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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2010
This chapter seeks to make a contribution to the growing interest in Nietzsche's relation to traditions of therapy in philosophy that has emerged in recent years. It is in the texts of his middle period (1878–82) that Nietzsche's writing comes closest to being an exercise in philosophical therapeutics, and in this chapter I focus on Dawn from 1881 as a way of exploring this. Dawn is a text that has been admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism and for its anticipation of phenomenology. My interest in the text in this chapter is in the way it revitalises for a modern age ancient philosophical concerns, notably a teaching for mortal souls who wish to be liberated from the fear and anguish of existence, as well as from God, the ‘metaphysical need’, and romantic music, and are able to affirm their mortal conditions of existence. As a general point of inspiration I have adopted Pierre Hadot's insight into the therapeutic ambitions of ancient philosophy which was, he claims, ‘intended to cure mankind's anguish’ (for example, anguish over our mortality). This is evident in the teaching of Epicurus which sought to demonstrate the mortality of the soul and whose aim was, ‘to free humans from “the fears of the mind”.’ Similarly, Nietzsche's teaching in Dawn is for mortal souls. In the face of the loss of the dream of the soul's immortality, philosophy for Nietzsche, I shall show, has new consolations to offer in the form of new sublimities. Indeed, for Nietzsche it is by reflecting, with the aid of psychological observation, on what is ‘human, all too human’, that ‘we can lighten the burden of life’ (HH 35). Nietzsche's thinking in Dawn contains a number of proposals and recommendations of tremendous value to philosophical therapeia, including (a) a call for a new honesty about the human ego and human relations, including relations of self and other and love, so as to free us from certain delusions; (b) the search for an authentic mode of existence which appreciates the value of solitude and independence; (c) the importance of having a rich and mature taste in order to eschew the fanatical. After an introduction to Nietzsche's text the chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first main part I explore various aspects of his conception of philosophical therapy, including purification of the higher feelings and liberation from the destructive effects of ‘morality’ and Christianity. In the second main part I explore his conception of ‘the passion of knowledge’, which is the passion that guides modern free spirits as they seek to overcome the need of religion and constraints of ‘morality’, and to access the new sublimities of philosophy.
1 The following translations of Nietzsche are cited in my chapter: The Anti-Christ (AC), trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, (D) trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming) and Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Random House, 1974); Human, All too Human (in two volumes), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) [includes Assorted Opinions and Maxims (AOM) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (WS)]; Nietzsche contra Wagner, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (New York, Random House, 1968). For the German I have used, Sämtiche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (München, Berlin & New York, dtv/de Gruyter, 1988).
2 See the two fine studies by Hutter, Horst, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham:, Lexington Books, 2006)Google Scholar and Ure, Michael, Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008)Google Scholar. See also the essays collected in Golomb, Jacob et al. . Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
3 See Clark, Maudmarie and Leiter, Brian, ‘Introduction’ to F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. vii–xxxivGoogle Scholar. See also Abbey, Ruth, Nietzsche's Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 7–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See Safranski, Rüdiger, Nietzsche, . A Philosophical Biography, trans. Frisch, Shelley (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 207–19Google Scholar.
5 In a note from the autumn of 1880 Nietzsche maintains that the metaphysical need is not the source of religion, as might be supposed, but rather the after effect of its decline: the ‘need’ is a result and not an origin. Nietzsche, KSA 9, 6 [290]. See also GS 151 where Nietzsche makes it clear that he is arguing contra Schopenhauer on this point.
6 The texts of the middle period find Nietzsche seeking to emancipate himself from Wagner and his youthful captivation by his music. In HH 153 he states that the free spirit's intellectual probity is put to the test in moments when it listens to something like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which makes him feel that he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars and with the dream of immortality in his heart: ‘If he becomes aware of being in this condition he feels a profound stab in the heart and sighs for the man who will lead him back to his lost love, whether she be called religion or metaphysics’.
7 Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), pp. 265–6Google Scholar. In a letter to Heinrich von Stein of December 1882 Nietzsche says he ‘would like to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character’.
8 Wilson, Catherine, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: New York, Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Epicurus in Inwood, Brad and Gerson, L. P., The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 29Google Scholar: ‘For there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life…the wise man neither rejects life nor fears death’.
9 We should note that Nietzsche confesses to not fearing death himself in a note of 1878: ‘A prominent quality: a more refined heroism (which, by the way, I recognize in Epicurus). In my book there is not a word against the fear of death. I have little of that’ (KSA 8, 28 [15]). There are a number of places in his published writings where Nietzsche writes in praise of the rational and voluntary death, and in a note from 1888 he writes of the need to ‘convert the stupid psychological fact’ of death ‘into a moral necessity. So to live that one can also will at the right time to die!’ (KSA 12, 10 [165]; WP 916).
