Nietzsche's Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge [1 ed.] 1119693667, 9781119693666

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Nietzsche’s Dawn

NIETZSCHE’S DAWN PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, AND THE PASSION OF KNOWLEDGE

KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON REBECCA BAMFORD

This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 1960– author. | Bamford, Rebecca, author. | Wiley-Blackwell (Firm), publisher. Title: Nietzsche’s Dawn: philosophy, ethics, and the passion for knowledge / Keith Ansell-Pearson, Rebecca Bamford. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020021956 (print) | LCCN 2020021957 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119693666 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118957790 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118957783 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. Morgenröthe–Criticism and interpretation. | Metaphysics–History–19th century. | Epistemology–History–19th century. Classification: LCC B3318.E9 A57 2021 (print) | LCC B3318.E9 (ebook) | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021956 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021957 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Images: © Red Dawn No. 5 @ Alicia Dunn, 2017 Set in 9.5/12.5pt STIXTwoText by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Contents Acknowledgments  ix Editions of Nietzsche’s Writings Used with Abbreviations  xi Introduction  1 1 From Human, All Too Human to Dawn  15 2 Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality  45 3 Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity  71 4 Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination  93 5 The German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and the Passion of Knowledge  115 6 Nietzsche on Subjectivity: Drives, Self, and the Possibility of Autonomy  141 7 Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self  167 8 Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death  187 9 Dawn and the Political  205 10 Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond  225

Appendix: Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn  247 Index  257

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­Acknowledgments Keith Ansell-Pearson wishes to express his gratitude to his co-author, Rebecca Bamford. He has profited greatly from working with her on this book, especially in his appreciation of aspects of Nietzsche’s text, Dawn, and he is full of admiration of her philosophical intelligence and diligence. He is also grateful to those readers and scholars of Nietzsche who have shown an interest in the pioneering work he has been doing in the past decade on Nietzsche’s middle writings, notably Dawn, and who have encouraged him in this work. In addition to Rebecca Bamford they include Daniel W. Conway, Christian Emden, Beatrice Han-Pile, Rainer Hanshe, Paul S. Loeb, Simon May, Graham Parkes, Paul Patton, Alan D. Schrift, Michael Ure, and Patrick Wotling. Keith’s contribution to this book draws on material previously published in the following sources, and he duly acknowledges permission from the editors and publishers listed to utilize this material in this co-authored publication: “HeroicIdyllic: Nietzsche on Philosophy and the Philosopher in Human, all too Human,” in Human, trop humain, et les debuts de la reforme de la philosophie, Celine ed. Denat and Patrick Wotling (Éditions et presses de l’université de Reims, 2017), 219–43; “Nietzsche and Epicurus,” in Nietzsche and the Philosophers, ed. Mark Conard (Routledge, 2017), 121–45; “Nietzsche on Enlightenment and Fanaticism: On the Middle Writings,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas (Routledge, 2018), 11–27; “Questions of the Subject in Nietzsche and Foucault: A Reading of ‘Dawn’,” in Nietzsche and Subjectivity, ed. J. Constancio (Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 411–35; “The Need for Small Doses: Nietzsche, Fanaticism, and Epicureanism,” in Aurore: un tournant dans l’oeuvre de Nietzsche, ed. Celine Denat and Patrick Wotling (Éditions et presses de l’université de Reims, 2015), 193–225; “Care of Self in Dawn: On Nietzsche’s Resistance to Bio-political Modernity,” in Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, ed. Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker (Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 269–86; Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).

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­Acknowledgment

Rebecca Bamford thanks the Department of Philosophy & Political Science and the College of Arts and Sciences, Quinnipiac University, for research funding. She also thanks colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare, East London Campus, for research encouragement. She is grateful to her coauthor, Keith Ansell-Pearson and all of the editorial team at Wiley-Blackwell for their patience and encouragement, particularly during her recovery from a serious injury, which delayed completion of this manuscript. She thanks Keith and other scholars for helpful discussions, including Christa Acampora, Mark Alfano, Jessica Berry, Paul Bishop, Daniel Blue, Dan Conway, Christine Daigle, Christian Emden, Larry Hatab, Anthony Jensen, Robert Guay, John Hacker-Wright, Paul Katsafanas, Manuel Knoll, Paul Loeb, Nick Martin, Allison Merrick, Matthew Meyer, Michael McNeal, Katrina Mitcheson, Martine Prange, Carl Sachs, Stefan Sorgner, and Barry Stocker. She thanks Simon Stratford for everything. Finally, Rebecca Bamford is grateful to several journals and presses for generous permission to use material that has been adapted and reworked in this book, which was first published with them. “Dawn” appeared in Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche ed. Paul Katsafanas, 25–40 (Routledge, 2018), and aspects of the argument there informs parts of Chapters 2 and 4. “‘Moraline-Acid-Free’ Virtue: The Case of Free Death” was published in the Journal of Value Inquiry 49.3 (2015): 437–51, and part of its argument informs part of Chapter 8. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism” was published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47.1 (2016): 9–29, © The Pennsylvania State University Press. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press, and a revised and adapted version of parts of its argument informs parts of Chapters 2, 4, and 5. “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn” was published in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford, 85–109 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), and a revised and adapted version of its argument informs part of Chapter 6. “Mood and Aaphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign against Morality” was published in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25 (2014): 55–76, and a revised version of the argument developed there informs parts of Chapters 2 and 4. “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination in Dawn §206” was published in: Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll (eds.), Nietzsche’s Political Philosophy, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2014, 59-76, and parts of its argument have been revised and adapted to inform Chapter 9. All the previously published material we have drawn upon for this book has been reworked and finessed for its purposes, and researching and writing the book has been a genuinely collaborative effort. Both authors wish to express their deep gratitude to Dr. Carol Diethe for her excellent translation work on Nietzsche’s letters that were especially prepared with her for inclusion as the Appendix to this book, and to Richard Ansell-Pearson for his excellent assistance with indexing. We also thank the anonymous readers for the press for their helpful suggestions.

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Editions of Nietzsche’s Writings Used with Abbreviations AC AOM BGE BT D EH GM GS HH HH II KGB KGW KSA

KSB

The Anti-Christ, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Assorted Opinions and Maxims in Human, All Too Human, volume II, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 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, volume one, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Human, All Too Human, volume two, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and NewYork: Walter de Gruyter, 1981). Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–). Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin and New York/Munich: dtv and Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77 and 1998). Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (in 8 volumes) (Berlin and New York/Munich: dtv and Walter de Gruyter, 1975–84).

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Editions of Nietzsche’s Writings Used with Abbreviations

PT

Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979). PTAG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington DC: Regnery Press, 1962). PP The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. and ed. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). TI Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). TSZ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Middlesex: Penguin: 1969). UO I David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). UO II Unfashionable Observations. On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). UO III Unfashionable Observations. Schopenhauer as Educator, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). UO IV Unfashionable Observations. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). WP The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968). WS The Wanderer and His Shadow, in HH II. Note: References in the text to Nietzsche’s writings are to section and aphorism numbers, unless stated otherwise.

1

Introduction Many of Nietzsche’s texts, particularly those that form part of his later writings, have received significant individual attention within English-speaking Nietzsche studies. Beyond Good and Evil is the focus of two studies, one by Christa Davis Acampora and Keith Ansell-Pearson, and the other by Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick.1 Significant scholarly attention has also been given to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the form of monograph-length studies of this text by Laurence Lampert, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Paul S. Loeb.2 And four ­separate book-length studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, written by Daniel Conway, Lawrence Hatab, Christopher Janaway, and David Owen, were published between 2006 and 2008, along with an issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies devoted to these works.3 The same is not true of Dawn. Ruth Abbey, Paul Franco, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Matthew Meyer, have all written monographlength studies on Nietzsche’s middle writings.4 Yet their investigations examine Dawn as part of a group of Nietzsche’s texts focused on the theme of the free spirit  —  Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science  —  rather than examining Dawn as an individual work. While Jonathan R. Cohen has written a book-length study that focuses on a single text from the middle writings, namely Human, All Too Human, and Kathleen M. Higgins, Monika M. Langer, and Michael Ure have written book-length analyses of The Gay Science, a study of Dawn has been missing from the available scholarly literature in English.5 Although a worthwhile line by line commentary on Dawn by Jochen Schmidt was published in German in 2015, our project here is the first book-length study in Anglophone Nietzsche studies that focuses solely on providing critical engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophical project in Dawn.6 As an individual work, Dawn has been mostly neglected by Nietzsche studies; however, simply filling a gap in the available literature is not our primary reason for undertaking this project. Our main aim is to provide a sustained analysis of Dawn as a distinct, internally coherent, Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Nietzsche’s Dawn

philosophical project. Rather than treating this text as being no more than a precursor to Nietzsche’s later writings, or a mere elaboration on themes from his earlier middle writings, we claim that Dawn itself is a significant work that makes a distinctive contribution to Nietzsche’s philosophy. While we do trace out important connections and significant disjunctions between Dawn and Nietzsche’s earlier and later works in the chapters that follow, our aim throughout is to show why Dawn is significant and innovative in its own right. Unlike others of Nietzsche’s texts, Dawn is not focused on a master concept such as “will to power” or “eternal recurrence” or the “superhuman [Übermensch].” Instead, as we show, Dawn is genuinely exploratory and experimental, and we contend that the text is worthwhile because of this dimension. It means that Nietzsche’s text is completely free of unnecessary metaphysical baggage and there is no risk of him doing what he rightly criticizes Schopenhauer of doing with his doctrine of the will to life, namely, indulging in the philosopher’s rage for generalization, as that always proves to be a disaster for science (AOM 5). We argue that Nietzsche’s core critical innovations in Dawn are in identifying why customary morality (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) (D 9) is a significant problem for humanity, and in developing a sustained critique of this form of morality in order to motivate our critical re-engagement with the ethical.7 In Dawn, Nietzsche attacks the view that everything that exists has a connection with morality and thus a moral significance can be projected onto the world (D 3, 90, 100, 197, 563). He voices an opposition to both “picturesque morality” (D 141) and “petty bourgeois morality” (D 146), and speaks of his own “audacious morality” (verwegenen Moralität) (D 432). With regards to the modern prejudice, which is one of the main foci of his polemic in the book, here there is the presumption that we know “what actually constitutes morality”: It seems to do every single person good these days to hear that society is on the road to adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng and that the individual’s happiness as well as his sacrifice consist in feeling himself to be a useful member of the whole (D 132) As Nietzsche sees it, then, a particular modern emphasis is on defining the moral in terms of the sympathetic affects and compassion (Mitleid). We can, he thinks, explain the modern in terms of a movement toward managing more cheaply, safely, and uniformly individuals in terms of “large bodies and their limbs.” This, he says, is “the basic moral current of our age”: “Everything that in some way supports both this drive to form bodies and limbs and its abetting drives is felt to be good” (D 132). And, as Nietzsche points out, philosophers have not been immune to this modern emphasis; the “boundless ambition” and “jubilation” at being what Nietzsche calls “the unriddler of the world” have been “the stuff of the thinker’s dreams” because, in the context of

Introduction

c­ ustomary morality, ­philosophy has become “a sort of supreme struggle for the tyrannical rulership of  the spirit” (D 547). What this means is that the scope of Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality is not limited to morality: it involves inquiry itself. As he writes, “the quest for knowledge, by and large, has been held back by the moral narrow-mindedness of its disciples”; he ­suggests that “in the future it must be pursued with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling” and that the question, “‘What do I matter?’ stands over the door of the future thinker.” (D 547). What we take Nietzsche to be calling into question is morality that is grounded in dogmatic and uncritical obedience to moral norms that have become deeply embedded in and expressed through social customs, feelings, and actions. This carries harmful consequences for individuals and for social groups, since the demand for obedience inhibits investigating and understanding of oneself and the world. Yet Nietzsche does affirm the possibility of the ethical, even while he calls customary morality into question.8 This distinction between a problematic morality that is based on obedience to moral norms, and the possibility of an ethics that admits of unbounded inquiry into oneself and the world, is also found in others of his middle writings, for instance in his call for the practice of “continual selfcommand and self-overcoming … in great things and in the smallest” (WS 45; 212). In Dawn, we suggest, Nietzsche is particularly concerned to address the unhealthy effects of obedience to customary morality and the way in which it limits human flourishing, including human intellectual flourishing. He points out, for example, that we need to develop “new physicians of the soul” who will expose the “scandalous quackery” with which humanity has been treating its “diseases of the soul” (D 52). According to Nietzsche, the problem is that we have mistaken “consolations” for “remedies”; “the human being’s greatest disease,” he asserts, has grown out of the battle to treat its diseases, and the “apparent remedies” for our suffering have produced something “much worse than what they were supposed to eliminate” (D 52). The emphasis that Nietzsche places on an experimental morality (D 453; see also WP 260) in which one gives oneself a goal should not be seen as something simply idiosyncratic or even self-promoting. As Richard Schacht has noted, indifference to oneself, rather than preoccupation with oneself in the narrow bourgeois sense, along with hardness toward oneself for the sake of goals that go beyond one’s own limited existence, are the key features of spiritual superiority for Nietzsche.9 The ethics that Nietzsche posits for the future therefore might best be described as “supra-individualistic,” even if it is specific individuals who practice the experimental life and lead the way by offering themselves and their lives as sacrifices to knowledge (D 146). Here the goal is a new “plowshare” of potential universal benefit and enrichment that can “cleave the ground, rendering it fruitful for all,” leading to a strengthening and elevation of the human feeling of power (D 146).10

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Nietzsche’s Dawn

On the one hand, in Dawn, Nietzsche claims that we live in a “moral interregnum,” in which there is a need to construct anew the laws of life and action; he suggests that the necessary reconstruction will be inspired by the sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology, and solitude that will provide the foundation stone for our positing of new ideals, if not the ideals themselves (D 453). On the other hand, Nietzsche points out that once we become “free of morality” — as a result of our minds becoming less and less narrow and inhibited by customary morality — then morality, in the sense of what has become “inherited, handed down, instinctual acting in accordance with so-called moral feelings,” will decline. The individual virtues (moderation, justice, repose of the soul, etc.) may well continue to be esteemed in a revitalized ethics, but for different reasons than would be given from a customary moral perspective; virtues will have a vital role to play in ethical training and learning the “art of living.” While we contend that Nietzsche’s project in Dawn focuses on addressing the presumptions and prejudices of customary morality, we also discuss other important dimensions to Dawn that grow out of this grounding concern, such as Nietzsche’s thinking on the passion of knowledge and the value that the suffering of the infirm can bring to knowing (e.g. D 114), his exploration of drive psychology and subjectivity (e.g. D 109, 501), of the effect of language upon human life (D 47, 115), and his engagements with Christianity (D 58, 76, 89, 321), with human existence and its relation to death and dying (D 33–36, 211), and with the political (e.g. D 174, 204, 206). Moreover, as we show, many of the aphorisms that make up book five of Dawn are ones that Nietzsche writes for the purposes of encouraging his readers to cultivate the pleasures of learning and knowing, which aim to foster philosophical meditation and contemplation. We trace out these other important concerns, and examine their connection to Nietzsche’s wider thinking in Dawn. We also explore some of the ways in which developing a better understanding of Dawn as an independent project may help to shed light on problems within Nietzsche scholarship, and may prove worthwhile to philosophy more broadly. One of the most significant challenges to understanding the philosophical contribution that Nietzsche makes in Dawn lies with understanding its specific place and role within the complexity of Nietzsche’s body of writings. Paul S. Loeb has pointed out that while “scholars usually take it for granted that a philosopher’s later thinking supersedes his earlier thinking,” things are more complicated in Nietzsche’s case.11 According to Loeb, Nietzsche privileges Thus Spoke Zarathustra over later works such as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals (EH Books BGE), as well as privileging it over earlier works such as Dawn.12 A further wrinkle of the complication that Loeb points out in the case of understanding Zarathustra’s significance is an issue of content: like his Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s middle writings each have distinct areas of contribution and purpose, as do his post-1886 writings. Nietzsche himself provided a helpful clarification of

