsche's artist's aesthetics. More than a matter of understanding the provenance of the rare or exceptional or consummate human being -- which is the nineteenth century and still ordinal vision of the artist as genius -- the problem of the artist is much rather the problem of education or culture, and the problem of culture is again mass culture.(34) The political space of this problem is the theatre: a doomed place where tragedy once perished at its own hand and whose decline has been traced throughout the course of Western civilization to Wagnerian opera in Nietzsche's day and the music video delights of our era.(35)
If Nietzsche defines the problem of the actor as "falseness with a good conscience" he does not simply excoriate deceit from the moral standpoint of truth and lie. That is, contrary to current analytic unreadings of the cogency of Nietzsche's "cognitive" claims, Nietzsche does not merely praise the lie of art as an honest lie (it is that, to be sure, but that is only the beginning). Instead where the truth itself must be justified (there is no truth as such for Nietzsche) illusion, the mask, or appearance, lays claim to much more than a negative provenance. That is, it is not because Punch and Judy declare themselves invulnerable as puppets that the violence represented is ameliorated or redeemed: Nietzsche's philosophy of art is not a theory of cathartic, Aristotelian, or even Freudian honesty. Art, as the art of illusion, is the quintessential achievement of human intuition and only from its origins in sense perception can it move to the free invention of the imagination or of cognition. This epistemological nisus or intentionality reducing the claims of truth to the conventions of art, does not suffice to make every human perspective the achievement of a poet. For the most part, the human artist is less an inspired genius than a dreaming savage, incapable of naming the dream as such, and ultimately unequal to it, even where the course of therapy (or philosophic insight) can lay claim to the dream in words: the "lying truth" as Lacan names it. "That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is" (EH, Why I am So Clever 4). With a word of praise for "even the blunders of life," for its wrong turns and "wastes of time," Nietzsche speaks of the "great sagacity" below the "surface" of consciousness itself. "One is," Nietzsche explains, "much more of an artist than one knows" (BGE 192). The archaic pathos of Nietzsche's reminder that "we are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be" (GS 301) suggests that precisely in the absence of such self-knowledge or consciousness of ourselves as artists, Nietzsche's programmatic teaching is meant to recall us to ourselves.
Thus the task of Pindarian becoming is "an act of supreme coming-to-oneself" (EH, Why I am a Destiny 1), but that will mean that it be won or it can be lost. One can equal oneself, becoming what one is, or one can indeed fail one's own measure. Here we must remember the distinguishing importance of the difference between higher and lower human beings, a difference Nietzsche -- anti-democratic to the core of a supremely democratic sensibility, as a very esoteric move affording the first foundational possibility for democracy as such -- never failed to emphasize.
For the early Nietzsche, reflecting on truth and lie, not only are we "eternally condemned to untruth" but resistance to the truth of untruth is quintessentially human: "only the belief in an attainable truth, a trustworthy, selfconfirming illusion is proper to humanity. Doesn't mankind actually live by virtue of being progressively deceived?" (I, 760). Throughout his creative life, Nietzsche would maintain that art is the only way to live with the truth that it is impossible to live with the truth. The truth of art is that there is no ideal of "truth." There is no truth, no justice, goodness, beauty: "The truth is ugly: we have art so that we not undone by truth [damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehn.]" (XIII, 500).(36)
In this way, art or illusion or indeed the actor's "falseness" will be the basic instinct of human society. In particular, we should note the genealogy of illusion or the lie is its utility for life, its indispensability for those who cannot do without it. An instinct for deception and illusion will translate to a practical prowess in seeming, and such a capacity for appearing to be what one is not will be developed by the vulgar, by the base or "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, ...until they learned gradually to turn their coat with every wind" (GS 361). As it turns out, the lower classes in society resemble Jews, but I hardly need emphasise that we can substitute any ethnic other we choose and of course, and above all, we may substitute women of any social ranking whatever. The claim that "Woman is so artistic" now turns on the miracles of couture, cosmetics, and romance novels (love songs, movies, magazine advertisements). "Woman" is ingenious at turning her coat with the wind of impossible fashion and the equally impossible aspiration of love.
Invoking the actor and the artist to get to woman, Nietzsche addresses every member of the excluded grouping of disenfranchised others. All coyness, flirtation, dissembling, delight in the mask, like the depths of all love, must be understood in terms of its origins. As psychologist, using the biological metaphor of pulsion, Nietzsche always traces the genealogy of need. But Nietzsche never traces a genealogy just to leave it there. Instead he uncovers the frisson at the heart of every basic need. And in this fashion, he captures the desperation of a god.
In a reading that is anything but anti-Christian, Nietzsche reads the life of Jesus as "one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love" (BGE 269 cf. 270)(37) To negotiate the inadequacy of our human ability to love and the deiform infinity of desire (Cartesian, Augustinian "will"), Nietzsche dares an extraordinary question as he asks in a strained query poised within a painful series of reflections and therewith raises the hardest of questions posed within and thus apart from all mockery or reproach, what it is that a god who comes to be the very God of love, would be condemned to know about love? What echoes in Nietzsche's question here is a shattering sensitivity to the divine, forsaken and abandoned, a divine indigence. As the non-erotic god of love, the God of the Jews fell from nomadic jelousy and a thunder or sky-god's vengeance to the cloying nuzzling of Christian need. Love becomes the supreme characteristic of God, thus, the need for love becomes the supreme passion, agony, or suffering of the divine. And because, this is key, the banal and ordinary run of humanity is anything but divine when it comes to the matter of passionate (that is the works of) love, human love has never deserved its name. Nevertheless, in the economy of seduction omni-present in eros, it will be this infinitesimal mite of human love which is to be transfigured as the measure of redemptive potential or salvation. Thus it seems -- and this will be the key to Milton's twist on the same Hesiodic eros, from Lucifer's light to God's deep blue sea, moving over the waters of Genesis -- the somehow always embarassing sentiment of the 68 generation ideal that repeats in its enduring disappointment that the world needs love is a foregoing and foregone point of departure for Nietzsche and for every theogony and for every story of love.