10 In Dawn ‘Redlichkeit’ (integrity or probity) is said to be mankind's youngest virtue (D 456).
11 See Kate Wharton, this volume.
12 Melissa Lane has suggested that from The Gay Science (1882) on, that is, after Dawn, Nietzsche's preoccupation with Epicurus and Epicureans evaporates and that his subsequent remarks on them are almost relentlessly negative. M. Lane, ‘Honesty as the Best Policy: Nietzsche on Redlichkeit and the Contrast between Stoic and Epicurean Strategies of the Self’, in Bevir, Mark, Hargis, Jill, and Rushing, Sara (eds), Histories of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 25–53Google Scholar. She also argues that the late Nietzsche favours Stoicism over Epicureanism. On her reading the difference is that whereas for Nietzsche Epicureanism is fatally flawed as a cognitive stance, the Stoics steel themselves cognitively and emotionally so as to confront reality and in the process they expand their knowledge to the whole of nature. Where the one restricts knowledge the other acknowledges reality in terms of a non-consolatory, non-delusional cognitive attitude towards it. Nietzsche's later appraisal of Epicurus is complex since he is identifying in him both a will to knowledge (in the form of knowledge of our actual mortal conditions of existence) and the denial of such a will (in the form of ‘decadent’ attempt to escape from the pain and tragic lot of human existence). In GM (1887) Nietzsche refers to the super cool but ‘suffering Epicurus’ as one who may have been hypnotized by the ‘feeling of nothingness’ and the ‘repose of deepest sleep’, that is, the absence of suffering (GM III. 17). In NCW (1888) Nietzsche notes that Epicurus may well have worn a mask and so may have been superficial out of profundity: ‘Profound suffering makes you noble; it separates. – One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicureanism, and a certain showy courage of taste that accepts suffering without a second thought and resists everything sad and profound. There are ‘cheerful people’ who use cheerfulness because it lets them be misunderstood: - they want to be misunderstood'. (NCW ‘The Psychologist Has a Word,’ 3) For further insight into Nietzsche's reading of Epicurus see also Howard Caygill ‘The Consolation of Philosophy or ‘Neither Dionysus nor the Crucified’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994), pp. 131–51.
13 In D 202 Nietzsche encourages us to do with away with the concepts of ‘sin’ and ‘punishment’: ‘May these banished monsters henceforth live somewhere other than among human beings, if they want to go on living at all and do not perish of disgust with themselves!’ In D 208 entitled ‘Question of Conscience’ he states what he wishes to see changed: ‘We want to cease making causes into sinners and consequences into executioners’. In D 53 he notes that it is the most conscientious who suffer so dreadfully from the fears of Hell: ‘Thus life has been made gloomy precisely for those who had need of cheerfulness and pleasant pictures…’
14 On Epicurus on fear and chance see P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 87, p. 223, and p. 252.
15 Catherine Wilson neatly lays out the central tenets of the Epicurean system in her recent study. They include: the denial of supernatural agency engaged in the design and maintenance of the world; the view that self-moving, subvisible particles acting blindly bring about all growth, change, and decline; and the insistence that the goal of ethical self-discipline, which involves asceticism, is the minimization of mental and physical suffering', Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, p. 37. It is on this last point that Nietzsche will come to later criticize Epicureanism and describe Epicurus as a ‘typical decadent’. See AC 30. In the same text Epicurus is once again prized on account of his battle against ‘the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity’, his fight against the ‘corruption of the soul’ through notions of guilt, punishment, and immortality' (AC 58).
16 See Levy, Oscar (ed.), Nietzsche, Friedrich. Selected Letters, trans. Ludovici, A. N. (London: Soho Book Company, 1921), pp. 157–8Google Scholar.
17 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1995, p. 87.
18 In a note from 1881 Nietzsche states that he considers the various moral schools of antiquity to be ‘experimental laboratories’ containing a number of recipes for worldly wisdom or the art of living and holds that these experiments now belong to us as our legitimate property: ‘we shall not hesitate to adopt a Stoic recipe just because we have profited in the past from Epicurean recipes’ (KSA 9, 15 [59]; cited in Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 277).
19 Letter to Gast in Levy, Selected Letters, p. 164.
20 In D 18 Nietzsche writes: ‘Nothing has been purchased more dearly than that little bit of human reason and feeling of freedom that now constitutes our pride’.
21 The link between the sublime and terror is, of course, the one made by Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, part 1, section VII and part II, section II. Compare Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), section 28.
22 Book five of GS, which Nietzsche added to the text's second edition in 1887, is entitled ‘We Fearless Ones’.
23 See also on this GM II. 7, in which Nietzsche notes that life has always known how to play tricks so as to justify itself, including its ‘evil’, and today, for us moderns and free spirits, this takes the form of ‘life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge’.
24 At this time Nietzsche is reading Voltaire's Mahomet (see HH 221) and recommending to people, including his sister Elisabeth, that they read it (see letter to her dated 13 February 1881, Friedrich Nietzsche Briefe III. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), p. 62). However, we need to read carefully here since there is the danger of turning Nietzsche's championing of the Enlightenment against forces of reaction into an all-too timely position against Islam. To avoid this requires a careful analysis of Nietzsche's comments on different religions. In GS 347, for example, it is not Islam but Christianity and Buddhism that he describes as teaching fanaticism. In D 68 Saint Paul is described as a fanatic whilst in D 546 Epictetus is presented as an example of a non-fanatical person.
25 Nietzsche considers Kant an important figure because he stands outside the movement within modernity that places the stress on the sympathetic affects (D 132). The problem is that his conception of the rational moral law conceals a remnant of ascetic cruelty (D 338; see also D 187 & 207).
26 Nietzsche mentions Aristotle as an example of a philosopher full of joyfulness and peace (D 424).
27 What Boethius wants from philosophy is assurance that the wicked will not go unpunished and knowledge that the world is a rational order and guided by Providence. See Boethius, , The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Watts, V. E. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1969)Google Scholar.
28 See BGE 205: ‘…the true philosopher…lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’ and above all imprudently and feels the burdensome duty of a hundred tests and temptations in life – he is continually risking himself…’