Introduction

this issue in his philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo. There, Nietzsche divides his main task in the works that he completed between 1878 and 1888 into two parts: first, an “affirmative” or “Yes-saying part,” and second, a “No-saying” part (EH Books BGE).13 In the works that he completed between 1878 and 1882, which are often referred to as his middle writings, Nietzsche focused on developing the “Yes-saying part” of his task (EH Books BGE). However, in his writings from 1886 onwards, which includes Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche’s focus was redirected toward what he called the “No-saying” and “No-doing” part of his task, which engaged him in pursuit of a transvaluation of all values (EH Books BGE).14 And, as Loeb has argued, Zarathustra occupies a distinct place within Nietzsche’s works.15 Completed between 1882 and 1885, Nietzsche says that, in Zarathustra, the “Yes-saying part of my task had been solved” (EH Books BGE).16 While it forms the beginning of his campaign against morality, and thus might at first glance appear to be No-saying, it is clear that Dawn should be understood as a part of the Yes-saying aspect of Nietzsche’s task.17 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself specifically describes Dawn as an “affirmative book” — affirmative not least because it affirms what has previously been forbidden, despised, or accursed (EH III “Daybreak” 1). Nietzsche further suggests that the text endeavors to restore to “evil things” a good conscience and the “exalted right and privilege to exist” (EH III “Daybreak” 1). Our analysis examines the extent to which Nietzsche’s claim for Dawn as a positive, Yes-saying, book, and his claim that the text essentially transvalues what customary morality deems to be evil, is borne out in the earlier text of Dawn itself. The challenge of understanding the philosophical contribution that Dawn makes is further complicated by Nietzsche’s writing styles: he combines innovative deployment of aphorism and punctuation with use of multiple voices or characters, and a range of rhetorical devices. Thus, for careful readers of Dawn, in addition to the question of what Nietzsche is saying, his approach demands that we ask additional questions of the texts, such as who is speaking, to whom, when, and from which perspective. As Tracy Strong has pointed out, in 1882, at the end of his period of focused work on the Yes-saying part of his task, Nietzsche presented ten principles of style to Lou Salomé under the title, “The Doctrine of Style.”18 In this piece, Nietzsche’s fourth principle of style reads, “Because many of the means of those who speak [Vortragenden] are missing to those who write, the person who writes must have an overall highly developed expressive ability to present speech as a model: the presentation of that which is written must necessarily turn out as much paler.”19 In presenting our account of Dawn as a coherent philosophical project, we also aim to clarify why the text is comprised of a collection of aphorisms written in a diverse range of styles. We seek to do justice to Nietzsche’s unique modes of philosophizing, where he often approaches topics from oblique angles and with enigmatic perspectives. It is Nietzsche the

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Nietzsche’s Dawn

extraordinary, philosophically suggestive, writer that especially interests us and that characterizes so much of the philosophizing that we encounter in Dawn. We find wisdom in Milan Kundera’s appreciation of Nietzsche, and that he provides a more superior insight than Iris Murdoch’s view that Nietzsche is a great writer but not a philosopher, when Kundera claims that he brings philosophy closer to the novel and in terms of an immense broadening of theme: “the barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher’s thought.”20 The original text of Dawn consists of five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms. The Preface added in 1886 includes an additional five aphorisms. Taken together, the aphorisms incorporate a range of writing styles, including fictionalized ­dialogue, psychological observation, humor, and logical argument. Nietzsche is explicit about his effort to ensure that his writing provokes his readers; for example, in Ecce Homo, he characterizes his readers as “guinea pigs who illustrate for me different reactions to my writings  —  different in a very instructive manner” (EH III 3).21 We think that three points about the form of the book are particularly important in this respect. First, the use of diverse styles within the aphorisms, as well as the use of aphorism itself, is a key component of the book, rather than accidental. Second, and relatedly, the strategic purpose of Dawn’s aphoristic construction is to engage and provoke the reader’s feelings, as well as their intellectual faculties; as Mark Alfano has recently claimed in his analysis of Nietzsche as an exemplarist virtue theorist, an encounter with an exemplar may prompt feelings of respect, pride, and emulation, or may prompt feelings of disgust or contempt and indicate what to avoid.22 For example, Nietzsche discusses four “supreme exemplars” — “Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon,” along with Lord Byron — whose impulse to action is, he suggests, at root a flight “from oneself” (D 549).23 Even beyond exemplars, we may find diverse affects provoked in ourselves through Nietzsche’s writing, particularly with regard to the case of our moral feelings; “we must learn to think differently,” he claims, “in order finally, perhaps very late, to feel differently” (D 103). Nietzsche’s point is that since errors drive moral judgments, while we cannot deny that people do experience feelings of morality or immorality, we can challenge why people feel moral or immoral in specific contexts (D 103). Third, the openness of aphorism to interpretation is not an objection to the project that Nietzsche undertakes in the book. It has already been established that Nietzsche deploys a range of writing styles in order to achieve his philosophical objectives.24 Our contention is that Nietzsche’s use of aphorism supports his effort to ground his critique of customary morality in the affects as well as in reason. Our first chapter examines how Nietzsche’s project in Human, All Too Human sets the scene for him to commence his project in Dawn. We consider how

Introduction

Nietzsche explores a new and modest pathway for humanity and its future ­development in the volumes comprising Human, All Too Human. As part of this, we consider Nietzsche’s commitment to science and in particular, to the pathos of truth-seeking, his deployment of “aphoristic” style, his break with Schopenhauer, and his skepticism, in each case considering how his thinking in the earlier writings supports his work in Dawn. In Chapter 2, we examine why Nietzsche’s campaign in Dawn is to set out an effective challenge a particular form of morality, customary morality. The significance and power of this form of morality on individual and social behavior and cultural development and innovation is immense, and underappreciated. Nietzsche’s key innovation is to identify this, to assess the scope of the problem that customary morality presents, and to provide a means of responding to it. As we argue, customary morality, according to Nietzsche, is harmful because it limits our capacity for flourishing and development, and because it also limits our capacity for inquiry, thus further hampering our capacity to investigate, and respond to, our existential situation. The presuppositions on which customary morality is based make it very difficult for us to question it, as in doing so it becomes incumbent upon us to question those foundational moral presuppositions as well. Raising and responding to critical questions about what we call “morality” is fundamental work in philosophy — but at the same time, undertaking this work is psychologically taxing, as well as socially discouraged, including within many parts of philosophy today. The challenge that Nietzsche presents to us in Dawn is not only a call to arms for humanity to explore his campaign against a system of ethics, and to participate as far as they can in it. He also prompts us to challenge limits that our current conception of morality places on our philosophical and other scholarly inquiries and scientific investigations, and indeed on our way of living. To properly understand and account for this challenge, in Chapter 3, we further extend and support our analysis of Nietzsche’s initiation of his campaign against morality by examining how the ethic of compassion counts as one of the chief legacies of the history of Christianity, and by considering how the campaign against morality prompts and demands our critical engagement with Christianity, and with religion more generally. As we go on to discuss in Chapter 4, critical engagement with compassion is particularly pressing for Nietzsche’s project in Dawn. Compassion is often treated as a fundamental moral value; Nietzsche’s critical engagement with compassion appears to be highly immoral to us, if his critique is assessed from the perspective of customary morality. The challenge, we suggest, is to understand Nietzsche as critical of the moral status quo, while open to seeking fresh ethical insight and, in particular, the development of new ethical agents. He identifies an ethic of compassion as fundamentally flawed given its basis in customary morality, and in contrast, he envisages new possible ethical agents who are self-legislators, and who are capable of creating new values and of punishing themselves should they break their own ethical laws.

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Nietzsche’s Dawn

Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality and of an ethic of compassion, we ­suggest, also opens up the possibility of a novel account of ethical imagination. As we argue, Nietzsche’s analysis of compassion in Dawn owes much to his thinking on drive psychology; we examine Nietzsche’s drive psychology in greater depth in Chapter 6. In Chapter  5, we examine the consequences of Nietzsche’s campaign against morality for the pursuit of knowledge in philosophy, and specifically, on values and methods of the German Enlightenment. As we show, Nietzsche had to balance his inheritance of the German Enlightenment with his call for affirmation of the passion for knowledge; in order to do so, he had to develop a new sense of enlightenment in which knowledge-seeking is tied to overturning old values and creating new ones, and which therefore involves knowledge-seekers in an experimental, risky, enterprise of inquiry. Since Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality involves challenging the limits that our current conception of morality places on inquiry, his campaign also prompts us to analyze our understanding of the subject of the inquirer — and indeed our own self-understanding. In Chapter 6, we explore Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity, in order to assess the extent to which knowledge or self-knowledge is possible for Nietzsche in Dawn. We argue that the self that Nietzsche envisages as part of his account of subjectivity in Dawn is a composite of experiences that counts as an emerging product of the conditions of natural or material subjectivity, in which subjects are in a constant state of change and development. We propose that this approach to subjectivity best explains how a Nietzschean subject as envisaged in Dawn can plausibly be said to engage in care of the self, and how such selves can be cultivated, (i) individually and (ii) on a species level. In Chapter 7, we support this account of the Nietzschean subject in Dawn by considering how care of the self is a fundamental part of the task of experimenting with what the ethical, when freed from the constraints of moral fanaticism, might mean. As we show, Nietzsche provides a sustained critique of moral fanaticism that also carries important implications for contemporary analysis of security. Another key constraint that customary morality places on inquiry is a limit on how to respond to the fact of death. As we discuss in Chapter 8, humans have no direct first-person experience of death itself; when combined with culturally inherited beliefs surrounding this phenomenon, death very often appears to us to be the most terrible of all possible punishments, which means that salvation from death in the form of an afterlife (ideally one in which we are not also punished) therefore seems highly attractive to us. We argue that Nietzsche deploys Epicurean thinking strategically, in order to undermine this intense fear of punishment and of death conceived of as the most terrible punishment. We acknowledge that Nietzsche is not primarily concerned with the political in Dawn. Nonetheless, we think it would be a mistake to assume that the political is

Introduction

entirely absent from Nietzsche’s thinking in this text. In Chapter 9, we therefore examine the remarks that Nietzsche does make with respect to the political in Dawn, focusing on his concern with the effects on humanity of capital and industrial development. We also provide an assessment of the political consequences that Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality entails. As we suggest, Nietzsche’s remarks in the text add up to a proposal of a minimal politics: specifically, a form of political therapy that is grounded in migration. Unlike accounts that have tended to emphasize only Nietzsche’s individual thinking on freedom and the political, our account places greater emphasis on Nietzsche’s attention to human species freedom and the political consequences arising from treating ­species freedom as a political value. Nietzsche’s political therapy fits with his broader, and more pressing, challenge to customary morality. We also draw attention to some of the concerns that arise with treating migration as a form of political therapy, such as colonial thinking.25 There has been some recent and innovative discussion of Nietzsche’s thinking on futurity, and on Nietzsche’s status as a philosopher of the future.26 In Chapter 10, we examine Nietzsche’s engagement with this theme in the fifth and final book of Dawn. We discuss how the final aphorism of the text, 575, presents a vivid and positive vision of humanity as future-oriented and self-cultivating. As we suggest, this vision has the potential to become a real possibility if humanity could indeed develop the capacity to free itself from the constraints of customary morality. Nietzsche’s vision of a future-oriented and self-creating humanity is supported, we propose, by the preceding aphorisms in book five of the Dawn. Second, we explore how Nietzsche’s vision of humanity is taken up once again by him in his later, No-saying, writings. In tracing out this comparison between Dawn and Nietzsche’s later texts, we show how Dawn may shed light on some key debates in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. The focus on custom, health, and futurity that we suggest is a hallmark of Dawn was personal for Nietzsche, as well as conceptual. Nietzsche’s letters from 1879 and 1880 suggest that his new project was influenced by his efforts to find a way of living that mitigated his ongoing health problems.27 In a letter to his mother, Nietzsche commented that a more simple and natural way of living, involving physically tiring labor and very limited psychological exertion, would improve his health (July 21, 1879; KSB 5, 427–28). A few months later, he wrote to Heinrich Köselitz of improvements in his headaches and some of his other symptoms, which he thought had been achieved by minimizing his intellectual work (October 5, 1879; KSB 5, 450–52). And early in 1880, in a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, Nietzsche remarked that while his health problems were almost enough to make him welcome the prospect of death, he found real satisfaction in producing work that outlined a way to achieve peace of mind (January 14, 1880; KSB 5, 4–6). Nietzsche discussed the connections he had been exploring between character, virtue, moral

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emotions, psychology, and health, and characterized the aphorisms he had been constructing as akin to digging in a moral mine (July 18, 1880; KSB 6, 28–30). He intimated that while working on Dawn, he had recently been reading Prosper Mérimée’s The Etruscan Vase; the tone, style, psychological focus, and in particular, the careful descriptions of the health and physiology of the characters in The Etruscan Vase, are reflected in Dawn.28 In an appendix to this volume, we include new translations of Nietzsche’s letters of 1881 by Carol Diethe. These letters also attest to Nietzsche’s personal, as well as philosophical, concern with health and futurity as Dawn was in the process of being completed and published. In these 1881 letters, Nietzsche reports feeling “so wracked by continual pain” that he “can no longer give an opinion” on the worthiness of Dawn for publication, and even considers whether he “might finally be allowed to throw off the whole burden” since he is now the same age as his father was when he died. Yet Nietzsche’s ambition was clearly invested in Dawn: “This is the book that will probably be clamped to my name,” he wrote to Franz Overbeck (March 18, 1881). To Gast, he intimates that the “book will at least not have a damaging effect — except that I myself will have to do penance for it! For I give not just the highly moral but also all those decent and plucky people an opportunity to enjoy their morality and pluck at my expense” (March 20, 1881). To his publisher Schmeitzner, he notes, “The content of my book is so important! It is a question of honour not to let it fall short in any way, so that it enters the world worthy and immaculate.” (March 13, 1881). Nietzsche admits his good cheer with regard to the social risks and benefits of his project: “I want to see how I get away with it; after all, I know better than everyone else can that everything is still to be done” (March 20, 1881). On April 10, 1881, he wrote to his sister Elisabeth that, “This is a decisive book, I cannot think about it without being greatly moved.” Since he could not stop her reading Dawn, Nietzsche suggested to Elisabeth that she should read the book “from an entirely personal point of view” and that she should take particular care to read the fifth book, “where much is written between the lines” (mid-July 1881). And he asked his friend Gast to take his copy of Dawn to the lido, “read it as a whole and try to make it into a whole for yourself — in other words, a passionate state” (June 23, 1881). In these remarks, we see a personal source of inspiration for the core points that Nietzsche develops throughout the text of Dawn: that customary morality is worthy of criticism, that the risk of challenging this form of morality is considerable, yet potentially highly worthwhile — and that readers have an important role to play in Nietzsche’s engagement in his campaign against morality. Our hope in writing this book is to clarify these core points, examine what support for them exists, and in so doing, to reintroduce Dawn to contemporary scholarship as a fascinating and worthwhile piece of philosophy, that is of continuing relevance to our efforts to respond to philosophical problems.

Introduction

Notes 1 Christa D. Acampora and Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2 Laurence Lampert. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Yale University Press, 1986); Robert Gooding-Williams. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Paul S Loeb. The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reaching Nietzsche’s “Genealogy” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Owen, Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” (Acumen 2007); Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2008); Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 5 Jonathan R. Cohen, Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s Human, All-too-Human (London: Humanity Books, 2010); Kathleen M. Higgins, Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Monika M. Langer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Dancing Coherence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 6 Jochen Schmidt, “Kommentar zu Nietzsches Morgenröthe,” in Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015). 7 Simon Robertson and Brittain Smith have both pointed out various translation issues with the phrase “Sittlichkeit der Sitte” that affect philosophical analysis of this concept. Robertson suggests “customary life” or “customary ethic” as alternatives to “morality of custom.” See Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110, 83. Smith notes a range of possibilities for translating “Sitte” including custom, practice, habit, etiquette, and propriety, and opts to use “morality of custom” with the singular “Sitte” translated as

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8

9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16 17

“custom,” and the plural “Sitten” translated as “mores,” with the exception of D 9, in which he renders “Sitte” as “mores.” See Smith’s note in Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 291. Paul Franco uses “customary morality” and “morality of custom” interchangeably in Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 59, 64, 199. We have chosen to use ‘customary morality’ throughout. In Dawn, as we will show, Nietzsche is explicitly ­concerned with the effects of a particular form of morality, not with the whole of the ethical. Moreover, as Brian Leiter and Maudemarie Clark have pointed out, Nietzsche’s engagement with customary morality is not limited to beliefs based on superstition in early societies; it includes the philosophical–moral sensibilities of later societies, which are based on moral feelings (D 18, 99, 103). See Clark and Leiter, “Introduction,” in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxxii–iii. See Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25, 138. Solomon points out that Nietzsche’s thinking on morality is suggested in his middle writings, and that the work in the middle writings incorporates a theory of virtue, but that Nietzsche’s thinking on the ethical is spelled out in later texts such as BGE and GM. See Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 469–70. Earlier in Dawn, Nietzsche points out the pleasure and virtue in cruelty that stems from the sadist’s enjoyment of the feeling of power as forming part of customary morality (D 18). Franco points out that the first mention of power [Machtgefuhl] in Dawn here is in the context of customary morality. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 65. This later aphorism (D 146) indicates that for Nietzsche, power is not limited to the confines of customary morality. Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 207. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 207. Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Thought, Life, and Work,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 15. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (London: Yale University Press, 2001), 2. Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” 15. See also Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 65. See Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 2. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 65.