Everyone needs love. But that is, i.e., quite literally and just as a woman might long to be or as a child demands to be loved, and likewise every (male) porter, Nietzsche cheerfully reminds us, confidently expects an admirer. And, just as it takes a pastor's son to teach us a lesson about Christian love -- most protestations of love are like the cries of a child: demands for love. Even God's love is such a demand, a claim for affection, exchange, or requital, a chit for being as such. The ideal of love is the ideal of just deserts: purely deserved love or "free" love. The law of love is the exchange of justice as love. Thus and again: the hardest question Nietzsche asks in his book-long reflection on what can be learned from the artist ("la gaya scienza"), cuts to the core of the paradox of the banal and everyday condition of life beyond both exultation and pain: "How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?" (GS 299).
Where things are not beautiful, attractive, desirable (when what is to be loved is not the friend, but exactly what is unlovable), what Nietzsche has called The Gay Science turns to art (techne, scienza), not to sound an invective or lament but for the erotic transfiguration that is love. The lowest or bass tone is the note sounding between the antique (and not only Aristotelian) commonplace that one loves and one can only love what is lovable (with its terminus or paradigmatic idea in love of the self) and the Judeao-Christian transformation of love in the image ideal of charity (both socialist and communist, including as well the occidental ideal of the deus ex machina of the free market).(38) The Judeao-Christian qua Enlightenment qua Smith-Weberian or Protestant ideal of love is the infinite (disinterested) favour that would be the love of the world as a free choice to love everyone as one's nearest and dearest just as one is oneself unconditionally -- unaccountably -- loved (and this too will be a demand for the sake of the self). It is an important complication that Nietzsche's cruelest comments turn on the pagan indefensibility and, still more critically, the classic ignobility of such love. Any God, even the almighty, the supreme, than which no greater can be conceived, seeking a human response or answer to creation is forsaken indeed. Human beings want God's love, but the love of God has to be genitive through and through. Raising the question of love in Christianity, Nietzsche also poses the problem of the neediness of human desire in our own lives.
The dialectic of love requires love and this virtuosity excludes even the God of love (though not the commands of eros). This is the erotic point at issue in the valence of art. The context of the satyr dance which framed the development of (served as prelude to) the play of tragedy, suggests a connection between the eros of antiquity and Christian love in the excess eroticism of ritual. Beyond Christian and Greek, beyond ancient and modern, experience affirms that in passion, particularly (if not exactly) orgiastic passion -- which Nietzsche reads as the key to the Dionysian transformation of the tragic -- one simply does love the world, without the least self-denial and yet without self-absorption, presuming, for the moment, a sufficient measure of ecstasy. However, in order for such a passionate moment to count as such one really has to be beside oneself. Thus the answer to Nietzsche's transfiguring question will depend upon the intoxication of desire or the framed veiling of artistry.(39)
Base desire, however, that is to say, womanly desire, that is to say, a slave's desire to be loved is a semblance, feigning love, offered to win love: "it is 'the slave' in the blood of the vain person, a residue of the slave's craftiness -- and how much 'slave' is still residual in woman for example -- that seeks to seduce one's neighbor to good opinions about oneself; it is also the slave who afterwards immediately prostrates himself before these opinions as if he had not called them forth" (BGE 261). Or as Nietzsche expresses the same point more pithily if no less convolutedly, "Seducing one's neighbor to a good opinion and afterwards believing piously in this opinion --who could equal woman in this art? --" (BGE 148). For Nietzsche, for Aristotle, as for all antiquity, including the flattering and whining Catullus and the other Latin love poets, this ambition is not merely ignoble but impotent: it can only mimic success. "Woman is so artistic."
Contrary to the simple cult ideal of genius, the artist as such (or more evidently the fool, buffoon, or mime), is exactly not what Nietzsche would name the noble in his genealogical polemic on morality or in his reflections Beyond Good and Evil. Much rather and like his closest relative, the criminal, the artist is hard pressed for everything that he or she becomes and, at the most basic level, this includes the artist's own survival. What is more, the womanly ideal of the artist -- as this includes Nietzsche (as philosopher, poet, author), together with actors, buffoons, rhetoricians, and Jews -- is always an artist who is never an artist by choice. In Nietzsche's unmasking of the masks of seduction, a divine or daemonic and furtive neediness unifies actor, artist, Jew, and woman. The urgency of disguise is predicated upon the absence of a sure or secure place in society except on the conditions and terms of that same dissembling and assuming just such a disguise. And yet, and this can be seen in the passions to which all humans are susceptible (in sexual desire above all), one can be driven to distraction, as we say, and in such a state or compulsion, we are the mask and no one, not women, not artists, not Nietzsche himself, has ever had any choice. It is Nietzsche's merit to have traced the appearance of the mask/artist back to the need that gave it birth.
If the mask is common, general as it must be, it is so for the success of the ruse. Thus the problem of the theater is not the lie as such. The problem of Wagner (or Schopenhauer or any one of Nietzsche's "educators") as the problem of the actor is not that the effect of truth must never be true. Rather the rub is the backwards and forwards vulgarity of display. The paedagogic ideal of the theater always lags behind its practice which in its turn absorbs and reflects the standards of the theater's own public and that always remains mass culture. Thus the conceit of the artist is to imagine that the public for which he plays can be led by his art.(40)
The confusion between the artist and the "artist of one's own ideal" is due to the inconsummate genius of the artist except and only as it achieves an exactly vulgar expression. For there is only vulgar genius. "Success has always been the greatest liar -- and the 'work' itself is a success; the great statesmen, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the 'work' whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it; 'great men' as they are venerated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction; in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules" (BGE 269). Hence, Nietzsche writes, for higher men, for artists, "ruination is the rule."
We cannot communicate except, Nietzsche reminds us, on the precise condition that we make ourselves common. This commonality or communion is the condition of democratic sublimation. The artist in reality (in "truth") must play to the public in order to be an artist. This is the classic standard of artistic success. In this context, the artistic culture of ancient Greece is not an exception but an exception of exceptions out of sequence and to it we cannot return. Preserved within Christianity, the strength of Hebrew culture is the clue but not the answer. For this reason Nietzsche's project was the task of a revaluation of values, values themselves once transformed. But I suspect that after two thousand years we need much more than just a new god.