Introduction

18 Tracy B. Strong. 2013. “In Defense of Rhetoric: Or How Hard It Is to Take a Writer Seriously: The Case of Nietzsche.” Political Theory 41(4): 507–32, 514. 19 WKG VII-1, 34; Strong, “In Defense of Rhetoric,” 507–32, 514. 20 Milan Kundera, “Works and Spiders,” in Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 147–79; 175–76; Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,” in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), 3–31, 4. 21 See Rebecca Bamford, “Ecce Homo: Philosophical Autobiography in the Flesh,” in Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo,” ed. Duncan Large and Nicholas Martin (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, forthcoming), for a more complete discussion of style in Ecce Homo. 22 Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 87–88. 23 Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology, 111–12. 24 See Richard White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 150–73; Jill Marsden, “Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22–37; Christa Davis Acampora, “Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 314–33. 25 On Nietzsche and colonialism, see e.g. Rebecca Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination in Dawn §206,” in Nietzsche’s Political Philosophy, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2014), 59–76. 26 Paul S. Loeb. 2018. “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49(2): 253–59; Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 241. 27 These examples are also discussed in Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul C. Bishop, (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House]), 139–57. 28 For a more detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s letters as he worked on the original aphorisms of Dawn, and key literary influences upon him at this time, see Bamford, “Daybreak,” 139–57.

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1 From Human, All Too Human to Dawn In this initial chapter, we consider how and why Nietzsche makes the move from his investigations in the three texts that comprise Human, All Too Human: Human, All Too Human, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (in HH II), and The Wanderer and His Shadow (in HH II). The initial publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878 makes it evident that Nietzsche’s thinking undergoes a truly fundamental turn; from this point on in his work he commits himself to science [Wissenschaft] and as part of this, to the promotion of the pathos of the search for truth and knowledge. Nietzsche makes an important distinction between “the pathos of possessing truth,” and the “gentler and less noisy pathos of seeking truth”; he prefers the latter since it focuses on “learning and examining anew” (HH 633).1 He contends that opinions grow out of passions, then stiffen into convictions through the “inertia of the spirit”; however, he suggests, a person whose “spirit is free and relentlessly alive” could, he thinks, resist such inertia through “continual change” (HH 637). That Nietzsche’s thinking over the two decades of his productive life underwent considerable and complex intellectual development is something Nietzsche took pride in, and to which he accorded significant value. As with his thinking on the pathos of seeking truth, such development is not only rational but affective. As he tells his readers in Ecce Homo his text of 1878, Human, All Too Human, represents the “monument to a crisis” (EH, “Human, all too Human”). In Dawn, he makes it clear that he prizes certain thinkers over others, such as Spinoza, Pascal, Rousseau, and Goethe over Kant and Schopenhauer, because their work testifies to what he calls “a passionate history of the soul” marked by crises and catastrophes. In the case of Kant, we have a thinker whose work is little more than an involuntary biography not of the soul, but of the head, while in Schopenhauer’s case there is  “the description and mirroring of a character”, albeit one characterized by an interesting vehement ugliness (D 481). In neither Kant nor Schopenhauer do Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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we find evidence of “the passion of thinking,” and in Schopenhauer’s case we can discern a distinct lack of “development” and “history” (D 481; see also AOM 271). To properly appreciate the nature of Nietzsche’s turn, we need to take into account two changes with respect to the commitments he displays in his early writings (1872–76). First, in an unpublished note of 1877 Nietzsche states that he had abandoned “the metaphysical-artistic views” of his early writings (KSA 8, 23 [159]). In particular, he wants to overcome what he calls his “deliberate holding on to illusion” as the foundation of culture (KSA 10, 16 [23]).2 Nietzsche is seeking to overcome what he calls “Jesuitism,” a form of casuistry that he located in his predecessors in German philosophy and himself. In the words of one commentator, this means not allowing the uncovering of the limits of human knowledge to be conducted in such a way that the task also gives free rein to metaphysics and the metaphysical need.3 Second, an important move that now takes place in Nietzsche’s thinking concerns the antique philosophers and their discovery of “possibilities of life.” He had advanced this appreciation of the original pre-­ Platonic philosophers in Philosophy in the Tragic of the Greeks (PTAG Preface), and he returns to the theme in Human, All Too Human in an aphorism entitled “The tyrants of the spirit” (HH 261). Nietzsche now proclaims that the time of these tyrants of the spirit is over. What remains is the need for some form of mastery [Herrschaft], but this is now to take place in the hands of oligarchs of the spirit. There is a need for free spirits appropriate to the requirements of the modern age and these spirits aim to discover new possibilities of life. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche is concerned with the fate of humanity as it endeavors to transform itself into a knowing and wise animal, stating firmly that there is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the welfare of humanity (HH 517), and willing to acknowledge that the “tree of knowledge” is not one with the “tree of life” and so there is only, and echoing Byron’s Manfred, the sorrow of knowledge (HH 109). Here Nietzsche accepts modern free spirits cannot seriously entertain any romantic return to the past, and an accommodation with any form of Christianity has to be completely ruled out. For the time being, then, we may well have to endure a condition of melancholy. This is a somewhat different position with respect to the cause of knowledge that Nietzsche will come to evince in Dawn with its conception of “the passion of knowledge” and that then provides the impetus for a joyful science. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche is most keen to aid humanity as it now charts a new course in its historical becoming, coming to terms with the insights of the new evolutionary naturalisms of the nineteenth century and appreciating the need for the small, unpretentious findings of science over the “bold insanities” of metaphysics (GS Preface). Nietzsche pins his hope for the future on these developments in culture without reliance on metaphysics and the errors of religion, as well as forsaking the harshness and

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

v­ iolence that have hitherto been the means for binding one person or one ­people powerfully to another. It is the task of a new humanity to “take in hand the earthly governance of all humanity,” and its “‘omniscience’ must watch over the future destiny of culture with a sharp eye” (HH 245). This requires at the same time that we do justice to the past and ­tradition, for example, by recognizing that the activity of the fiercest forces were “necessary so that a milder cultural dispensation could later establish itself.” This means recognizing that those fearsome energies we now call “evil” have been in history “the cyclopean architects and builders of humanity” (HH 246). Of course, we can acknowledge that the whole of humanity is merely a developmental phase of a certain species of animal of quite limited duration. If human beings descended from apes, as the new science of evolution teaches us, it is quite possible that we will becomes apes again without anybody taking an interest in this comic ending. This is to say that the decline of universal world culture might one day lead to a heightened repulsiveness and bestialization of humanity — but it is “because we can envision this perspective” that “we are perhaps in a position to prevent the future from reaching such an end” (HH 247). Nietzsche insists that it is impossible to go backward, to “go back to the old,” since “we have burned our boats; all that remains is to be bold, regardless of what may result” (HH 248). It may appear that the world is becoming more chaotic every passing day or year, with the old being lost and the new seeming feebler, but we have no option but to “step forward” and move on (HH 248). Nietzsche even admits that, “Every better future that we wish upon humanity is also in many respects necessarily a worse future” (HH 239). This is because we can no longer draw on on the forces that united previous cultures, forces of consolation provided by religion and metaphysics: “What grew out of religion and in proximity to it cannot grow again if religion has been destroyed” (HH 239). Nietzsche holds that all the important truths of science need to gradually become everyday, ordinary, things. However, because it lacks the intense pleasure of what has been conquered  —  for example, the pleasures afforded by religion and metaphysics — and has taken away the consolations they offered, there arises the need in a higher culture for the dual brain. Nietzsche envisages a higher culture in which human beings have a dual brain made up of two compartments, one with which to experience science and one to experience non-science (HH 251). He stipulates this as a requirement of health in which the realm of science and the realm of metaphysics, religion, and art will be closed off from one another with one unable to confuse the other. One region will be the source of power [Kraft] and of pleasure, the other will serve as a regulator. One will allow for illusions, partiality, and the passions that stimulate heat in us, while the other will avert the dangers of overheating stemming from these operations. In short, there is need of a culture that can do justice to our liking of illusion, error, and fantasy — because

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it gives us so much pleasure and a confidence in life — and the need for the true (this is now a new need in us that demands satisfaction). This is not to say that there is no pleasure to be had from knowing [Erkennen], only that it is of a peculiar and more refined kind. In knowing we become conscious of our own strength, we become victors over older conceptions and their advocates, and we feel we are distinguishing ourselves from everyone else. Nietzsche is not oblivious to the fact that there are dangers facing the development of the human intellect and spirit under modern conditions of life. Ours is an age of quickness that is fast becoming an enemy of slowness. A tremendous acceleration of life is taking place in which people more and more resemble the traveler who gets to know a land and its people only from looking out of the train window. This means we will more and more deprecate an independent and careful attitude toward knowledge [Erkenntniss]. Nietzsche thinks that the discrediting of the free spirit — the genuinely independent thinker — is already taking place with the rise of the scholar (HH 282). If the requirements of higher culture are not met, then, Nietzsche thinks, a reversal to barbarism can be predicted: the free unleashing of fantasy and a deliberate dwelling in illusion and error. It is simply a fact that truth and science cannot compete with art and religion on the plane of pleasure. Nietzsche will wrestle with this problem in the texts and notebooks of the free-spirit period. It is not that the acquisition of knowledge is completely devoid of pleasure, but compared to that offered by religion and metaphysics it is of a much soberer kind. As we shall see, to fully carry out the requirements of knowledge and make it an abiding passion, Nietzsche will appeal in Dawn to the need for courage and excessive magnanimity on the part of the free-spirited thinker. In the volumes of Human, All Too Human, then, Nietzsche is negotiating a new modest pathway for humanity and its future development. He is prudent, cautious, wise, and impressed by the new evolutionary naturalisms that serve to radically decenter the human animal from what it has taken to be its privileged position in the cosmos. We see this especially in evidence in aphorism 14 of The Wanderer and His Shadow. Here Nietzsche looks at humanity’s insignificance when viewed from the new perspectives of modern evolutionary theory and modern cosmology, with “the music of the spheres around the earth” assuming the form of a “mocking laughter of all other creatures at humans” (WS 14). Furthermore, Nietzsche notes, according to our modern astronomers, and who adopt a field of vision detached from planet earth, “the drop of life in the world is without significance for the total character of the immense ocean of becoming and passing away” (WS 14). And, finally, he concludes the aphorism by noting that the dispassionate astronomer is one who “can scarcely himself feel the earth without life in any other way than as the gleaming and floating gravesite of humanity” (WS 14).

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

­Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism In the period up to 1878, the standard form that Nietzsche adopted for his ­writings was the essay or pamphlet, in accordance with his professional training as an academic classicist. It is in the texts of the so-called middle writings that he explores both a new kind of philosophizing, inspired by the psychological observations of the French Enlightenment thinkers and his friend Paul Rée, and a new means of expressing it, equally inspired by the aphoristic works of the French moralistes. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s style is the numbered paragraph, which amounts to the essential building block of his prose style. The Nietzschean paragraph is an extraordinarily supple unit, ranging in length from a bare line or two to several pages. The number of genuine ­aphorisms in his works is relatively small; instead, most of what are called the “aphorisms” are more substantial paragraphs that exhibit a unified train of thought frequently encapsulated in a paragraph heading indicating the subject matter, and it is from these building blocks that the other, larger structures are built in more or less extended sequences. For the later Nietzsche, “the will to system” displays a lack of integrity (TI I 26); he balks at the idea of erecting the kind of philosophical edifice in which his philosophical predecessor so often delighted. His criticisms of scholarly myopia and asceticism are scathing. Above all, he wants to distinguish himself from the traditions of German academic philosophy that preceded him, which he finds lifeless and, ultimately, simply boring. He does not merely present his readers with disquisitions on philosophical topics, such as truth and knowledge, and the nature of the self, but rather dramatizes them through a series of parables, thought experiments, imagined conversations, and the like. His aim is always to energize and enliven philosophical style through an admixture of aphoristic and poetic  —  broadly speaking, “literary”  —  forms. The specificity of Nietzsche’s style lies in the fact that it occupies the ground midway between what one might call philosophy and poetry “proper.” Perhaps the most appropriate way of describing his style is with reference to its multifarious impropriety, for its lack of scholarly niceties is but the least of its provocations. His stylistic ideal is, parodying Horace, “ridendo dicere severum” (“saying what is sombre through what is laughable”), and these two modes, the sombre and the sunny, are mischievously intertwined in his philosophy, without the reader necessarily being sure which one is uppermost at any one time. His work is an unsettling provocation for both his philosophical antagonists and his readers, especially when his breath of allusion, and lack of references, the love of impropriety, and paradox, are combined with an ideal of concision, as when he declares that his ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — or does not say in a book (TI IX 51).

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The texture of Nietzsche’s work, evident in many parts of Dawn, is often very dense and he is under no illusions that he is straightforward to read. When he conjures up his perfect reader it is as a “monster of courage and curiosity,” and someone “supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer” (EH III 3). Nietzsche did not want hurried readers. In the Preface to Dawn, Nietzsche stresses that a book such as this has no hurry and that he and his book are friends of lento or slowness: Having been a philologist is not for nothing; perhaps you remain one, a teacher, in other words, of slow reading — in the long run, you end up writing slowly as well. Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps?  —  To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry” (D Preface 5) In an age of work, that is, “of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, even with every old and new book,” philology is that “venerable art” that requires that one takes one’s time, becoming still and slow: “as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but, fine, cautious work to take care and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento” (D Preface 5). It is worth noting that in addition to his distaste of the German academic mode of doing philosophy, Nietzsche also finds in German thinkers, including the likes of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and even Schopenhauer, a distinct lack of “harsh selfexamination” and of the kind that he finds in French thinkers and writers such as La Rochefoucauld and Descartes; these are thinkers in whom he finds displayed an admirable “honesty” (Rechtschaffenheit). To this day, he writes, the Germans “have never had a psychologist. But psychology is practically the yardstick of a race’s cleanliness or uncleanliness … And if you are not even cleanly, how can you be profound?” (EH “The Wagner Case” 3). When Nietzsche discusses his favorite authors and books in his middle writings, it is typically at the expense of German authors and German philosophy. Nietzsche begins to adopt the “aphoristic” style in the first text of his middle writings, Human, All Too Human, and he reveals important insights into the nature of his commitment to this style in the four aphorisms that open up chapter two of the text, HH 35–38. Indeed, Nietzsche’s initial plan was to open the book with these aphorisms. The reasons informing his change of mind with the final version of the book are not known, but these aphorisms afford an excellent insight into how he conceived what would now become his principal philosophical practice. Nietzsche’s middle writings are among the most neglected in his corpus; this is especially true of the volumes of Human, All Too Human and Dawn, and it is

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

surprising the extent to which a number of commentators on Nietzsche write about his art of the aphorism in abstraction from these texts and from the positions Nietzsche commits himself to in them. One example is Gilles Deleuze’s claim about Nietzsche’s “new image of thought”: “It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and the deepest truths live and rise up. The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not the temperate zones of the moral, methodical or moderate man.”4 Deleuze’s linkage of Nietzsche to a supposedly new image of thought completely misses the character of Nietzsche’s actual philosophical practice, including one of its main features, namely, its cold and skeptical character. Deleuze’s appreciation also ignores Nietzsche’s commitment to a new temperate culture, which he is keen to see come into being: conceived as a cool and sober mode of inquiry, the practice of philosophy can help bring this about. Deleuze’s conception of Nietzsche as a philosopher simply does not square with how Nietzsche himself conceives of the philosopher, namely as a human being who speaks “from a cool, invigorating resting place” (WS 171). Although for Nietzsche there are clearly ascents of thinking to be experience and attained  —  elevated perspectives that the philosopher reaches (a prominent theme of Dawn, and especially book five of the text) — even in his late writings, such as The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche insists that the free-spirited philosopher needs to keep their enthusiasm in bounds (AC Foreword). Nietzsche combines philosophical thinking with psychological observation in a very specific way, namely, as a way of addressing what he sees as the dangers of an overheated mind, which, for him, characterize the post-revolution European society of the nineteenth century. Philosophy for Nietzsche is now to become “historical philosophizing” (HH 1) and a “heroic-idyllic” practice (WS 295). The former teaches the need for the virtue of modesty and is needed to combat the claims of “metaphysical philosophy,” while the latter serves to attach us to the world and the earth: we are to feel we exist in the world and that the world exists in us. It is in the context of developing a program of mental reformation that Nietzsche deploys the art of the aphorism: such an art serves to slow us down and encourages us to contemplate our being in the world in fresh and beneficial ways. In the literature on Nietzsche as an aphorist the typical focus is on his debt to the French moralistes and the way in which he seeks, under their inspiration, to come up with a style of writing and thinking that is lucid, concise, and enigmatic. While important and instructive work has been done on this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophizing, what has been overlooked is the extent to which, commencing with Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche is carrying a quite fundamental program of philosophical training and education that centers on a reformation of the human mind.5 The manner in which he does this connects him in interesting and fruitful ways with ancient conceptions of the nature and tasks of philosophy, such as we find in the Epicurean school, and where the overriding aim is to combat fear and superstition

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so as to cultivate a modest being in the world on the part of the human animal. In this respect, then, his thinking is consonant with ancient practices and techniques of philosophy, and hence the positive references we find in the middle writings to the likes of Epicurus and Epictetus, both of whom are important philosophical figures for Nietzsche because they are figures, he holds in whom wisdom has assumed bodily form (AOM 224; for Nietzsche’s positive valuation of Epictetus see also AOM 386, D 131, 546). At this point, Nietzsche conceives philosophy as a practice of a sober mind that seeks to cool down a human mind prone to neurosis. Philosophy, in concert with science, has the task of tempering emotional and mental excess. Indeed, Nietzsche at this time defines the philosopher as a human being who speaks “from a cool, invigorating resting place” (WS 171). In the volumes of Human, All Too Human, and in the subsequent text, Dawn, Nietzsche favors a project of sobriety that supposes philosophical moderation in an effort to combat both human neurosis and a sentimental, self-intoxicating world view (which he associates with Rousseau).6 Nietzsche is committed to a program of intellectual reform, then, in which the chief aim is to cool down the human mind. Nietzsche’s philosophy in these middle writings is one that has specific therapeutic ambitions, one that he finds pertinent to the needs of his age. Indeed, in large part he conceives the art of the maxim in therapeutic terms. The modern age, he thinks, has forgotten the art of reflection or observation, in which it is possible to gather maxims “from the thorniest and least gratifying stretches of our lives” so as to make ourselves feel better, to give ourselves a lift and a tonic (HH 38). We can return to life revivified rather than depressed from our encounter with thorny problems, and with “presence of mind in difficult situations and amusement in tedious surroundings” (HH 38).7 There is a need, therefore, for modern spirits to learn how to derive pleasure from the art of the maxim, from its construction to its tasting. Nietzsche notes that it is virtually impossible to say whether the inquiry into the “human, all too human” will work more as a blessing than a curse to the welfare of humanity; at any rate, and for the time being, the issue is undecided. He further notes that because science, like nature, does not aim at final ends, any fruitfulness in the way of promoting the utility and welfare of humanity will be the result of science’s attaining something purposeful without having willed it. But where science is needed now, he thinks, and as part of general therapeutic practice of reflection and observation, is in cooling down the human mind. Indeed, we might see this as a fundamental component of philosophy’s practice: to aid the securement of a mind that welcomes the world as its friend by freeing the mind of fear and superstition. Nietzsche readily makes use of philosophy’s traditional virtues and practices, including the exercise of contemplation and reflection, and he will readily appeal to thinkers of the past and of a classical character. For example, in the text he

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

makes an appeal to the vita contemplativa, noting that the modern age is poor in great moralists, with the likes of Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch being little read today. The free spirit is said to exist as a “genius of meditation” and in an age where time for thinking and tranquility while thinking is lacking: “With the tremendous acceleration of life, the spirit and the eye have grown accustomed to seeing and judging partially or falsely, and everyone resembles the traveller who get to know a land and its people from the train” (HH 282). The free spirit is discredited by the scholar for having an independent attitude toward knowledge, and for lacking in his art the thoroughness and antlike diligence that characterizes the scholar’s practice. The free spirit sees the situation differently, wishing to command “from an isolated site all the scientists and scholars who have been called to arms and of showing them the paths and goals of culture” (HH 282). Here we see Nietzsche continuing to define the philosopher, as he does in his early writings such as Schopenhauer as Educator, in terms of their commitment to culture as a whole over the cause of mere scholarship: the philosopher practices philosophy as a way of life, through meditation and the vita contemplativa, but also seeks to have a transformative effect on society and the direction of the world. In Dawn, we encounter Nietzsche keen to determine what the value of the vita contemplativa is, and to indicate how it works in helping to produce the philosopher’s unique mood of serenity (see especially D 41, 440). We now wish to examine more closely the aphorisms that Nietzsche deploys at the start of book two of Human, All Too Human and that he originally conceived as opening the text. We begin by noting Nietzsche’s stress on, and commitment to, “psychological observation.” He is not, then, simply carrying our straightforward “philosophy,” one that would deal with eternal problems or timeless questions. Instead, his aim is to address the “human, all too human” sources of our religious, ethical, and metaphysical thinking. He construes “psychological observation” not only as scientific observation but as an “art”: it is both a skill we can cultivate and a mode of relating to the world we can enjoy and derive pleasure from. More than this, in practicing the art of the aphorism we elevate ourselves, or as Nietzsche puts it, “make ourselves feel better” and we “lighten the burden of life” (HH 35). To understand what he means by this we have to appreciate that he is suggesting that the practice of this art of observation is exercised in the context of finding ourselves in both “difficult situations” and “tedious surroundings” (HH 35). His aim is to return European humanity to the great masters of the psychological maxim; it is unsurprising that he refers specifically here to La Rochefoucauld and his “spiritual and artistic relatives.” Today, he finds, although there is an appreciation of these writers of maxims, it is one without real discipline or exercise: “they praise them because they cannot love them, and are quick to admire, but even quicker to run away” (HH 35). Just as the modern acceleration of life is leading to a superficial appreciation of and engagement with life, so Nietzsche finds that

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modern readers taste the maxims of the great psychologists in all too hasty fashion when the precise task is to savor the maxim and to go slowly. Nietzsche continues to adhere to these stipulations, as when, in the 1886 Preface to Dawn, he presents himself as a friend of lento. Nietzsche makes it clear in HH 36 that he considers psychological observation one of the means by which human existence [Dasein] can be “remedied,” “relieved,” and even “stimulated.” He thinks that we have new interests, new passions, and new goals to cultivate. But he now wishes to consider an “objection” to the intellectual position he is espousing on the art of psychological observation. The observation centers on an obvious concern, namely this perspective on the trials of human existence: is not the happiness of humankind best preserved by not carrying out psychological dissection? Would the interests of humanity not be best promoted by maintaining “a blind faith in the goodness of human nature” and a kind of shamefulness with respect to the “nakedness” of the human soul? Will the new psychologists not simply promote widespread skepticism and mistrust, so ridding the world of helpful beliefs, such as the belief that the world is characterized by an abundance of impersonal benevolence? Will not “psychology” only serve to diminish our belief in the human animal? In short, the question has to be considered whether or not what has helped humanity move forward in its existence on earth are “psychological error” and “general obtuseness” (HH 36). Nietzsche responds to this fundamental concern in the next aphorism, entitled “Nevertheless” (HH 37). He aims to provide a balance between the pro and the con on this issue of error and obtuseness. He is keen to promote a revival of interest in moral observation, which he sees as necessary in the present age and in which humanity cannot any longer “be spared the gruesome sight of the psychological dissecting table and its knives and forceps” (HH 37). He readily acknowledges that what he calls “the older philosophy” was not familiar with the need to inquire into the origin [Ursprung] and history [Geschichte] of the so-called moral sensations; indeed, he claims that the older philosophy evaded the tasks of such an investigation with weak excuses. Nietzsche has urgent reasons for now wishing to correct the older philosophy. Such an evasion has had dire consequences, consisting in an impoverished conception of science and a neglect of truthful and honest scientific inquiry. This would not be so lamentable if it were not for the fact that the errors of the greatest philosophers — here Nietzsche does not refer to any specific figures — have resulted in false explanations of human behavior, the erection of a “false ethics” on the basis of a poor analysis of so-called unegoistical actions, and that has led to “mythological confusion,” and ultimately “the shadows of these dismal spirits fall even upon physics and our entire world view” (HH 37). In short, until recent times, say with the advent of the French moralistes, psychological observation has been superficial, laying down “the most dangerous snares for human judgment and inference” (HH 37). Nietzsche thus calls on his

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

fellow free-spirited philosophers to engage in probing and fearless “humble work,” defying the contempt modern humankind has for it, and to persist in the labor that never tires “of piling stone upon stone, pebble upon pebble” (HH 37). It is important to note that Nietzsche is not simply aping the work of the French moralistes; he is proposing a major reform of their practice and agenda. Such work now needs to become more rigorously scientific instead of being practiced in the spirit of a “witty conquettishness” [geistreichen Gefallsucht]. If the aphoristic and psychological inquiry into “the human, all too human” is carried out in this way Nietzsche hopes that it will come to be taken much more seriously than it is at the present time by the scientific person, who understandably professes a mistrust of the genre and its apparent lack of seriousness. But note that, although Nietzsche is appealing to the scientific community in this way, he does not lose sight of his view that the new scientifically minded philosophy has a therapeutic role to play in cooling down the human mind and transforming our sense of being in the world. He concedes that the new intellectual practice of this philosophy will have consequences for humanity that are at one and the same time frightful and fruitful: it will indeed deflate human pretensions to significance, while at the same time, it will open new possibilities of life — that is, new ways of being in the world. In the final aphorism of this suite of aphorisms that guide the investigation of the book, Nietzsche acknowledges that the issue of whether psychological observation brings with it more utility or liability for human beings is currently undecided. In large part, then, what he is proposing in Human, All Too Human is an experiment: science today finds that it cannot dispense with the new observation, and to do so would amount to a retrograde step for the advancement of knowledge. Nietzsche’s enlightenment sensibilities, which become prominent at this point in his published writings, tell him that the situation cannot be otherwise if we wish to be servants of knowledge and truthfulness. Moreover, the integrity of science must be respected, and this consists in our appreciating the fact that science proceeds without a commitment to final aims; if science does end up promoting the welfare of human beings it does so without having willed it. Nietzsche thus appeals at the end this aphorism to science and philosophy to join forces so that, working in concert and supporting one another, they can serve an important critical end, namely, that of cooling down a human mind that is prone to neurosis. In the closing lines it becomes evident, if it wasn’t already, that he is advancing enlightenment modes of thinking, such as the dedication to scientific knowledge and the integrity of truth, in the specific context of an appreciation of the dangers of the modern age: shouldn’t we, the more spiritual human beings (geistigeren Menschen) of an age that is visibly catching fire in more and more places, have to grasp all available means for quenching and cooling, so that we will remain at

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least as steady, harmless, and moderate as we are now, and will thus ­perhaps become more useful at some point in serving this age as mirror and self-recollection? (HH 38) Nietzsche sees the present age as moving in the direction of a temperate zone of culture (HH 236). Here he contests Schopenhauer’s suprahistorical standpoint, the standpoint of a metaphysical philosophy, which perceives no progress in the last four millennia taking place with regard to philosophy and religion. The zone of the past, Nietzsche thinks, can be compared to a tropical zone in which violent contrasts, abrupt changes between day and night, and a reverence for everything sudden, mysterious, and terrible predominate. In this zone, “we see how the most raging passions are overpowered and shattered by the uncanny force of metaphysical conception” and “feel as if savage tropical tigers were being crushed before our eyes in the coils of colossal serpents” (HH 236). Today, Nietzsche speculates, in this time of transition to a different zone, and which we label “progress,” we inhabit a spiritual climate with no such events, “our imagination has been tempered, even in dreams we scarcely come close to what earlier periods beheld when awake” (HH 236). Nietzsche alerts us to the danger of an overstimulation of the nervous and intellectual powers such is, as a result of the sum of sensations, knowledge, and experiences, the whole burden of culture: “indeed, the cultivated classes in European countries are thoroughly neurotic” (HH 244). Our concern is to maintain our health in every possible way and live in hope of a new Renaissance. To keep at bay and from overgrowing us the deeply moving sensations instilled in us by centuries of Christianity, as well as the work of metaphysically inspired philosophers, poets, and musicians, we have recourse to a scientific spirit that makes us colder and more skeptical, cooling down “the scorching stream of a faith in final, definitive truths” (HH 244). It is to the Italian Renaissance that we owe all the positive forces of modern culture: the liberation of thought, disdain for arbitrary authorities, the triumph of cultivation over the arrogance of lineage, the unfettering of the individual, an ardor for veracity and against appearance and mere effect, and an enthusiasm or passion for science (HH 237). In the final aphorism of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche tells his readers that he wishes to practice the philosophy of the morning, which will find him in search of the mysteries of the dawning day; what is required is a free mind, that is, one suspicious of reaching final, definitive truths and willing to revise its thoughts in the bright morning light of fresh experiences and new experiments. Nietzsche’s thinking aims for a new sobriety: it seeks to approach the world beyond both theology and the struggle against it. The world is neither good nor evil, neither the best nor the worst. Good and evil, he argues following in the footsteps of Spinoza, only make sense with reference to human beings, and even then, they are not justified in the typical ways they get deployed. He invites us to renounce both the

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

view that curses the world and the view that extols it, since, in this way, we will do away with the tediously overused words optimism and pessimism (HH 28). Nietzsche’s commitment to the cool sobriety of scientific thinking, which includes first and foremost a commitment to the methods and procedures of science (see HH 634–35), informs his treatment of religion both in Human, All Too Human and in Dawn. Nietzsche insists that between religion and “real science” there is neither friendship nor enmity since they dwell on different stars. Nietzsche evinces a number of arguments to support his position. To suppose that religion contains truths is to have a very loose conception of truth, especially where truth is bound up with the pursuit of rigorous methods of examination and psychological observation. Nietzsche also holds that every religion is born of fear and need and this requires an inquiry into origins that will demonstrate this. The reason why the doctrines of some philosophies resemble those of religious beliefs, be they Jewish, Christian, or Indian — as in the case of Schopenhauer — is because philosophers have operated either under the influence of traditional religious habits or under the hereditary power of the metaphysical need. Unsurprisingly, the religious need is strongly rooted in human beings; it has thousands of years of training in superstitious and credulous human psychology behind it. Nietzsche appreciates that less reflective free spirits take offense at the dogmas of religion but still allow for the magic of religious sensation. It is for this reason that he proposes that scientific philosophy needs to be extremely careful not to smuggle in errors on the basis of this need, a need that has been acquired and is a transitory one. Even logicians, he notes, have consented to speaking of presentiments of truth in morality and art, for example, the presentiment that the essence of all things is one. This, Nietzsche says, is illegitimate since between something carefully inferred and something intuited there exists an unbridgeable gulf — one is due to the intellect, the other to need: “Hunger does not prove that the food that would sate it exists, yet it wishes for this food” (HH 131). Similarly, if I have a presentiment this does not mean that I know with any degree that it exists, only that I take its existence to be possible — and because I wish for it or fear it: “We involuntarily believe that the religiously tinged sections of a philosophy are better proven than others; but it is basically the reverse; we simply have the inner wish that it might be so — hence, that what makes us happy might also be true” (HH 131). This distrust of intuition, and especially of the commitment of certain German idealists, such as Schelling, to “intellectual intuition,” conceived as a suprarational faculty that affords access to a comprehension of the divine, continues in Dawn where he writes in glowing terms of those great philosophers — such as Plato and Aristotle from the ancients and Descartes and Spinoza from the early moderns  —  who found in knowledge, that is, “in the activity of a well-trained, inquisitive, and inventive understanding[,] the highest happiness: such thinkers actually enjoyed knowledge!” (D 550). He wishes his readers to be inspired by

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these examples of philosophers who freely committed themselves to the demands of knowledge and to resist the appeal to an “inner sense” or “intellectual intuition” since such an appeal ends up wanting not philosophy but religion (D 544). Nietzsche locates in Christianity a curious psychology of salvation, and his probing of this reveals further his commitment to a cool, skeptical mode of inquiry. Christianity seeks to crush and shatter the human being, to sink them into slimy depths; then, as if by a miracle, in the midst of this feeling of complete depravity, there shines the gleam of a divine compassion (Mitleid), “so that someone surprised and stunned by grace let out a cry of rapture and for a moment believed that he bore the whole of Heaven within him” (HH 114). All the psychological discoveries of Christianity, Nietzsche notes, are made to work on this pathological excess of feeling: “it wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate; there is only one thing it does not want: measure, and hence it is, when understood most profoundly, barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, non-Greek” (HH 114). This appeal to the need for “measure,” and the allied claim that the “pathological excess of feeling” is something non-Greek, can disclose to us important insights into Nietzsche’s philosophical character, and something of this character is revealed in his admiration of Voltaire. Thomas Brobjer, a helpful chronicler of Nietzsche’s influences and sources, has argued that from around 1878 onwards Voltaire becomes the philosopher Nietzsche praises most in his published writings.8 We know that Nietzsche made a personal visit to Voltaire’s estate in Ferney in the spring of 1876, and that he avidly read him in Sorrento later in same year in the company of Paul Rée and Malwida von Meysenbug. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche praises Voltaire as the last “of the great dramatists who used Greek moderation to restrain a polymorphic soul that could encompass the greatest tragic thunderstorms” (HH 221). For Nietzsche, Voltaire is the last great writer who displays “a Greek ear, a Greek aesthetic consciousness” and “a Greek simplicity and charm in his handling of prose discourse” (HH 221). Nietzsche’s appraisal of Voltaire is in accord with the free-minded philosophy that he is keen to espouse in his middle writings, which is sober and skeptical, aiming to combat the eruption of neurosis in modern-day humanity in the form of emotional and mental excess. His appraisal of Voltaire is a specific one: Voltaire is to be prized on account of the fact that he combines “the highest freedom of the spirit with an ‘unrevolutionary disposition’,” and, Nietzsche adds, “without being inconsistent and cowardly” (HH 221).