Once again, the clue is found in the problem itself as our culture is a culture of vulgar, slave morality. Thus Nietzsche asks whether "falsity, indifference to truth and utility may be signs of youth" as symptoms of "childishness" in an artist? Asking this of artists (actors, Jews, women) he refers to "their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance about themselves, their indifference to 'eternal values,' their seriousness in 'play' -- their lack of dignity; buffoon and god side by side; saint and canaille" (WP 816).
In the artist as in the ascetic priest, problem and redemption are yoked. But therewith we have again no more than a clue; we have neither the answer much less the cure. Nietzsche's approach to this puzzle seeks to make a distinction between art as "a consequence of dissatisfaction with reality? Or an expression of gratitude for happiness enjoyed." In this contrast, we speaking of the art of passionate love only in the latter thankful or loving case: "aureole and dithyramb (in short, art of apotheosis)"(WP 845). Nietzsche, like Schiller, is always and everywhere speaking to (or of) the artist not the appeal to the crowd, thus he can observe that art in the grand style has that rhetorical diffidence "in common with great passion, that it disdains to please; that it forgets to persuade; that it commands, that it wills" (ibid.). If the soul of music seems opposed to this same grand distance that is also because, as a sign of its own consummate decadence, it has been limited to the play of one sense alone and no longer the dance of the senses. Music is more than two long millennia separated from its long degenerate progeny: the complete work of tragic art.
The slave morality of the Jew, as the vulgar morality embodied in the image ideal of woman, may never be able to emerge from the circle it builds for itself, even if it learns to survive the wound of its weak existence by continually reinflicting the wound upon itself. The standing problem is that if your life is a lie, you cannot be spared that lie in yourself.(41) And yet: exactly in this violent and self-delusory illusion, we are, exactly as artists -- as actors, Jews, women -- those beings who play with stars: "Wesen die mit Stirnen spielt."
This is tragedy not science, not logic: the paradox of the Cretan, the paradox of Freud's truth-telling Jew insulting his interlocutor with the lying insinuation of truth between Cracow and Lemberg, exceeds the opposition between good and evil or truth and lie with the remainder that Lacan calls the Real. Once again, we review the odd cadence of Nietzsche's rendered relationship between the problems Artist-Actor-Jew-Woman. The most interesting of these cultural problems, to use Nietzsche's words, is the problem of the Jew which is the same problem of the actor precisely resonant in the metaphor of erotic music. In "Peoples and Fatherlands" in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche offers a sustained reflection on the political history of nothing but European music. Yet we can hardly recall this thematic focus without adverting to the then contemporary sense of the title (and apart from the now-dangerously misleading ahistorical resonance) to clarify the contextual meaning of the section title. It is after noting "What Europe owes to the Jews?," and because Nietzsche's context has precisely nothing to do with Hitler but much rather everything to do with the complex artist-actor-woman, that Nietzsche defines the Jew in terms of a racial or scientific metaphor if also in terms precisely opposed to the biologism that ended in National Socialism. For Nietzsche, the Jews "are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (better even than under favourable ones)" (BGE 251).
The context is a metaphorical one and it is all about music. This is the erotic music Nietzsche prescribes, that is: like the Jew or the actor or the woman -- or the Mediterranean-Adriatic-Aegean -- in music. This erotic music could be poised "against German music" as "the redemption of music from the north," as "prelude to a deeper, mightier, perhaps wickeder and more mysterious music." This potential music not yet sung, certainly not yet heard, where we would have more than mere hearing to do with it, would have to be a "supra-European music which holds its own even before the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is kindred to the palm-tree and knows how to roam and be at home among great beautiful solitary beast of prey." For Nietzsche claims that he, at least, is able to "imagine a music whose rarest magic would consist in this, that it no longer knew anything of good and evil, except perhaps some sailor's homesickness, some golden shadow and delicate weakness would now and then flit across it" (BGE 255).
This is the music heard by the same heart's ecstatic genius which has tempted so many seduced and intoxicated commentators to reinvent the conclusion of Beyond Good and Evil: "the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul" (BGE 295). There the poses of Nietzsche's seduction take us beyond our routine pettiness (resentments) redeeming in an almost confessedly Christian mode -- and, incidentally enough, in the bravest democratic fugue yet heard -- nothing less monumental than every vulgar instinct. It is "the genius of the heart, who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen, who smooths rough souls and gives them a new desire to savour --", teaching the agitations of modernity stillness and superficiality out of profundity: "... that the deep sky may mirror itself in them." Such a genius teaches not the cheap promise of the market and its seduction of still vulgar desire in the curse that is the blessing of the "goods of others" but instead and much rather forms the common man so that he is "richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes." Yet it is important to recall that Nietzsche cannot close with this rarest of sustained lyrical notes. In the end, the human must be brought to teach this genius how to be humane, that is to say, as beings inevitably condemned to art, be it knowingly or not, we will always need a trick to get there. We need artistry, we need the bronzed music that is the soul of the south, the gondola song resonant in the soul singing itself to itself.
Such a music is of course the music of brown and bronzed night, the music of the soul that sings to itself a song atremble with wild bliss.(42) The colors of this music, which can only be heard in the night, elusive in the morning of their youth are as written words, sketched out, no more than fragrance faded shadows of music, so that what is left to tell barely hints at the tones of what Nietzsche calls his "beloved -- wicked thoughts!" painted like a musical poem, in "many many-coloured tendernesses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds."
When Nietzsche speaks of the innocence of the moment it is an innocence that looks hard into the abyss, into the weakness of human vanity, ambition, inadequacy. But at the same time he affirms the only source of transcendent power, glory, and beauty from and on the same humane side of life. It is for this reason that Nietzsche opposes the rhythms of his lived body to the long theatricality of Wagnerian music. Speaking of the body, of "iron, leaden life," he asks only that it be "gilded by good golden and tender harmonies." Hence Nietzsche can complain that what he suffers most when he contemplates the fate of music is the loss of the tragic sense: "deprived of its world-transfiguring, affirmative character ... décadence music and no longer the flute of Dionysus" (EH, The Wagner Case). This redeems neither the heaviness of life nor ameliorates its tragic side. It is a tragic joy or "melancholy" that seeks "to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection" (GS 368).