­ ietzsche’s Break with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s N Skepticism In the middle writings, and beginning with Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche makes a decisive and lasting break with Schopenhauer. Indeed, Nietzsche deliberately cultivates what he comes to call “the passion of knowledge,” which makes its

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

first appearance in the published writings in Dawn, contra Schopenhauer, whom he regards as superficial in psychological matters. In a note from the time when he was composing material for Dawn, he writes tellingly about Schopenhauer in the following terms: “His passion for knowledge was not great enough for him to suffer on its behalf: he barricaded himself in” (KSA 9, 6 [381]). In his early writings, such as Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), Nietzsche had argued that we should esteem Schopenhauer “because he calls to mind the memory of naïve, universal truths” (KSA 7, 19 [26]). While Kant’s influence has proved detrimental, the Kantian philosophy finds its redemption and true meaning in Schopenhauer: “He gathers together all those elements that are still useful for controlling science. He arrives at the most profound primordial problems of ethics and of art; he raises the question of the value of existence” (19 [28]; compare GS 357). For the early Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s greatness consists in the fact that he deals with the picture of life as a whole and interprets it as a whole. Moreover, he does so without letting himself become entangled in a web of conceptual scholasticisms. Schopenhauer stands in contradiction to everything that today passes for culture, he awakens a powerful need just as Socrates did: not for knowledge but for wisdom, drawing attention to the barbarizing power of science and demolishing secularization. He is simple, honest, crude, and ahead of his time. In short, Schopenhauer is not a scholar. As we have suggested, in his middle writings Nietzsche embraces the modern scientific spirit; this now means that Schopenhauer can no longer be upheld as a philosophical role model. In his middle writings, Nietzsche detects a major flaw in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In spite of the fact that there is a strong ring of science in his teaching, the scientific spirit is not strong enough in it, and, as a result, the entire medieval Christian world view could celebrate its resurrection. Schopenhauer does not master the scientific spirit; rather the metaphysical need does (HH 26). Nietzsche proposes that a mature humanity needs to wean itself off this need (which he says is an error and a failure of the intellect), and contends that the need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer thinks, but rather a religious after-shoot. Nietzsche’s position is that with the metaphysical need, and the speculations it gives rise to, we are in the dangerous realm of human fantasy. For Schopenhauer, the “metaphysical need” is a primordial need within the human being and specific to the human animal. For him, it is bound up with the attitude of astonishment we are free to adopt with respect to the world and from which “arises the need for metaphysics that is peculiar to man alone.” Indeed, he calls man “an animal metaphysicum.”9 His claim is that in animals the “wisdom of nature speaks out” of their peaceful glance: in them will and intellect are not separated widely enough and that would mean they would be capable of being astonished at each other when they meet again. Moreover, in them “the whole phenomenon is still firmly attached to the stem of nature from which it has sprung.”10 In man, then, there is a surprise at being in the world. Schopenhauer is

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obviously following Aristotle here, indeed he cites him from the introduction to his Metaphysics with the claim that it is on account of wonder that humans philosophize. He adds his own unique gloss on this, arguing that the wonder is of a serious kind and that, in point of fact, philosophy begins in a minor key. This is owing to the fact that human self-reflection and astonishment inevitably faces the recognition of the finitude of life and the vanity of all existence. Schopenhauer appreciates that the “need” is a response to the recognition of this finitude and the fact of death, and so expresses itself as a longing for an afterlife: “Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man’s need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical.11 By metaphysics, Schopenhauer says he understand it as follows: all so-called knowledge that goes beyond the possibility of experience, and so beyond nature or the given phenomenal appearance of things, in order to give information about that by which, in some sense or other, this experience or nature is conditioned, or in popular language about that which is hidden behind nature, and renders nature possible.12 For Schopenhauer, it is necessary to explain the fundamental character of the world that lies behind phenomena, which he considers to be the will to life and conceived as the thing-in-itself. In his middle writings, Nietzsche comes to hold the view that Schopenhauer’s thinking is a disaster for science. Moreover, the notion of the will to life expresses the philosopher’s unhelpful rage for generalization; it is little more than a poetic metaphor, and in Schopenhauer it results in all kinds of mystical nonsense (AOM 5). Schopenhauer also maintains that we need metaphysics in order to have an adequate conception of ethics and that ultimately needs to have its basis in an insight into the true, metaphysical character of the world. Only one philosopher prior to himself has attempted this, Schopenhauer thinks, and this is Spinoza — but Spinoza’s system rests on nothing more than palpable sophisms. In Dawn, Nietzsche becomes especially severe in his critical response to Schopenhauer, describing his metaphysical account of compassion as nothing more than “rapturous and worthless poppycock” (D 142). The early Nietzsche worries that Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy will lead to a “gnawing and disintegrating relativism and skepticism” (UO II 3). In his middle writings, Nietzsche is accepting that we moderns live in a skeptical age and holds to the view that certain modes of skeptical inquiry now need to be vigorously pursued and form an essential component in our practices of knowledge and truthfulness (see HH 21, 630–31). In Dawn, Nietzsche warns against having unconditional trust in things and advises that we practice “a little bit of skepticism for each and every thing, be it god, human, or concept” (D 207). In

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

addition, it is also in Dawn that Nietzsche seeks to liberate himself from the need for an ultimate solution to the riddles of existence; he has no desire to assume the role of being, as Schopenhauer sought to be, the great unriddler of the world (D 547). However, although skepticism plays an important role in his pursuit of free-spirited inquiry, Nietzsche’s embrace of skepticism is of a specific kind. There are two skepticisms he is, in fact, highly critical of: first, the kind of skepticism which can ironically result in the thinker becoming a fanatic of mistrust (see the complex and witty dialogue between Pyrrho and an old man Nietzsche presents, WS 213); and, second, the philosophical practice of hair-splitting metaphysicians that prepares the way for a skepticism that can be used as a tool for a “subtler obscurantism” (AOM 27).13 In this aphorism, Nietzsche raises the question whether Kant can be used for the purpose of generating such an obscurantism, as when Kant declares in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), which Nietzsche cites, that he has found it necessary “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” For Nietzsche, this is a case of the “dark art” of a dangerous obscurantism appearing underneath “a cloak of light” (AOM 27). This line of criticism continues in Dawn. In an important aphorism, Dawn 142, for example, Nietzsche forcefully and wittily expresses his distaste for Kant and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical obscurantism. At the very end of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in a concluding note, Kant says that while it is not possible for us to “comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility,” and he adds: “This is all that can be fairly asked of a philosophy which presses forward in its principles to the very limits of human reason.”14 Kant is referring to the difficulty we have as empirically and affectively conditioned subjects in comprehending how we can, in actuality, act completely rationally as agents or subjects of the moral law (“act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be translated into a universal law”). Nietzsche refers explicitly to Kant’s obscurity in Dawn 142, citing from the Nachlass of Schopenhauer, in which Schopenhauer esteems as Kant’s “greatest gift” his demonstration of the limits of the concepts of the Understanding, and in the process lending value to Kant’s view about the “incomprehensible” character of the categorical imperative. Nietzsche’s riposte to Schopenhauer reveals the depths of his commitment to enlightenment knowledge over the reinsertion into philosophy of metaphysical chicanery: One ought to consider whether someone who, from the outset, is perfectly happy to believe in the incomprehensibility of things moral can be sincerely interested in acquiring knowledge of such things. Someone who still honestly believes in illuminations from above, in magic, and spiritual apparitions and in the metaphysical ugliness of the toad! (D 142)

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Nietzsche’s aim, in objecting to this metaphysical obscurantism, is to draw attention to the willingness of philosophers like Schopenhauer to prioritize the “mystical,” as was also the case in his objection to mystical nonsense in the second volume of Human, All Too Human volume (AOM 5). In Dawn, he objects in particular to Schopenhauer’s failure to treat “empathy” sufficiently skeptically as a product of this metaphysical obscurantism (D 142). As Nietzsche contends, for Schopenhauer, “the mystical process” through which “compassion transforms two essential beings into one” to the extent that “each is vouchsafed unmediated understanding of the other” is “incomprehensible nonsense,” and that “such a clear-headed thinker as Schopenhauer” indulged in this metaphysical mysticism merits his unbounded “astonishment and pity” (D 142). Perhaps the most important sense of skeptical practice we need for a proper understanding of Nietzsche is that of an endless searching and seeking, and this takes the form of a commitment to experimentalism in his writings (see e.g. GS 51). Here Nietzsche is faithful to the original Greek sense of being a skeptic and where the skeptics are conceived as seekers, the zeteikoi.15 In a discussion of skepticism in Beyond Good and Evil, Jessica Berry has argued that Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future are “fundamentally Zetetics.”16 We see this fully at work, however, in Dawn, in which Nietzsche deploys skepticism essentially as a tool and as part of his commitment to the passion of knowledge. This commitment to experimentation is designed to work against philosophical dogmatism, and it deeply informs and guides Nietzsche’s philosophical practice in the middle writings preceding Dawn. In reflecting on the character of Nietzsche’s skeptical practice we would do well to take cognizance of Stefan Zweig’s great insight into Montaigne the essayist. Zweig put down his reflections while in exile in Brazil in the early 1940s: Montaigne’s greatest pleasure is the search, not the discovery. He is not one of those philosophers who seek the philosopher’s stone, the convenient formula. He cares not for dogma, precepts, and has a horror of definitive assertions: “Assert nothing assiduously, deny nothing frivolously”. He has no defined destination. All roads open to his “pensée vagabonde”.17 Nietzsche’s adoption of certain aspects of skeptical practice in his middle writings is evident, for instance, in the attitude of indifference he thinks we need to adopt with respect to the first and last things (WS 16). We can also see it at work in his appeal to Epicurus, whom he describes as the “soul-soother of later antiquity,” and the ways in which he sought to solve the ultimate theoretical questions (WS 7). He wants the “scientific spirit” to bring to maturity what he calls “the virtue of cautious reserve,” which he describes as a “wise moderation” that to date is more familiar in the realm of practical life than in the realm of theoretical life (HH 631). In Dawn, and in a very

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

similar vein, Nietzsche stages in a mini-dramatic form a response to an exhortation from Luther and writes of the wisdom of withholding judgment with respect to some key existential matter as a way of freeing ourselves of “soul anxiety” (D 82). It is obvious, though, that Nietzsche does not conceive the free spirit — who works against dogmatism and fanaticism — as a figure who simply acquiesces in the customs and traditions of his or her society, and as we find in the skepticism of both the ancient Pyrrhonists and Montaigne.18 The contrary is the case. There is an important dimension to Nietzsche’s project that is not present in these modes or forms of skepticism, namely, a commitment to experimentalism with respect to both individual and social modes of living. Indeed, in Dawn, Nietzsche declares human beings to be “experiments” and the task, he adds, is to want to be such (D 453).19 Finally, on the issue of skepticism in Nietzsche we can take cognizance of a striking aphorism from The Gay Science where he acknowledges his own implication in the moral skepticism introduced into the world by Christianity (GS 122). Nietzsche suggests that, whether intentionally or otherwise, Christianity has made an important contribution to the enlightenment by teaching “moral skepticism” in the form of a patient and subtle questioning of human motivation and behavior, and in the process, it has accused and embittered human beings, so provoking them into conscientious self-reflection. Nietzsche writes: “it destroyed faith in his ‘virtues’ in every single individual; it led to the disappearance from the face of the earth of all those paragons of virtue of whom there was no dearth in antiquity” (GS 122). It is necessary, then, that modern free spirits acknowledge their training in this Christian school of skepticism and to the extent that when we read the great moral treatises of Seneca and Epictetus, for example, we experience “a diverting sense of superiority,” feeling “full of secret insights”: “we feel as embarrassed as if a child were talking before an old man, or an over-enthusiastic young beauty before La Rochefoucauld: we know better what virtue is” (GS 122). Nietzsche, then, wishes us to continue and finesse further this tradition of Christian moral skepticism — it informs his estimation of the virtue of honesty [Redlichkeit] and his commitment to the intellectual conscience — and he does so by now applying the same skepticism “to all religious states and processes, such as sin, repentance, grace, sanctification.” When we free spirits apply our skepticism we then enjoy “the same sense of subtle superiority and insight when we read any Christian book: we also know religious feelings better!” (GS 122). Although one might wish to contest Nietzsche’s claims about Christianity in this aphorism — he does not mention any specific Christian thinkers in it, and we know that Augustine wrote against skepticism in his Against the Academicians — it does find, interestingly, a curious echo in the work of Kierkegaard. In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), for example, Kierkegaard notes that while all ancient ethics was based on the assumption that virtue is something realizable, the notion of “sin” casts the shadow of skepticism over such an assumption.20

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We shall say more on the topic of Nietzsche and the intellectual conscience in a moment. Before doing so it may be worthwhile reflecting on his change of mind about skepticism and that begins with Human, All Too Human. One can only speculate about the reasons for Nietzsche’s change of mind: from doing everything he can in his early writings, such as Schopenhauer as Educator, to ward off the dangers of skepticism, and even the menace of it, to now in his middle writings, and commencing with volume one of Human, All Too Human, accepting (and embracing) the fact that Europe is now entering a skeptical age, and promoting in his own writings specific modes of skepticism and skeptical inquiry. With respect to the early Nietzsche one might venture the suggestion that in them he is operating in an essentially German context, and as a young nation-state Nietzsche, one might add, is thinking that it is too premature for German education and culture to be exposed to skepticism that will have only a debilitating effect (he also expresses a concern over the rise of a mood of “cynicism” taking over the German mind, UO II 9). Instead, he clearly seems to think that a quite different intellectual strategy is required and merited, and so, one might suggest, he makes the decision to subordinate his intellectual project, including his conception of philosophy, which at this point he conceives as a way of life and a key vehicle in self-­ cultivation [Bildung], to the essential and key task of energizing German ­education and culture. By the time of Human, All Too Human, however, his intellectual orientation has fundamentally changed, and in dramatic ways. He is now addressing European culture and writing as a free-spirited “good European” (WS 87) and is committed to the view that to be a good German one must “de-Germanize” oneself (AOM 323). One of his main concerns now and henceforth in his writings is the rise of dangerous forms of religious and moral fanaticism, and in his middle writings Nietzsche aligns himself with an Enlightenment project of deploying skepticism as a philosophical tool that can defeat such excessive enthusiasm, so allying himself with a long line of impressive skeptics who seek to combat fanaticism in their own times and places — one thinks of historians and philosophers such as Montaigne, Hume, Edward Gibbon, Diderot, and, most important of all for an appreciation of Nietzsche in his middle writings, Voltaire (Nietzsche was familiar with the skeptical works of all the aforementioned writers). Two further observations can be made: 1) First, that Nietzsche is definitely aware of the problem of fanaticism in his early writings. This is in evidence, for example, in his unfashionable observation on David Strauss, but he makes no appeal in it to the need for a mode of skepticism to combat it. Nietzsche simply notes that historical education or cultivation can work against fanaticism, though at this time this mode of education is not something that he wishes to take up since he has all kinds of