The monological art, an art not made for the theatre, for the masses of self-conscious playing affect, would be like Greek art -- which "never 'knew' what it did" (GS 369).(43) Causality works forwards in this kind of passionate affirmative love only by working backward like the ray of sunlight Nietzsche sees shining on his life, at the start of Ecce Homo, "I looked backwards, I looked forwards, never did I see so many and such good things at once." Nietzsche's account, telling his life to himself, thus works upon his life as a benediction. And it is this benediction which transfigures the glance, transfiguring what was into what was willed as such, which is the meaning of what it is to will backwards, declaring: "how could I fail to be thankful to my life?"
The gift of such a bendiction is the affirmation of the great and the small, "a yes-saying without reserve: to suffering itself, to guilt itself, to the most questionable and strangest in existence itself," simply because "nothing that is can be subtracted, nothing is dispensable" (EH, Birth of Tragedy 2). This does not mean that there is or was or will be "no suffering," no guilt, nothing strange and questionable but -- this is the meaning of fate -- that everything is necessary: not only one thing is needful. What is required in everything is everything that preceded, accompanies, and succeeds it. Ergo, if in one tremendous or happy moment one affirms or blesses even one joyous fruition, one inevitably wills as well everything that has been as necessary for it to be at all.(44) Echoing the Saitenspiel that is the full soul trembling like a strung chord sounding with happiness, Nietzsche notes that "all eternities were needed to produce this one event -- and in just this moment of yes-saying all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed" (XII, 308).
The creative, artistic response to the conditions of life expresses neediness or abundance, but the articulation of such an expression is inevitably non-exclusive.(45) Nietzsche affirms that both "ascendent artists [and] decadent artists ... belong to all phases" (XII, 264).(46) And if artists of ascending and declining life characterize every stage, every excess and destitution of life and history, everything, both hunger and abundance must also be affirmed. Thus Nietzsche retrospectively describes his own Zarathustra as "yes-saying to the point of justifying, of redeeming even the entire past" (EH, Zarathustra 8). This Zarathustra does as he composes, singing his own song to his own soul, bringing together into one "what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance." The lean time and the wreckage of life, the failures and the humiliations are as necessary as the full and perfect moment of time, as the consummate turning of life.(47) The stumbling move must be caught, not denied or named deception or illusion but blessed and turned into the balance. And all for the sake of affirmation or creative abundance. But -- to keep to the claims of ordinary or real life -- it is here that it gets hard to hold, hard to ambition, hard to keep. The point is that it cannot be kept: the key is gift, expression, sacrifice. Contra current conservative (i.e., cutting edge, Foucaultian, Deleuzian)(48) readings, Nietzsche's convalescence has nothing to do with recuperation or reserve or yet another effort but is always all about expenditure. This is the erotic trope par excellence, the organismic, i.e., the orgasmic meaning of what Nietzsche describes as the defining aspect of "the great health -- that one does not merely have but also acquires continually and must acquire because one gives it up again and again and must give it up" (GS 382).
At the same moment and drawn into the same breath with which Nietzsche teaches love of life, he underscores every last reason for despair, frustration, impossible desire. This is the tragic condition of life, where life always "presupposes suffering and sufferers." What is transformed in the possibility of love is the disposition of sufferering, a transformation as rare as that same (impossible) possibility. Only lovers -- and there have perhaps been only seven of these, all told, since the beginning of time -- fully alive to everything in life, which means those arched not with right feeling but by what I have deliberately been calling "wrong feeling," commanded by eros beyond themselves (not in imaginative projection) but exactly incarnate in what and how they are. Lovers, bodily, physically representing "the over-fullness of life," are able to desire the Dionysian, wholly erotic art Nietzsche consecrates as presupposing "a tragic view of life, a tragic insight." As an erotically charged being, the lover, precisely ecstatic, can "not only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable" as a spectacle to be admired at an aesthetic distance, but such a "Dionysian god and man" can also face the actuality of the "terrible deed and every luxury of destruction" (GS 370).
In the genealogy Nietzsche traces between artistic creativity and artistic culture, both abundance and need can give birth, yielding either immortalization or destruction. And Nietzsche wishes to look less at the fruits or works of the artist as a means to understand the psychology of the artist ("I am one thing, my works are another" [EH, Why I Write Such Good Books 1]), than the nature of the creative impulse, the expression of overabundance or the product of hunger or need (cf. VII, 440). Thus, for example, a delight in destruction may be the result not of a cheap or vulgar nihilism but "an overflowing energy, pregnant with the future" (GS 370). Commentators, including trend-ambitioning readers like David Krell, typically read every energetic metaphor into pregnancy in its connection with the future save the critically metonymic reference to how one gets that way (this last point is the erotic dimension that is always occluded in Krell's putuatively feminist enthusiasm for couvade or elephantine female envy). It is crucial to catch the specifically erotic tone of the image of pregnancy not only because it could not be more obvious but also because it could be argued that in its time and context (especially for the eternally adolescent Nietzsche): such talk was suggestive enough.(49)
What is telling is abundance, that is: potency or sovereign not slavish desire. Immortalisation can be an apotheosis of flux and destruction can be the precondition for creation. Nietzsche's consciousness of the tragic insight colors both the affirmative and the reactive dispositions of abundance and need. Whatever is replete with overflowing energy cannot be conserved -- this is the economy of expenditure or expression: affirmation. The will to power that is a capacity for expression can only be given out without reserve.(50) In contrast with art, knowledge merely seeks to tell itself a story: justifying and enduring its own impotence. Thus Nietzsche speaks of the gap between "know" and "can" (BGE 253) and suggests that what can act must perhaps exclude knowledge. The will lacking power is the will to power that does (and can do) nothing but conserve itself in the power it lacks, already played out, already without reserve. The difference is between the will to expend and the will to save. If no one can spend more than one has, expenditure remains the point at issue. In any case: in the economic dynamic of life as erotic love, power can only be kept if it is continually spent, lost, given out. This is the energetics of eros, the erotic dynamic, as it is an exact economy of discharge. It is the impotence of fear which cannot imagine and can never believe that such power, such great health, "one does not merely have, but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up" (GS 382). The course of desire sacrificed is the eternal return of the same.
If it is true of everything organic and inorganic that the conditions of life include death, the condition of the artist as the creator of the work of art (as of the condition of everyday life) is also the history of what must be overcome or mastered as what must be brought forward or heightened to produce the work. Not only "mud and chaos" but also "the divine spectator and the seventh day," (BGE 225) are absolutely necessary aspects of a holy yes, a wheel rolling out of itself, which Nietzsche's Zarathustra compares first to the child's innocence and poises again with the very same words in the impossible ideal of lovers who promise a life to one another.
As a defining condition of artistic creativity, Nietzsche mused that a Raphael "without hands" be imagined as the rule rather than the exception. Nietzsche also emphasised the tremendous vulnerability of the human capacity for and openness to beauty. And, again and again, he points out that no one can get more out of anything -- art or life, even a book -- than what one brings to bear on it. In the case of art, life, or, indeed, a text, this limit is that of the interpretive wherewithal at one's disposal, which includes everything one is and everything one has experienced. The conditions of art for the artist, for artistic perception as for the culture or cultivation of a people are exceedingly rare.
To become what one is, one must take over one's own life as an invention; even more importantly, at the same time, one must learn love. The need for love, for learning how to love, and an active erotic deed or lived passion or expressed, articulated desire corresponds to the importance of what Nietzsche calls benediction. This is a yes-saying. To learn love is to learn to bless and this love has an extraordinary mien: as human as divine. And from the first moment of creation, benediction is a song of blessing or naming or calling things good.(51)
Nor would Nietzsche ever stop talking about, longing for, arguing love, which he spoke of as amor fati, Dionysus teasing Ariadne. Thus he could charge (much as Wittgenstein similarly observed) that "The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up to the topmost summit of his spirit" (BGE 75). Thus Nietzsche could echo his ideal definition of chastity in love: "Dans le véritable amour, c'est l'âme qui envellope le corps" (142). The dream of love was always in his mouth, even if as the actor, artist, Jew, or else as the woman "born of a rib of his own ideal" ideal (TI, Mixed Maxims and Arrows 13, cf. GS 71, etc.) The Nietzsche who "ventured to paint his 'happiness' on the wall" (GS 56) owes much of what made him "dynamite" to a dying era and to the insight that the eighteenth and nineteenth century ideal of energy or eternal delight was a metaphor for what he always knew better than to reduce to sex without illusion, without erotic artistry.

Endnotes
1. For examples of this fatal banality, consider Roger Scruton's chillingly asexual, monotononic account or accounts by Robert C. Solomon or Alan Soble, or indeed Irving Singer's three volume treatment, or, in German, the tome by the one-man encyclopedia, Hermann Schmitz, or else Niklaus Luhmann's patently oxymoronic "codification" of Love as Passion. That these authors are male, that men are (in fact and despite the mythologization of male desire to the contrary) typically uninterested in the ideal of eros and even less interested in the nature of the erotic (which is always all about the Other) but write utterly incidental books (none of the aforenamed specialises in the subject: their books are extras, written on the fly, for fun, impotent efforts delivering nothing of philosophic relevance on a necessarily dyadic topic), all this is doubtless part but not the whole of the monological drabness of such philosophic studies of love. By contrast, Simone de Beauvoir's expressly one-sided account of woman and love remains both broadly appealing and interesting to both sexes, both in my own teaching experience and as illustrated by the recent explosion in its sholarly reception.
2. In the same way, to vary Nietzsche's aphorism on the relationship between Christianity and eros, when science gives eros poison to drink, it does not simply cripple it but kills it outright.
3. This reticulative correspondence also means that the problem of the artist is the seductive problem of the Other. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), section 361. Cited as GS by section number in the text.
4. I owe this -- as so much else -- to David B. Allison. See his Reading the New Nietzsche, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
5. The problem of the hysteric as the problem of the artist-actor-woman-Jew corresponds to the vulgar nihilism specific to contemporary modernity.
6. Nietzsche's provocative constellation of ideas embodies what Agnes Heller expresses as its "shock" value in her An Ethics of Personality (London: Blackwell, 1996).
7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R, J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Cited as BGE by section number in the text.
8. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), "How the 'Real World' at Last Became a Myth." Cited as TI by section title in the text.
9. We are more sophisticated than the Victorian cycles of nineteenth century thermodynamics and if we can correct a simplistic reading of Nietzsche, this could be a useful place to begin.
10. Nietzsche writes, for example: "In every age, the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless." (TI, The Problem of Socrates 1).
11. For a further discussion of the consequences of this "technical" myth in a related but different (much broader and more nuancedly) philosophic context, see Holger Schmid's discussion of "Eros und Logos: Die platonische Inversion" and the surrounding sections of Schmid's Kunst des Hörens: Orte und Grenzen philosophischer Spracherfahrung (Böhlau, 1999), p. 163f.
12. Thus Aristotle's philosophico-bio-anthropology regarded the basic processes of life as vegetative, lower than animal life and even more incidental to the nature of the human. The most basic processes of life are brutalizing and soulless.
13. See my introductory essay, "Nietzsche's Critical Theory: The Culture of Science as Art," in Babich ed., in cooperation with Robert S. Cohen, Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge and Critical Theory: Nietzsche and the Sciences I (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 1-26.
14. As Karl Reinhardt reminds us, "Allerdings, was Nietzsche «Leben» nennt, ist ein sehr Unbequemer, fordernder Begriff des Lebens." Vermæchtnis der Antike: Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreibung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960/1989), p. 345. ["In fact, what Nietzsche called 'life' is an extremely disagreeable, challenging conception of life."]
15. "Dem Werden den Charakter des Seins aufzuprägen--das ist der höchste Wille xur Macht" Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980) XII, p. 312. Hereafter parenthetically cited from the KSA directly in the text or in the notes with roman numerals (volume) and arabic numbers (page) alone. It is should be noted here that Heidegger renders the passage in question as a pro-technological expression. See for a related discussion, my "Heidegger's Relation to Nietzsche's Thinking: On Connivance, Nihilism, and Value," New Nietzsche Studies, III, 1/2 (1999): 23-52.