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

issues with it, issues that he then fully explores in his next unfashionable observation on the uses and disadvantages of history for life. The stance contra fanaticism emerges, then, in Nietzsche’s middle writings, and can be fruitfully understood in the context of his keenness and readiness to now advocate certain modes of skeptical inquiry and practice (UO I 2). 2) Second, and as we have just seen, Nietzsche continues to wrestle with Kant’s legacy in the volumes of Human, All Too Human, but now his concern is quite different and perhaps subtly so. He no longer focuses on the cultural influence Kant’s Copernican Revolution might have, and as one of skepticism and relativism, but rather on the fact that Kant’s supposed “enlightenment” is contributing to the spread of a new obscurantism (see especially AOM 27). Nietzsche is now very keen to combat this, along with all and any forms of obscurantist modes of thinking.21 Nietzsche sees the demise of belief in God that characterizes the modern period of Occidental history as being bound up with the development of the intellectual conscience. This is because we reach a point when the discipline of truth forbids itself the lie in faith in God. For Nietzsche, then, what really triumphs over the Christian God is Christian morality itself and its concept of truthfulness, which comes to be understood more and more rigorously: “the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness” (GS 357). Nietzsche lists what he takes to be now over for us moderns: looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a divine force; interpreting history in honor of a divine reason and a testimony of a moral world order; and interpreting one’s experiences as if they were informed and guided by providence and ordained for the salvation of one’s soul (GS 285). What stands against all of these things is our modern intellectual conscience: such articles of faith have simply become unbelievable for us. Nietzsche’s commitment to the intellectual conscience first comes to the fore in his middle writings, and it is linked to the manner in which he conceives skepticism as an essential component of the authentic practice of philosophy. This conscience is about having and developing intellectual integrity, and it works against the “heart’s desire” and against the idea that beautiful feelings constitute an argument. In the Preface to Dawn, Nietzsche says that all philosophers from Plato to Kant have been building under the seduction of “majestic moral structures.” Later, Nietzsche builds on this to argue that Kant’s whole conception of practical reason lacks this intellectual conscience: “he invented a special form of reason so that people would not have to worry about it when morality, when the sublime command ‘thus shalt,’ is heard” (AC 12). For Nietzsche, the philosopher is but a further development of the “priestly type,” or what he calls “the art of falling for your own forgeries” (AC 12). In the very next aphorism he talks about the importance of

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“methods” and promotes “modesty” as the new intellectual virtue (AC 13). For too long people have demanded what he calls here a “picturesque effect” from the truth, and philosophers have been only too happy to satisfy this need. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche construes the intellectual conscience as the ­superior form of conscience, the conscience behind our conscience (GS 335). It demands from us that we do not accept anything on trust and that we are willing to question existence and in terms of a commitment to certain intellectual virtues such as honesty or probity. Nietzsche perhaps writes on this most potently in the opening of The Gay Science: To stand in the midst of the “discordant concord of things,” and of this whole marvellous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and rapture of such questioning…this is the feeling I look for in everybody. Some folly keeps me persuading that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my kind of injustice (GS 2) Nietzsche speaks of making our experience a matter of conscience for our knowledge, which entails practicing a type of honesty [Redlichkeit] that is quite alien to founders of religion and moral systems (GS 319). The link with skepticism, conceived as a practice of truthfulness, is made explicit by Nietzsche in GS 2: this superior form of conscience requires from us the exercise of doubt and the search for more and more adequate reasons in what we take to be true and certain. Here Nietzsche appears to be echoing the sentiments expressed by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot: Sckpticism does not suit everybody. It presupposes profound and disinterested examination. He who doubts because he is not acquainted with the reasons for believing is no better than an ignoramus. The true skeptic has counted and weighed his reasons. But it is no easy matter to weigh arguments.22 There are some revealing treatments of the intellectual conscience in Dawn. In aphorism 149 of the text, Nietzsche writes about those situations where the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep. He gives the example of the person who takes his child to a Christian baptism, either for his child or the sake of a friend’s child, although he is an atheist (he gives other examples that work along the same lines). The critical point he is making here is that we are giving rational confirmation to anciently established and irrationally recognized customs, and in the process committing a thoughtless error. In aphorism 151, he argues that we ought not to be permitted to come to any decision affecting our life while we are in the condition of being in love. To live by the intellectual conscience, as the calling of one’s superior self, is, then, to commit oneself to quite a severe way of living (see also D 298).

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

In Dawn, honesty [Redlichkeit] is said to be our youngest virtue because it is not found among the Socratic or Christian virtues: it is still in the process of becoming (D 456). The question that Nietzsche is now focused on is that of how it is best lived. Nietzsche notes one especially serious danger for the intellectual conscience: we may have conquered intellectual vice and good conscience, but the real temptation to resist is that of becoming intoxicated and frenzied, thinking that we are now beyond all doubting since we tell ourselves that we now know for certain (D 543). He criticizes such a standpoint because of what he sees it as its “deplorable martyrdom.”

­The Moment of Dawn Dawn is a deeply anti-metaphysical and skeptical work, where Nietzsche’s skeptical practice of inquiry is to be understood in the ways we have just outlined. In an aphorism entitled “Interpolation,” Nietzsche confides that the book is not one for reading straight through but for “cracking open” (Aufschlagen); he wants readers to place their head into it and out again, finding nothing about themselves that they are accustomed to (D 454). Concerning Nietzsche’s style of writing, Arthur Danto has put it well when he describes the prose style of the work as “a kind of eroticism of writing,” one that requires from its reader a partnership in pleasure and intelligence.23 The text is characterized by sudden shifts of tone and rhythm, “at one moment lyrical and at the next moment earthy,” with moments of “mock distance and then of sudden intimacy,” and its “jeers, sneers, jokes and whispers,” all contribute to this eroticism.24 As Danto further notes, while Nietzsche’s voice here has lost the professorial authority of the early writing, it has yet to acquire the “strident conviction of a prophet unheeded” that characterizes the later writings. We think he is right to suggest that in none of Nietzsche’s other books do we get a more palpable sense of intellectual well-being than we find in Dawn. It is also clear that Nietzsche wants his readers to share in the adventure of knowledge undertaken in the book. Rüdiger Safranski has construed Nietzsche’s philosophy of the morning in the following terms: we are not sufficiently composed to let the world work its magic. We fail to provide it with a stage on which to appear as an epiphany, rich and enigmatic … For this to be possible, we must not have become too established as creatures of habit. Leeway is required to allow consciousness to observe itself, not in an autistic sense, but in such a way that receptivity for the world can be experienced on an individual level. This degree of attention to the way in which the world is “given” to us entails a decided departure from our customary attitude toward the world. We need to undergo a genuine transition in attitude, the kind we experience every morning when we

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awaken … This peripatetic philosopher, “born from the mysteries of dawn”, is the phenomenologist Nietzsche. His phenomenology is the philosophy of the early light and morning.25 What is missing from Safranski’s incisive appreciation, however, is an explicit recognition of the skeptical dimension to Nietzsche’s mode of inquiry into questions about the self and the world, which is designed to lead us into the realm of deeper truths, even if these truths unsettle us and make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves. Numerous aphorisms in Dawn aim to show the extent to which, and the ways in which, we misunderstand and misread ourselves, or show how difficult it is to discern the true motives of our action, and how we illegitimately grant ourselves extraordinary powers of freedom (of free will) (e.g. D 112, 125, 148; also, with respect to drives and self-understanding, D 109). According to Safranski, Nietzsche was “a master of shading the particular tinge, color, or mood of experience” and someone who used their own solitude and suffering as a springboard to construct a new philosophy, often providing exquisite depictions of the world while racked with pain. Moreover, Nietzsche is not content with mere expression and self-expression, but rather uses the example of his own experience to probe new and challenging questions. As Safranski rightly notes, Nietzsche is “a passionate singularist” in the sense that for him the world is composed of nothing but details; even the self can be approached in such terms, that is, as a detail that is composed of further details. In the analysis of the detail there is no point of completion or termination: “There are only details, and although they are everything, they do not constitute a whole. No whole could encompass the plethora of details.”26 By paying attention to the details of existence we may discover ourselves in ways that surprise and enlighten us. As Nietzsche likes to point out, the journey of self-discovery has consequences that are frightful and fearful at one and the same time. Nietzsche’s opening up of thinking in texts such as Dawn, and later in The Gay Science, to great currents, oceanic expanses, and departures for new shores is metaphorical imagery by which he intends to explore the vast unknown territory of human consciousness and existence (e.g. D 575). The self for Nietzsche is a mode of being in the world that can attain different and novel perspectives on it, sometimes by undergoing disconcerting experiences. In an aphorism on the sufferer’s knowledge Nietzsche seeks to draw out the value for knowledge of the condition of the infirm, who are tormented for long periods by their suffering, but whose minds remain unclouded (perhaps he is writing with attention to his own experiences here). Such experiences, and insights into them, are of value because they come from profound solitude and release us from all duties and customs, including customary habits of seeing the world and being in the world. Nietzsche writes:

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

From within this condition the heavy sufferer looks out onto things with a terrifying coldness: for him all those little deceitful enchantments in which things usually swim when regarded by the healthy eye disappear … Supposing that until that point he was living in some sort of dangerous fantasy world: this supreme sobering up through pain is the means to tear him out of it … He thinks back with contempt on the warm, cosy, misty world in which the healthy person lives his life without a second thought; he thinks back with contempt on the most noble and cherished illusions in which he used to indulge himself in days gone by (D 114) In the experience that Nietzsche is describing in this aphorism, it is the “prodigious straining” of the intellect that wants to resist the pain that ensues from the experience of feeling alienated and withdrawn from familiar life (the “warm, cosy, misty world”). So, even in this extreme condition, the sufferer can resist the temptation of suicide and want to continue living, such is the mind’s fascination with what it is now experiencing. Indeed, the sufferer experiences only contempt on this warm and cozy world and in which the unreflective healthy person lives. As a counterweight to the physical pain now being felt, the sufferer conjures up this attitude of contempt from the “deepest hell” and that causes what is his or her greater bitter suffering, namely, that of their soul. The sufferer feels compelled to wrestle with their suffering, and seeks to prove equal to the experience they are undergoing, becoming their own accuser and executioner, and in the process, recognizing their own complicity in the experience, which involves a “capricious pleasure” and “tyrannical arbitrariness.” Now they can elevate themselves above their life and their suffering and “look down into the depths of meaning and meaninglessness!” At this point, the sufferer experiences pride, which is the pride of opposing the tyrant that is pain and that wishes to overwhelm us and devour all our attention — and attachment — to life. Against the tyrant, the sufferer wants to be life’s advocate. Nietzsche then adds: In this state, one resists to the death all pessimism lest it appear to be a consequence of our state and humiliates us as one who has been defeated. By the same token, the appeal of exercising justness in judgement has never been greater than now, for now it constitutes a triumph over ourselves and over the most sensitive of all states … We find ourselves in ­veritable paroxysms of pride (D 114) We might suppose that such an altered — and alienated — state of consciousness can bring with it the possibility of a new just “judgment” on the self and world, affording us insights into existence that are simply not available to us in our normal,

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everyday, and habitual comportment. However, Nietzsche is honest enough with himself and his readers to draw attention to the limit of such an experience: And then comes the first twilight glimmer of alleviation, recovery — and almost the first effect is that we resist the supremacy of our pride; we call it foolish and vain — as if we had experienced anything! Without gratitude, we humble the almighty pride that had just allowed us to endure pain and we vehemently demand antidotal venom for our pride: we want to become estranged from ourselves and depersonalized after the pain has made us personal too forcefully and for too long a time. (D 114) In short, is the pride not just a malady like any other? Does it not need to be humbled? Does the self not need to exercise in this life situation, with its recognition of specific alienated moods it is experiencing and that are informing its conception of the world, some humility? This is precisely what Nietzsche is advising in the aphorism, and now comes the final dramatic twist in his portrayal of the sufferer’s knowledge. It is now returned to life in a new and surprising way, with its senses restored and the appreciation of life deepened: We begin to pay attention again to people and to nature  —  with a more longing eye: smiling ruefully, we remember that we now have come to know certain things about them in a new and different way than before, that a veil has fallen — but it restores us so as to view once more the subdued lights of life and to step out of the horrible, sober brightness in which, as a sufferer, we saw and saw through things. We don’t grow angry when the enchantments of health resume their play — we look on as if transformed, kind and still weary. In this state, one cannot listen to music without weeping (D 114) Here, Nietzsche depicts in a subtle and varied manner the way our consciousness functions, involving an initial detachment from life and a new reattachment to life. We see through the illusions that characterize normal life, but then, having withdrawn from them and having becomes divorced from practical life, we are filled with a new longing for them and there comes into being an appreciation of life that is ultimately deeper and richer in sensitivity and knowledge. As Nietzsche points out, there is a need to get outside and beyond our own personhood  —  a need to become “depersonalized,” as he puts it — since in an experience of profound suffering, pain traps us for too long in ourselves and makes us “personal too forcefully and for too long a time” (D 114). We should also note just how brilliantly, displaying real philosophical subtlety and dexterity, Nietzsche is drawing the reader’s attention to how our

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

differing and varied attitudes toward existence reflect our own emotional ­condition at any given time, such as our moods and our life situation; as he so astutely observes, one’s “pessimism” about life and one’s existence may be little more than a reflection of our own state of being, as opposed to a correct or adequate appreciation, even representation, of the world as it actually is. “Pessimism” about life is something we have the freedom to wrestle with, and  —  through the experience of an enriched appreciation that is acquired though some actual experience — to defeat. But note, Nietzsche is not being didactic about the issue of pessimism, but is rather raising a suspicion in order to provoke his reader into genuine reflection. The insights Nietzsche provides into human emotional life in this aphorism are not intended to be either definitive or exhaustive: they do not pretend to be this and we should not take them to be such. And although Nietzsche may well be drawing upon his own experiences of pain and suffering in the aphorism, the insights he is developing into the emotions are not reducible to personal experience; for example, what he says at the end about now listening to music and finding oneself weeping is not to be related to any personal idiosyncrasy on his part, but is an experience that many readers will be able to readily connect with since it reveals something true about reaching a mature state in one’s experience of life and by which one can appreciate on an emotional level the complexity of the human experience of life. Our experience is often deepened exactly in the way Nietzsche describes, and in those situations where we find ourselves, often unwittingly, alienated from life. We then weep when we hear music because we have understood something poignant about life and our reaction to it. We may have learned, for example, that life is a tender and gentle thing and that the people and things that populate existence for us are still to be valued even when we have withdrawn from our gaze the veils of cozy enchantment that serve to cover over for us in everyday existence the fact that life is harsh, cruel, and may not at all be something gay. As the art form par excellence of the emotions or feelings, music has the capacity to magnify for us, in an incredibly powerful way, the experiences we have lived through, endured, and overcome. At the end of the aphorism we find the sufferer feeling kind and weary, and music is part of their restoration of health as they once again become receptive to the intensities of life. When we thus weep to music perhaps we are expressing a certain gratitude toward life, as well as experiencing a fundamental sympathy both with life and with ourselves. There is obviously an important movement that has taken place in the example Nietzsche provides in this aphorism, which might be construed in terms of a spiritual maturation, in which the sufferer is transformed from a position of intellectual conceitedness to one anchored in a recognition of the “rich ambiguity of existence,” as Nietzsche sometimes like to express it (see e.g. GS 373 and also the treatment of music there).

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Marco Brusotti has argued that with its emphasis on pursuing knowledge as a “passion” Dawn represents a far-reaching break with the ideal of moderation and repose of soul espoused in the previous main text, Human, All Too Human. He writes: “The concept of the ‘passion of knowledge’ … marks a clear turn in his interpretation of the free spirit. Dawn is the book in which this turn takes place.”27 Although there is some merit to Brusotti’s claim  —  in Dawn, Nietzsche is no longer a disappointed idealist and now has the hope that all kinds of new discoveries about ourselves and the world can be arrived at if we pursue knowledge as a passion — we should not lose sight of the fact that Nietzsche retains his commitment to the pathos and passion of science, and to the cause of cool, sober knowledge that works against forms of fanaticism in religion and morality — and even in philosophy itself. As to whether one should look in Dawn for a consistent and fully worked out philosophy, this is a difficult question to consider. This is simply because the text develops what might be called trains of thought that sometimes lead to decisive insights, but which also leave much for the reader to engage with and to complete independently and, indeed, through collective engagement. The text engages with a sense of the future — that new dawns are about to break — but much is deliberately left open for readers’ rumination. As Nietzsche says, one of his fundamental aims in the book was to teach his readers how to read well, which for him means: “to read slowly, deeply, backward and forward with care and respect, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate fingers and eyes” (D Preface 5).