16. This is Reinhardt's point, once again.
17. If what becomes becomes towards some end, it has a reason for being. In this project, it loses all innocence. Thereby the event acquires value in terms of its mediate good (or evil), that is, its ultimate utility. In order to love the world and not merely to accept or to endure the world as it changes and becomes, one has to deny the concept of ultimate truth or purpose or indeed the concept of God. For "as soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming" (XII 35-36). Naming God the greatest objection to existence, in an earlier text, in a wholly, cadentially or melodically related context, Nietzsche invokes Meister Eckhart, to remind us that exactly when one would be saint, transcending illusory and excess attachments, one has still to ask God to be disencumbered of God (cf. GS 292).
18. This is the context of Tracy B. Strong's love-cult quotation, "what the world needs is love." Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 1975), p. xviii. My critical reserve has fairly little to do with Yack's conversational complaint (now immortalised twice in a footnote, in a culture that rarely reads them) that Strong "reduces Nietzsche to John Lennon" (p. xxix) and everything to do with the meaning of love's work. For a more honest account, see Howard Caygill, "Nietzsche's Atomism," in Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, pp. 27-36., as well as Caygill's "The Consolation of Philosophy or 'Neither Dionysus nor the Crucified'," Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 7 Spring (1994): 113-140.
19. Neither Casanova nor Don Juan may be said to love women (as some reconstructivist interpretations enthusiastically suggest) nor do they act in some Freudian sense out of a fear of or hatred of or whatever else of women in general or in particular-- rather, both are no more than streamlined versions of the Platonic ideal: philosophasters of the imaginary erotic, like the ordinary fan of pornography and fashion photographs.
20. The kind of love which the modern world might be said to "need more of" -- where one respected scholar of Nietzsche's political theory has found nothing better than an anemic reprise of the charmingly popular song of the sixties generation (see note 18 above) -- could only be what Caygill, in the direct lineage and spirit of integrity of Gillian Rose's complex and elusive Love's Work (New York: Schocken, 1977), insightfully recasts in terms of the traditional concept of agape, renewed throughout the complex registers of its changing historic context, necessary because popular music is as full of love talk as ever and we are (from a physiological standpoint: quite beyond the possibility of noticing this, just because this is the way sensual or perceptual accomodation works) continually bombarded by images of sex.
21. Denying God--the ideal of perfect being and constancy--we forswear blame, attributing guilt and responsibility neither to our intentions nor the world of natural determinate causes nor a supernatural God. Likewise, for love of the world of flux and becoming, "we deny accountability" and restore the passing of things to innocence. And by denying accountability in pure love "we redeem the world" (TI, The Four Great Errors 8).
22. Thus the casually ironic problem with women in the "love" that is supposed for them to be the whole of their lives (and only an incidental part of man's life) is that "she nonetheless 'poses' even when she yields herself" (GS 361).
23. I refer particularly to Baudelaire's reflections on beauty, "comme un rêve de pierre," in Les fleurs du mal.
24. In Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Julian Young imagines the Nietzschean ideal of affirmation in terms of love on his way to get to sexual expression (where I would be far from arguing against the erotic as ultimate end or its decisive significance in Nietzsche's thinking).
25. It may not be an accident that Cambridge University Press also published an account of Nietzsche's Truth and Philosophy by Maudemarie Clark (1984) which employs a similar tactic, avoiding the obviously analytically unacceptable aspects (even where the same anti-analytic details are inevitable) in Nietzsche's thought and "explaining" such notions away. Both Young and Clark are in good company in such a corrective course as they follow Arthur Danto's lead. Thus one adverts to Nietzsche's more egregious errors and restates what Nietzsche should have said. In this way, Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher, New York: Columbia University Press, 1965/1980) could explain that Nietzsche was in part "seduced by his own arguments. Because he wanted to say that all our beliefs are false, he was constrained to introduce a world for them to be false about, and this had to be a world without distinctions, a blind, empty, structureless thereness" (p. 96). Danto's conviction that Nietzsche merely "introduces" this world works the way of ordinary (analytic-style) philosophy. In saying that we can know nothing true of the world an sich (a Kantian commonplace), Nietzsche is in fact saying that we know of the world an sich false beliefs, and for Danto, using truth table logic, if we know that our beliefs are false, then we know a truth. This schema refuting Nietzsche's epistemological significance is a standard one, stunning in any form for its irrelevance to Nietzsche's own argumentative expression.
26. Nietzsche's solution to the Schopenhauerian riddle posed by absurd, meaningless suffering, ambitions what Young names a performative, if "atheistic theodicy." Young, p. 109.
27. Young, p. 109. Ignoring Nietzsche's perspective (perhaps with the aid of a Cavellian lens), Young goes on to read even Wittgenstein with Emerson's eyes: "'The riddle ... does not exist.'" (p. 109, and Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.5.) Yet as recent scholarship has come to suggest, the declaration here is a riddle redeemed in the later Wittgenstein.
28. See, again, Reinhardt, op. cit.
29. This is the black pearl of Hölderlin's Sophocles, "Viele versuchten umsonst das Freudigste freudig zu sagen/Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus." ["Many have tried, but in vain, with joy to express the most joyful;/Here at last, in grave sadness, wholly I find it expressed." (Michael Hamburger's translation.)]
30. Young with his focus on love (not the reason the world might require transfiguration) ranged Nietzsche in parallel with Oscar Wilde: all image all show. Young would have done better to have drawn the parallel where it would perhaps sit more cleanly: (leaving Nietzsche out of the equation)- between Wagner and Wilde. For Nietzsche, Wagner (like Wilde, whose art was his life) was "a first rate actor." Thus Nietzsche names Wagner in the same associative connection which runs explicitly from actor to artist and genius to Jew (in this case: the genius as Wandering Jew) to woman as "an incomparable histrio, the greatest mime, the most amazing genius of the theatre ever among Germans, our scenic artist par excellence." Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1967), section 8. Cited below as CW.
31. Nietzsche's call, "Du sollst der werden, der du bist" (GS 270) which recurs as the subtitle to his auto-bibliography, Ecce homo: Wie man wird was man ist, derives from Pindar's second Pythian ode: " µ." Contra Stanley Rosen's philosophically inadequate interpretation of Pindar, Nietzsche's insight is that it is redundant to translate the mathematical measure of being oneself. This is the arched bow in Hölderlin; it is collapsed to the mystery of becoming in Nietzsche. It should be noted that while quietly resolving many of the philosophical debates that grew up in the wake of Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), as well as a few incidental ones for good measure, Nehamas also offers a finely lapidary rendering of Pindar in his recent book: The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1998): "Having learned, become who you are" (p. 128).
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Section 4, p. 213.
33. Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), section 240.
34. The problem of the artist is the problem of the artist's culture. And for a good many cultures there is simply no difference between the artist or genius and the criminal.
35. The problem of the actor is the problem of the theatre itself, here as in the Case of Wagner: for as we "know the masses, we know the theater" (CW 6, 167).
36. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche reminds us that existence can only be "justified" as an aesthetic phenomenon. Many commentators feel sure that this claim can only be a juvenile exercise in pessimistic or Schopenhauerian bad taste. But in The Gay Science, Nietzsche explains that it is only as "an aesthetic phenomenon [that] existence is still bearable for us." (GS 107). It is (at least to this reader) quite unclear how much may reasonably be made of the difference between what may be justified and what one can stand.
37. I owe the impetus for the following reflections to Tracy Strong and a catenna of email exchanges on this issue. This is an acknowledgement of deeper recollections than any one name can afford because the substance inevitably predates this impetus by more than a few years.
38. See Alasdair MacIntyre's crucial contrast in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 174f.; p. 184.
39. The question of transfiguration here is exactly (importantly with reference to both Strong's subtly opposed reading and MacIntyre's more concordant reading) not a Christian question just because Nietzsche's question is not how to love the unlovable, i.e., what MacIntyre names as the love for the sinner (see his key emphasis in After Virtue [loc. cit., note above]) but rather -- and here Nietzsche is strangely, more pragmatically Aristotelian than either Aristotle or MacIntyre, how to make the unlovable lovable.
40. In this context, Nietzsche refers to the best men of his own era, to name Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendahl, Heine--and also Wagner. And it is relevant that Nietzsche includes in this list an exception among exceptions, the quintessentially modern guise of the conquering hero, the world-spirit on horseback. Napoleon captured the Machiavellian aesthetic political ideal, and was, at least as we read the historian's tale, loved and feared. Any other tyrant has had to settle for terror alone, and at the end of power: revulsion. If Napoleon was different it was only because he was, as Nietzsche suggests, himself an artist of his own ideal. For Nietzsche, "all of them were fanatics of expression 'at any price' ... all of them great discovers in the realm of the sublime ... still greater discoverers concerning effects, display, and the art of display windows" (BGE 256). Thus although such tyrants represented "on the whole, an audaciously daring, magnificently violent typology of higher human beings who soaring, tore others along, to the heights," their century, as our own, remains "the century of the crowd."
41. "Bist du echt? oder nur ein Schauspieler, ein Vertreter, oder das Vertretene selbst?" Nietzsche asks in Twilight of the Idols, "Mixed Maxims and Arrows" 38.
42. See further, and for a different dimensionality, Holger Schmid, "Nietzsche's Philosophical Nocturne," New Nietzsche Studies, I, 1/2 (1996): 57-63. For the original German text, see "'Nacht ist es.' Zum philosophischen Ort von Nietzsches Venedig Gedicht," in Nietzsche und Italien. Ein Weg von Logos zum Mythos? (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1999).
43. That this is not the same as a pure naïveté is plain. Nietzsche distinguishes monological art from an art that plays to the crowd, as he distinguishes an esoteric irony. For Nietzsche the innocent Greek as an ancient warrior, never did anything except for appearance's sake, that is: all bravery requires a witness. Yet the Greek still never "knew" what it did." The difference is a noble pathos.
44. The difference between vulgar theatricality and artistic style reflects the chasm between taste and creative power. By adverting to this distinction, Nietzsche does not merely offer a new canon of taste. Rather the ground condition par excellence for all genuine creation is the consciousness of creative limit and impotence. For human beings, the creative accomplishment grows out of and at the same time confirms a keen reverence for "the interconnectedness of all things" (XI, 341). I hear this (along with E. Heller) in Nietzsche's note from 1884-85 where he declares that "die Ehrfurcht vor Gott ist die Ehrfurcht vor dem Zusammenhang aller Dinge und Überzeugung von höheren Wesen als der der Mensch ist ... Der Künstler ist Götter-Bildner ..." (XI, 341). Reflecting the knotted interpenetration of everything that is, where "nothing is self-sufficient, neither ourselves nor things," Nietzsche notes that the "first question is by no means whether we are satisfied with ourselves, but whether we are satisfied with anything at all. Assuming we affirm a single moment, we affirm not only ourselves but all existence" (XII, 307).
45. Thus Nietzsche asks whether "falsity, indifference to truth and utility may be signs of youth" in an artist by which he means "their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance about themselves, their indifference to 'eternal values,' their seriousness in 'play'--their lack of dignity; buffoon and god side by side; saint and canaille--" (XIII, 264).
46. Nietzsche emphasises this by posing the rhetorical question whether "Aufgangs-Künstler" (ascendent artists) and Niedergangs-Künstler (decadent artists) do not belong to every phase," and supplying the inevitably counter-rhetorical reply, "Yes" (XIII, 264).
47. From this perspective on the importance of the entirety of the artist's being, life, and history as condition for what can be worked as the artist's work, as the work of art, I need (as promised earlier) to oppose Nehamas's otherwise admirable egalitarianism as well as the recently celebrated or declared appreciation for the "other," following not only in the wake of Levinas but contra the ascendency of formerly Eastern European critical socialist sensibilities. Nietzsche's broadly nuanced conditionality does not mean that "anyone" can be an artist of life and the "art of living," even taken in a Foucaultian wise, even as an ethical stylist of one's own, ownmost individual life. But see, for a nuanced and new elaboration of the contrary, Nehamas's The Art of Living (cited above.) One German effort in this direction connected obliquely with Nietzsche is Wilhelm Schmid's Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst. Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegründung der Ethik bei Foucault, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). There are a number of others in German, French, and English, for the most part following Nehamas's influential lead and in addition to reflecting Foucault's displacing influence on Nietzsche scholarship.