Notes 1 Rebecca Bamford examines Nietzsche’s account of how opinions and learning depend on the pathos of knowledge in HH 632–38 in “The Relationship between Science and Philosophy as a Key Feature of Nietzsche’s Metaphilosophy,” in Nietzsche’s Metaphilosophy, ed. Matthew Meyer and Paul S. Loeb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 65–83. 2 In his early writings, Nietzsche holds to the view that philosophy is the selective knowledge-drive in which the aim is to place knowledge in the service of the best life, even if this means “One must even desire illusion” (KSA 7, 19 [35]). 3 Mazzino Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 60. 4 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Continuum Press, 1983), 110. 5 See the excellent study by Brendan Donnellan, Nietzsche and the French Moralists (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1982), and the more recent study by Joel Westerdale, Nietzsche’s Aphoristic Challenge (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013).

From Human, All Too Human to Dawn

6 On Nietzsche and Rousseau in the middle writings, see especially Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7 See the discussion of solitude in Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), especially chapter 10. 8 Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 63. 9 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, volume II, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Press, 1966), XVII. 10 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, XVII. 11 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, XVII. 12 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, XVII. 13 On Nietzsche and the skeptical tradition more broadly, see Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 14 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 131. 15 Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92. 16 Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, 92. 17 Stefan Zweig, Montaigne (London: Pushkin Press, 2015), 101. For Nietzsche’s appreciation of Montaigne see section 2 of Schopenhauer as Educator, for example: “The joy [Lust] of living on this earth has been truly increased by the fact that such a person wrote … I would take my example from him if I were set the task of making myself feel at home on this earth.” For further insight see Brendan Donnellan. 1986. “Nietzsche and Montaigne.” Colloquia Germania 19(1): 1–20. 18 See Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, for further analysis on Nietzsche, skepticism, and Montaigne. 19 Nietzsche’s commitment to experimentalism in Dawn is discussed in Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. See also Bernard Reginster. 2013. “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51(3): 441–63. 20 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Alastair Hanney (New York & London: Liveright, 2014), 25. 21 In section 54 of the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche states that all great thinkers have been skeptics, and adds, intriguingly, that “Zarathustra too is a sceptic.” There are specific discourses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that bear out this claim, though the ways in which Zarathustra is indeed a special and certain kind of skeptic has yet to be properly explored by commentators of Nietzsche. 22 John Hope Mason, The Irresistible Diderot (London: Quartet Books, 1982), 39. 23 Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 249.

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24 Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 249. 25 R. Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 218. 26 Safranski, Nietzsche, 210. 27 Marco Brusotti. 1997. “Erkenntnis als Passion: Nietzsches Denkweg zwischen Morgenröthe und der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 26: 199–225.

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2 Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality In this chapter, we examine the basis of Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn. We also consider what problems there are with mounting a successful campaign against morality, and to what extent Nietzsche’s campaign against morality leaves room for a positive ethics.1 As we show, Nietzsche’s fundamental concern is that morality as it currently stands is bad for humans: in Dawn he examines how and why morality directly inhibits our capacity for flourishing and development, while also showing how the presuppositions or presumptions on which morality is based have inhibited us from subjecting morality to sufficient critical questioning. In her essay on Nietzsche and Bernard Williams, Maudemarie Clark notes that, “the term ‘morality’ has been monopolized by a particular form of ethical life in such a way that we fail to recognize the possibility of other forms.”2 It is for this reason that the British philosopher Bernard Williams favored the word “ethics” over “morality.”3 The wisdom of making this move is also articulated in the work of French philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.4 On a related matter, Richard Schacht has pointed out that Nietzsche’s stance in relation to questions of morality is complex simply because the matters to be treated are so diverse.5 Nietzsche’s self-stylization as an “immoralist” is misleading, since it invites a drastic oversimplification of his position, even as it indicates one polemical feature of it. This is, as Schacht claims, “his relentless and uncompromising hostility to a certain type of morality and moral mode of valuation and interpretation, which he considers to have achieved ascendancy in the Western world.”6 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls this type of morality “herd animal morality,” which he stresses is merely one type of morality and one, furthermore, beside which “many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible” (BGE 202). As Schacht notes, Nietzsche avails himself of the considerable number of expressions in German to denote “morality” — die Moral, Moralität, moralisch, Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Sittlichkeit and sittlich, and so on  —  but it is rare for Nietzsche to distinguish ­systematically between them, or to use them in specified ways to mark the many distinctions he wishes to draw.7 This means that we must pay careful attention to the various contexts in which Nietzsche treats “morality,” including in Dawn, the text in which Nietzsche says his “campaign against morality” begins in earnest (EH “Daybreak”) and also in which he presents his own “audacious morality,” contending that there is no “absolute morality” (D 139). In Dawn, Nietzsche asserts that “what is ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in morality is not, in turn to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no absolute morality” (D 139). It is important to emphasize from the outset of our discussion that this claim does not amount to an abandonment of the ethical. Nietzsche acknowledges that his primary target in the text is a customary ethic or “customary morality” [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], including the values that exemplify and sustain this particular sort of morality (D 9).8 Moreover, as he later points out, Dawn “gives notice to trust in morality” specifically “[o]ut of morality!” (D Preface 4). In the early aphorisms of the original text, Nietzsche focuses his critical attention on the moral imperatives of early societies, which reinforced obedience to customs through fear of punishment by community and/or divine authority. As Simon Robertson has pointed out, while Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings as a whole attend to the role played by obedience to customary morality in the development of master and slave morality, his particular focus in Dawn is on our adherence to moral traditions or customs.9 When Dawn was first published, the book did not include the Preface that we see at the beginning of the contemporary edition — this Preface was completed by Nietzsche no later than November 14, 1886, as he remarks in a letter to Franz Overbeck, and was added to second and subsequent editions of the text. In this chapter, we suggest that fear plays a particularly important role in Nietzsche’s original analysis of how customary morality sustains its powerful position within communities. Yet in the 1886 Preface to Dawn, as well as in his 1889 treatment of the text in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche places more emphasis on concerns that he raises about how the perceived immorality of campaigning against morality undermines the authority of such a campaign, and on how making an effective challenge is further complicated by the seductive power of moral language and the primacy of moral feeling over reason (D Preface 3).10 We assess the strategies that Nietzsche offers to overcome these challenges, and provide some reasons as to why a positive approach to the ethical remains available in Dawn in light of Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality.

­The Retrospective Campaign Against Morality Nietzsche provides an overview of his aims in Dawn in his remarks on this text in Ecce Homo, which are well worth attending to as a source of Nietzsche’s retrospective thinking about the text, and the place he gives it in his assessment of his work



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as a whole. He clearly considers Dawn to be a fundamentally positive work, describing it as “profound but bright and generous” (EH “Books” GS) and drawing attention to the “cheerfulness, even exuberance of spirit” that the book reflects (EH Wise 1). As he also notes, feelings of cheer and exuberance can coexist in him with “the most profound physiological debility” and “an excessive feeling of pain” — and these more dolorous feelings, combined with the “sweetening and spiritualization that are more or less bound to result from extreme anemia” facilitated his writing of the book (EH Wise 1). As he puts it, he “very cold-bloodedly thought through things for which, in healthier circumstances,” he was “not enough of a climber” (EH Wise 1). When Nietzsche claims to his readers that his “campaign” against morality begins with Dawn, he emphasizes that we should not smell gunpowder at work here but rather, provided we have the necessary subtlety in our nostrils, more pleasant odors (EH Books D1). As well as emphasizing the positive nature of the book, Nietzsche also draws the reader’s attention to the fact that he wants to open up the possibility of plural ways of being, including plural ways of being ethical (EH Books D1). His task in Dawn, he claims, was to prepare a moment of “supreme coming-to-oneself” for humanity: a “great noontide” (EH Books D2). Such a moment is necessary for the sake of the well-being of humanity. This underscores the point that Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality in Dawn is not one of simple wanton destruction. Yet Nietzsche claims that in the book, morality [Moral] is not attacked, it just no longer comes into consideration (EH Books D1). To make sense of this remark, given that so much of the book does consider the ethical, we should read “morality” as “customary morality” rather than the ethical as a whole.11 If this is right, then the book retains an ethical  —  albeit perhaps immoral — purpose. As Peter Berkowitz has pointed out, challenging morality is a matter of conscience for Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself recommended that he be known as an immoralist of the highest intellectual integrity on this basis in a letter to Carl Fuchs of July 29, 1888.12 Humanity, Nietzsche suggests, had been on the wrong path; his particular task in Dawn was therefore to take up “the struggle against the morality of unselfing,” which he also terms “décadence morality, the will to the end” (EH Books D2). The “unselfing” component of the morality of custom discussed earlier is recalled here, insofar as it demands that the individual must sacrifice through overcoming of the self and its associated needs and interests, so that customary morality is always prioritized (D 9). These remarks indicate that, even as late as 1889, Dawn remains a text that Nietzsche not only thought well of, but that he also considers to be a pivotal moment in the development of his ethics. Even so, Nietzsche’s use of the language of decadence in these sections of Ecce Homo threatens to direct our attention too far toward his thinking on the ethical in his later and perhaps better-known texts, such as On the Genealogy of Morality. There, we find a continuation of the language of self-sublation that we see in the Preface to Dawn: for example, Nietzsche

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points out that all great things “bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublation [Selbstaufhebung]: that is the law of life, the law of necessary ‘selfovercoming’ [Selbstüberwindung]” (GM III 27).13 The original five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms of Dawn were constructed as part of Nietzsche’s thinking on the free spirit in his middle writings and he described this series of texts as his “whole free spiritedness [meine ganze Freigeisterei], clearly understanding the series as forming part of an important unity of concern within his writings as a whole.”14 Although his remarks in Ecce Homo help to show that for him, Dawn remains an important text, we need to bear in mind when reading this text that the reasons why it is important are to be found within its own pages, rather than in those of later texts. In 1886, as part of a series of remarks on his earlier writings, Nietzsche wrote a Preface for the second edition of Dawn. This Preface consists of five long aphorisms. The first aphorism warns us that, in the text, we will find a “subterranean,” an “apparent Trophonius,” at work (D Preface 1). If we have “eyes for such work of the depths,” Nietzsche claims, we will see, how he makes his way forward slowly, deliberately, with calm relentlessness, scarcely betraying the hardship that accompanies every lengthy deprivation of light and air; even in his work in the dark, you could call him content. (D Preface 1) Nietzsche suggests that the process of engaging with the depths, like a “mole,” does impose some considerable hardships upon the “subterranean,” including darkness, concealment, enigma, and incomprehensibility (D Preface 1) and danger, chance, malice, and bad weather (D Preface 2). However, the ultimate contentment of the “subterranean” is made possible by the consoling knowledge that he will “become human” again and have “his own daybreak [eignen Morgen], his own salvation, his own dawn [eigne Morgenröthe]” (D Preface 1).15 As Nietzsche clarifies, in his mole form, he began to dig away at the “ancient trust” that philosophers have built on without realizing that it constitutes a shaky foundation: “trust in morality” (D Preface 2). Nietzsche suggests that morality has consistently proven herself to be the greatest mistress of seduction, characterizing morality as the philosophers’ “Circe” (D Preface 3). Because of this seduction, Nietzsche proposes, philosophers have built in vain and their constructions either lie in ruins, or are threatening to collapse (D Preface 3). As an example, Nietzsche points to Kant, who was under the impression that he had developed an objective moral system but whose thinking was not, Nietzsche contends, as successful in this regard as he imagines: it is infected not only with the rapturous enthusiasm common to his century, but also with moral fanaticism courtesy of the influence of Rousseau



Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality

and pessimism (D Preface 3). We should not overlook the lack of charity in Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Kant’s philosophy in this aphorism — for example, he does not give specific examples from Kant’s writing beyond an extract from the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant remarks on the need to render the ground “level and suitable” for moral constructions, which is hardly sufficient to ground Nietzsche’s attack. One reason for engaging in a discussion of Kant as a victim of seduction by morality might be to shock readers into considering, at least momentarily, what might be (particularly if they are philosophers) an excessive credence in the correctness of Kant’s thinking. At the least, as Nietzsche suggests, it is to make the moral realm more approachable and hence more of an accessible target for critique (D Preface 3). Another possible explanation for the lack of charity in Nietzsche’s remark is that he is drawing on his earlier critique of science’s construction of a “columbarium of concepts” that he characterizes as a “graveyard of perceptions” in On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, because it produces a “regular and rigid new world” that acts as a prison for the drive to metaphor formation (OTL 2). In the same way that the scientific investigator of On Truth and Lying seeks shelter beside the tower of science and in so doing, imprisons their perceptions within conceptual orthodoxy, so too does Kant’s moral investigator unwittingly fetter his perceptions with moral presumptions that inhibit some facets of investigation. This does not excuse Nietzsche’s uncharitable approach to Kant’s position, but it sheds some light on why Nietzsche might appeal to Kant in this way. This appeal illustrates his real target in Dawn: moral presumptions as key supports of morality, and the deleterious effects of such presumptions on seeking understanding of ourselves and the world. More support for this view is evident in the third aphorism of Nietzsche’s Preface to Dawn, in which he is careful to categorize all philosophers’ judgments as subject to the seduction of morality. As Nietzsche could potentially have restricted his remarks to the context of ethical matters, this raises the question as to why he incorporates all facets of philosophy into this initial critique. A partial answer to this question is provided when Nietzsche suggests that faith in reason is fundamentally a moral phenomenon and requires challenge (D Preface 4). Because of this, he proposes that German pessimism needs to run its full course, which would entail giving notice to trust in morality “out of morality” (D Preface 4). It is clear that at least two senses of morality are at work in this phrasing, one of which is the object of critique, and the other of which is an alternative position sustaining the critique.16 Even while Nietzsche names giving notice to trust in morality as the task he takes on in Dawn, he also points to the possibility of exploring ourselves as “people of conscience” following a last morality that tells us how to live (D Preface 4). This is so in as far as we still sense an imperative or “thou shalt” governing our actions, which Nietzsche characterizes as follows:

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we do not want to go back once more into what we deem outlived and decayed, into anything at all “unworthy of belief,” call it God, virtue, truth, justice, or love thy neighbour; in that we allow ourselves no bridges of lies to old ideals; in that we are inimical to the core to everything that would like to appease and to interfere with us; inimical as well to every present type of faith and Christianness; inimical to the half-and-half of all Romanticism and fatherland-fanaticism; inimical as well to artists’ love of pleasure and their lack of conscience, which would like to convince us to worship where we no longer believe — for we are artists — inimical, in short, to the whole of European feminism (or idealism if that sounds better to you) (D Preface 4) Our status as godless ones, “immoralists,” is contingent on a process of ongoing change in moral matters that he terms the “self-sublation of morality” [Selbstaufhebung der Moral] (D Preface 4). This is the process in which readers of Dawn are invited to participate. Nietzsche wants to undermine our confidence in morality, but at the same time he recognizes that in an important respect such confidence is withdrawn “out of morality;” and this is because, he says, “here … we too are men of confidence, in that we do not want to go back again to that which we regard as outlived and decayed” (D Preface 4). In the Preface to Dawn, Nietzsche appeals to the need for “more modest words” when it comes to morality and to describing and accounting for ourselves. The “modest” approach to the phenomenon of morality Nietzsche proposes stands in marked contrast to what he thinks philosophers have accustomed themselves to doing in the study of it, namely, demanding from themselves something “exalted, presumptuous, and solemn.” He holds that philosophers have been speaking about morality from a very limited realm of experience and knowledge. In short, they have not been conscientious enough in their understanding of it. The process of self-sublation, however, is not a quick one. In the final aphorism of the Preface, Nietzsche speaks to “friends of the lento” including himself as well of the text of Dawn as such; he suggests that while this Preface has come “late, but not too late,” its timing is unproblematic because “a book, a problem” like this one — the question of morality — “has no hurry” (D Preface 5). He points out that it is unnecessary to proclaim “what we are, what we want and don’t want” loudly and with fervor (D Preface 5). Instead, the circle of friends that comprise himself, the book, and other slow readers and writers “go aside, take time” and become still and slow (D Preface 5). He admits this is likely to drive to despair the type of person who is always in a hurry; however, he suggests that nothing will be achieved if it is not achieved “lento” (D Preface 5). As a philologist, he explicitly states he wants careful readers who adopt the precepts of reading well as philologists think of so doing: “which means to read slowly, deeply, backward and ­forward with care and respect, with reservations, with doors left open, with



Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality

­ elicate fingers and eyes” (D Preface 5). It is with this injunction to careful reading d in mind that we turn to consider Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in the original five hundred and seventy-five aphorisms of the text.