48. NB: not, of course, contra Deleuze.
49. By the same token, the talk need not be read as Nietzsche's "becoming" female, even if Nietzsche's metaphoric language has seduced so many readers into infectious readings of this kind (although it remains significant that in such accounts, Nietzsche never ends up female, not even metaphorically, but always either a homosexual or transgendered, moping elephant and I have never seen the interpretive advantage of this account over the ordinariness of heterosexual [male and/or female] desire with its pretensions, demands, disappointments, and concommitant loneliness. The overfullness of which he speaks has been outlined by more than one reader as a phallic metaphor, and so on.
50. The Dionysian instinct which Nietzsche employs as a cypher for the "older Hellenic instinct," is also, Nietzsche writes in praise of Burckhardt, "explicable only as an excess of energy." In the "orgy," Nietzsche writes -- as a stumbling block for Winckelmann and Goethe -- in "the mysteries of sexuality," eros expresses a will to life -- "exactly as the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change."
51. Yet what remans the unadverted stumbling block in all such arts of living and writing the self is the need for love. That is the need to learn love, which is also to say to learn to see that things are good, the necessary art or science of joy, in order to love life itself, that is, with respect to one's own life, "here and now and in little things" as Heidegger expresses it.


Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most disturbing and influential thinkers of modern times, was born in Rocken, Germany, in 1844. To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, a Nietzsche museum was opened on October 9, 1994. Interest in Nietzsche is reviving as "values" come into the forefront of political debate.
Full Text (895 words)
Copyright Economist Newspaper Group, Incorporated Oct 15, 1994
FANS of P.G. Wodehouse will recall that in "Jeeves Takes Charge" Bertie Wooster falls briefly for the bookish Honoria Glossop. To impress her he asks his butler, Jeeves, to get him the works of her favourite thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Jeeves demurs: "You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
Until lately most people would have agreed with that judgment. Nietzsche, one of the most disturbing and influential thinkers of modern times, was born in 1844 at Rocken in Germany. To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, a Nietzsche museum was opened in nearby Naumburg on October 9th. He died in 1900, after ten years of insanity, leaving 12 polemical works of moral philosophy.
Along with Marx and Freud, Nietzsche was one of the great destroyers of 19th-century certitude. Each in his own way doubted the liberal vision of society as a set of rational and responsible individuals. Removal men have come for Marx and in places Freud is being shifted to back shelves, but interest in Nietzsche is reviving as "values" come into the forefront of political debate, both inside nations and between them.
Even among analytical philosophers in Britain and America--the hard-headed lot who hold that soundness matters--the standard view of Nietzsche is changing. His famous challenge to moral philosophers "But what good do morals do us?"--is accepted as needing an answer.
Part of the trouble with Nietzsche is that there are so many of him. The Nietzsche of legend is everything that prompts common sense or decency to sigh, "Oh dear": a brilliant but wild writer, an immoralist and nihilist, an elitist and nationalist, a despiser of women and Jews. In 1914 English Jingos attacked his ideas as a cause of the first world war; Hitler and his intellectual cronies welcomed them as a herald of Nazism.
Although Nietzsche was not a nationalist, and arguably neither a misogynist nor an anti-Semite, parts of the standard picture of him are true. He said cruelty had done more for mankind than pity. He lauded the ubergehende Mensch (higher person or superman) and bemoaned "superfluous" people. Bits of him need to be read with a giggle or with two fingers to the nose. If his meaning was often misread, that was partly his fault. His style was aphoristic and he poured out vehement asides on so many subjects that religious believers, atheists, fascists, socialists, naturists, Alpinists, vegetarians and fox-hunters can all plunder his writings for their cause.
Another Nietzsche, the philosophical relativist, stamped 20th-century thinking on the European continent and in literature departments across Britain and America. But Anglo-American philosophers have never taken well to the notion that in matters of fact we believe what we want. For them it is Nietzsche's immoralism that demands attention.
Nietzsche took the child's question--"Why should I be good?"--seriously and pushed his answers to the limit. The idea that moral values, unlike facts about the world, are up to us is not new. But Nietzsche took moral scepticism to new depths. Values, in his view, were not so much up to us as up to me.
He questioned whether they could or should be impartial moral rules applying all round. Why hobble exceptional people by holding them to ordinary standards? Morality, he suggested in his analysis of altruism, was an attempt by powerless Christian slaves to tame the strong.
Nietzsche, then, was not without values of his own against which to gauge the moralities he attacked. The Nietzschean virtues are drive, creativity, self-discipline, ambition: anything, as he would see it, that "enhanced life". To be consistent, Nietzsche had to accept that his favoured virtues could not be foisted on anyone else either. It was, he would have claimed, up to each of us whether to be strivers or slackers.
Some, bemoaning the individualism of modern societies, think Nietzsche's ideas have already bitten too deep, whether people realise it or not. Others think his ideas have not gone far enough. This is true of thinkers of different perspectives.
"The End of History and the Last Man", a celebrated book by Francis Fukuyama, contains a little-noticed Nietzschean subtheme which clouds his otherwise sunny optimism about the triumph of democracy and markets: without heroic projects and overarching ambitions even successful democracies risk decay.
A noted British philosopher, Bernard Williams, comes at Nietzsche's notion of life-enhancing virtues from a more philosophical angle. It is usual, he observes, to suspend the normal rules for exceptional people, or feel unsure which rules to apply: the brilliant painter who neglects his family, for instance. But if respect for all individual lives is to be taken seriously--and is that not part of what defines a true liberal?--then ought not personal integrity (ie, what each of us is trying to make of our life) often trump the ordinary rules, too?
Another noted analytical philosopher, Philippa Foot, argues that Nietzsche's moral philosophy is in the end defective because it leaves little room for moral persuasion and no room at all for justice: no way, in other words, to ensure that we all respect each other's life-projects. But she pleads for his moral scepticism to be grappled with, and refuted, not just conveniently ignored.
The best philosophers always bully their undertakers. That is true of Nietzsche. Who knows, the supposed destroyer of moral philosophy may be contributing to its revival. The choleric sage from Rocken might even laugh.