­Nietzsche’s Original Campaign Against Morality Might Nietzsche plausibly be taken to go about the task of campaigning against morality effectively, and if so, how? One way to begin to respond to this question is to attend to Nietzsche’s differentiation between two possible ways of denying morality (D 103). First, someone might deny morality on the basis that the ethical motivations that people claim drive their actions do not in fact do so, and are nothing more than words (D 103). Second, someone might deny morality by denying that ethical judgments are based on truths (D 103). While Nietzsche points out that the “sensitive mistrust” of the first approach is worthwhile, he acknowledges the second approach to be his own view on the matter (D 103). He points out that “errors operate as the foundation for all ethical judgements” and that these are what “drive human beings to their moral actions” (D 103). He therefore denies “immorality” on the basis that feeling immoral according to the presumptions of customary morality is not justified (D 103). His point is not to deny that anyone could ever be judged to be immoral according to the terms of customary morality, which would clearly be implausible. Rather, the feeling of immorality — the feeling that one has done something wrong according to the customary traditions and norms of moral behavior — is itself problematic. What is at issue is why, precisely, such a feeling could be deemed problematic. As Nietzsche puts it: I don’t deny that it is best to avoid and to struggle against many actions that are considered immoral; likewise that it is best to perform and promote many that are considered moral — but I maintain: the former should be avoided and the latter promoted for different reasons than heretofore. We must learn to think differently— in order finally, perhaps very late, to achieve even more: to feel differently (D 103) Under the conditions of customary morality, we assume that we have made a mistake and have acted unethically. Nietzsche’s claim about error being the foundation for ethical judgment opens up the possibility that falsifications or errors are not intrinsically or absolutely wrong, and may be necessary or useful. Customary moral successes and failures may not count as such, at least not for the same reasons, from a non-customary moral perspective. It is also important to notice here that Nietzsche’s expressed aspiration is to promote a change in feeling, not simply in moral reasoning or judgment: we shall have more to say on feeling later.

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Nietzsche’s thinking on error is perhaps why, when he speaks of retroactive rationality in the first aphorism of the text, he directs our attention to the emergence of seemingly rational things out of unreason; as he suggests, exact histories of emergence might strike us as “feeling paradoxical and outrageous” (D 1). Nietzsche adds contradiction to outrage as the “constant” contribution of the good historian and suggests that these two components might frame how we currently understand “morality” (D 1). In the second aphorism, Nietzsche raises an initial question of morality: he points out that while scholars are correct that humans of every historical epoch “thought they knew what was good and evil, praise- and blameworthy,” they make a presumption if they suggest that “we know it better now than in any other epoch” (D 2). In these first two aphorisms, Nietzsche suggests not only that there are presumptions or presuppositions about morality, but also that these presuppositions may be false: and if so, then there are grounds to call morality into question. Nietzsche embarks on the process of questioning customary morality in the next aphorism, by claiming that just as humans have, without justification, assigned genders to things in language, so too have they mistakenly “conferred on everything that exists a relationship to morality [zur Moral] and have laid upon the world’s shoulders an ethical [ethische] significance” (D 3).17 With this in mind, Nietzsche explicitly describes the type of morality that he aims to challenge as constituting: “nothing other (therefore, above all no more!) than obedience to customs, no matter what ilk they might happen to be” (D 9).18 For Nietzsche, customs are “the traditional manner of acting and evaluating” (D 9). Where unfree human beings are constrained by their obedience to customary morality, Nietzsche suggests that free human beings would be “unaccustomed and immoral” by the standards of the morality that he is calling into question, because such individuals want to depend on themselves “and not upon a tradition” that “commands” (D 9). He further suggests that primitive societies treat anything individual as equating to evil; actions that are performed out of any other motive than tradition or custom, such as the seeking of individual advantage, are not only said to be immoral but are perceived as such, including by their perpetrators (D 9). In the same aphorism, Nietzsche contends that one of the key aspects of human flourishing and development that is inhibited by customary morality is the capacity for independent law-giving (D 9). The most moral person, from the perspective of customary morality, is the person who sacrifices the most to custom (D 9). Ultimately, the person who sacrifices the most is the person who overcomes the self in order that custom will triumph, even including over benefit to individuals (D 9). Any individual who fails to acquiesce to customary morality’s demand for sacrifice may be subject to a demand for compensation or even to revenge exacted by the community (D 9). Nietzsche illustrates the deleterious effect of the sacrificial demand of customary morality, both on the sick and the weak members of



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society who “do not have the courage to get healthy” — and on a few others who may perhaps possess this courage, or come to possess it — when he explains how societies based on customary morality are filled with “little revenge addicts” and “their little revenge-acts,” which have an “immense” impact on society (D 323). As he points out, the situation is toxic: “the whole air is constantly buzzing from the arrows and darts launched by their malice such that the sun and sky of life are darkened by it — not just for them but even more so for us, the others, the remaining ones” (D 323). The effects of customary morality are sufficiently sickening that these “remaining ones” may end up denying the sun and sky of life; hence, for the sake of health, Nietzsche recommends that they seek solitude (D 323). Nietzsche further suggests that those with the courage to do so should take responsibility for their health and become their own physicians: this would, he thinks, help those able to do so to ponder their own health in better conscience, and to “abjure and adjure” themselves — in short, to self-legislate — more effectively than would be accomplished if they simply followed doctor’s orders (D 322). Hence, while a customary moral agent follows rules for health promotion that are laid out by others, a non-customary moral agent breaks with custom and takes responsibility for promoting their own health. To return to the phrasing of the 1886 Preface, such a person gives notice to morality out of morality (D Preface 4). This non-customary moral agent is immoral by the lights of customary morality — but is not necessarily unethical because of this.19 This is the kind of human being that Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in Dawn seeks to make possible and sustain, for reasons of health, as we have seen. This raises a new question: why exactly do we remain customary moral agents, rather than becoming non-customary ones  —  and how might we change to become non-customary moral agents? In pursuit of a response, we can first consider Nietzsche’s examining of the possibility that our adherence to and appreciation of customs is based on how old the custom is, rather than on what is perceived to be useful or harmful about a particular custom — the persistence of customs over time lends them “sanctity” and “inscrutability” (D 19). We therefore tend to abide by moral customs, Nietzsche argues, in significant part because the longer that a custom or tradition has been present within society, the greater the taboo that exists against contravening it (D 9). A tradition is to a certain extent its own justification: we obey a traditional source of authority “because it commands,” not because it “commands what is useful to us” (D 9). Habit is a partial, but not a sufficient, explanation for our customary moral agency; in addition to habit, Nietzsche also examines how individuality factors into moral behavior. Individuality, he contends, is a threat to customary morality  —  the individual must sacrifice their own preferences, desires, and needs in order for customary morality to be sustained (D 9). This is because in the past, our “traffic with one another and with the gods” had been a part of “the domain of morality”; Nietzsche

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contends that one of the key demands of this domain is that we must “observe rules and precepts” without thinking of ourselves as individuals (D 9). According to him, if everything is originally a matter of custom, then the creation of any new custom requires that an individual elevate themselves above custom (D 9). The mere prospect of someone becoming a “lawgiver” through creating customs is “terrifying” and “life-threatening” from the perspective of customary morality, because of the risk of negative consequences that it entails (D 9). Someone might well point out here that Nietzsche’s characterization of fear in response to independent acts of legislating seems too extreme. To mitigate this worry, it is important to keep in mind that when compared with other feelings of fear, Nietzsche identifies the kind of fear that promotes obedience to customary morality as being of a particular kind. He describes what is special about this kind of fear as follows: It is that fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal — there is superstition in this fear (D 9) The fear in question is of inexplicable and indeterminate power, and it is not entirely rational. The aspect of it that is an intuitive response to the possible wrath of an unknown power is superstitious, as Nietzsche identifies. We might imagine that it is easy to dismiss the inexplicable unknown, but as Nietzsche points out, a fearful person is never truly alone; such a person intuits an enemy “always standing behind his chair” (D 249). That a fear is irrational superstition does not make it less powerful: a phobia about flying, for instance, may be irrational yet may still prompt someone to utterly constrain their behavior and feelings, for example, by not flying to see much-missed loved ones living overseas. And Nietzsche adds further support to this by showing how by virtue of our capacity for empathy — literally the capacity to reproduce the feelings of others in ourselves — humans are “the most timorous of all creatures” and their timidity is self-reinforcing because we see in “everything alien and alive a danger” (D 142).20 However, there is also a rational component to the kind of fear under discussion in D 9, and this lies in the threat of exclusion from the customary moral community for contravening a moral custom or law, and bringing down ­possible retribution upon the community. Regardless of whether or not the “inexplicable, indeterminate power” amounts to much, it is rational for an individual to be concerned about exclusion from their community, especially if that community follows customs that are formed to appease such a power. Every person experiencing both the irrational superstitious fear and this more rational fear contributes to the broader pervasiveness of fear within the broader social environment. It is worth noting that this account of fear as



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r­ einforcing obedience to customary morality is not unique to Dawn: Nietzsche similarly discusses the ­production of fear through social reinforcement in later works such as Beyond Good and Evil, where he builds on this account by contending that fear is taken as the determinant of the power relations within a specific community as well as across different communities, and how moral values become established according to how certain actions will affect the well-being of the group (BGE 201).21 An important example of the kind of error-laden scrutiny that arises among people in such a community context, and which recalls Nietzsche’s earlier remarks on error in Dawn 103 discussed earlier, is given in Dawn 102. In this aphorism, Nietzsche asks us how we respond to the behavior of someone in our presence, and notes the errors that are involved in our responses. First, we view behavior with an eye for what emerges from it for ourselves, and thus see behavior only from our own point of view; second, we take this effect to be the real intention of the behavior; and finally, third, we ascribe the holding of these intentions to the other person as if this constituted their most fundamental character trait — for example, we decide to label the person injurious. Nietzsche wonders whether the origin of all morality might reside in such “petty inferences,” and whether it is an inheritance from animals and their power of judgment: whatever injures me is something evil or injurious per se and whatever benefits me is something good or advantageous per se (D 102). The fundamental error is in turning another person’s accidental relation to us into their essence, ascribing to them some kind of essential core self in the process. Alongside this “genuine folly,” Nietzsche says, is another arrogant and misleading motive that compounds the existing error: “that we ourselves must be the principle of good, because good and evil are apportioned according to us” (D 102). Customary morality is problematic, Nietzsche proposes, not simply because it involves error, deceit, and falsification, but because it does so without owning up to this — thus undermining its own presumptions about its truth and its absolute rectitude. As he puts it: To accept a faith merely because it is the custom — that is certainly tantamount to: being dishonest [unredlich], being cowardly, being lazy! — And so that would make dishonesty [Unredlichkeit], cowardice, and laziness the preconditions of morality? (D 101)22 Moreover, customary morality operates in ways that are either directly harmful to individuals and communities, including to their health, or that are uninterested in the usefulness of customs and the needs of individuals or communities. But at root we do not challenge customary morality, Nietzsche thinks, because we are afraid.

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­Problems with the Campaign Against Morality The basic problem with the campaign against morality that Nietzsche pursues in the original aphorisms of Dawn can be developed in greater depth by examining evidence from its 1886 Preface, which illustrates Nietzsche’s awareness of the challenge that his campaign against morality faces. One challenge is that campaigning against morality is — by the standards of the kind of morality in question — immoral. The degree of authority that customary morality holds makes it exceptionally difficult to subject it to critical question: As with every authority, in the presence of morality one precisely should not think or, even less, speak one’s mind; here, one--obeys! As long as the world has existed, no authority has ever willingly permitted itself to become the object of critique; and even to think of criticizing morality, to consider morality as a problem, as problematic: what? was that not--is that not--­ immoral? (D Preface 3) Notice that this is both a psychological point and a philosophical one. Psychologically, it is difficult to challenge a near-supreme authority, especially one that most of us have spent most of our lives recognizing as such, both individually and in social contexts, and being rewarded for so doing. Philosophically, the difficulty arises because there is an apparent lack of sufficient epistemic as well as ethical grounds on which to base a challenge to morality. One concern, then, is how to engage critically with a form of authority that can immediately dismiss such a critical project from a sufficient foundation. Nietzsche provides a way to overcome this challenge by developing a new, psychological, foundation for his campaign against morality.23 He moves the campaign against morality from the overground of rationality to the underground, identifying the “moral mine” of human drives as the framework for his campaign (D Preface 1; D 119). The “ebb and flow” and “play and counter-play” of drives allows us to challenge customary adherence to the notion of a singular authoritative basis for moral judgments and actions, and to disrupt mindless faith in reason. The second challenge facing Nietzsche’s campaign is that morality seduces us, because it knows how to “inspire” [begeistern] each of us (D Preface §3). In notes on his translation of Dawn, Brittain Smith points out that begeistern may be translated as “to inspire,” “to enthuse,” and “to breathe spirit [Geist] into.”24 The chief method by which morality seduces us is through the medium of language: moral language can overpower us without our consent, and even without our noticing. This is supported by Nietzsche’s remarks on how language reinforces error; he argues that language and its governing prejudices develop words only for ­“superlative” degrees of processes and drives, not for their more subtle variations



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(D 115). For example, we have words for extreme states such as “[w]rath, love, compassion, pain” but not for intermediate, milder states or lower states; we are wholly unaware of these lower states, yet even so, they still form our characters and direct our actions (D 115). If we were to develop words by which to name and enumerate these lower states, doing so may not help us; as Nietzsche points out, “perpetually petrified words” form substantial impediments to solving problems, and indeed count as problems, including morality (D 47). As he puts it, “[t]he words get in our way!” (D 47). Hence, trying to campaign against customary morality can lead us back into supporting customary morality. We are likely to fall into using customary moral terminology and concepts to discuss extreme states of being; where words are lacking for less extreme states, Nietzsche claims that we “tend no longer to engage in precise observation because it is painfully awkward for us to think precisely at that juncture” (D 115). As a further piece of evidence in support of this explanation of the second challenge to his campaign against customary morality, consider Nietzsche’s example of anarchist discourse, in which he draws to our attention “how morally [anarchists] evince in order to convince” (D Preface 3). Even though anarchists logically should not ally themselves to moral authority, they still, as Nietzsche points out, end up describing themselves as good and just in order to gain authority for their position — in short, they borrow the authority of moral language (D Preface 3). Nietzsche had already developed this point on the seduction of moral language in his original version of the text, arguing that even when we develop insights into the development of morality, such insights “stick to our tongue and don’t want out: because they sound coarse!” (D 9). The example of anarchists provides a practical context in which to observe the significance of this challenge to Nietzsche’s project in Dawn. We can take this concern in concert with the third challenge to Nietzsche’s ­project — overcoming the fear of contravening custom (D 9). Each of us is afraid that we might perform some non-customary action just as much as we fear the negative consequences for society of our performing such an action. As we saw, part of this fear is rational and part is the product of superstition. For Nietzsche, individual fears give rise not simply to a community fear as the sum of individual concerns, but to a social mood of fear that forms part of the fabric of customary action in the social context, and which further compounds the difficulty of ­campaigning against customary morality.25 Nietzsche explicitly calls attention to a climate of fear in terms of mood at the end of Dawn 9, using the metaphor of weather to characterize this mood. He suggests that because of the fear induced by customary morality, “any form of originality has acquired an evil conscience; accordingly, the sky above the best of humanity continues to this very minute to be cloudier, gloomier than necessary” (D 9). He also introduces the concept of mood as argument in Dawn 28, contending that mood is used in place of argument by customary morality, making it harder for us to countermand it.

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As Christopher Janaway has pointed out, rhetoric is used by Nietzsche to ­facilitate change in our moral thinking not only through linguistic analysis but also through the affective power of writing, as this works in and through each individual.26 Nietzsche suggests that it is possible to use mood strategically in order to challenge the authority of customary morality (D 28). Doing so would help us move past the seduction of morality by campaigning against morality through the medium of feelings instead of solely through language or reasoning.27 Moreover, this would enable alteration or replacement of the social mood of fear — or at least, disruption of this mood that may be beneficial to Nietzsche’s campaign. In putting forward this possibility in Dawn 28, Nietzsche compares two possible ways of explaining the experience of a “joyous resolve to act.” The first way identifies God as the cause of all actions; the feeling of joyous resolve is God’s way of letting us know that our intention to act in some particular way has received God’s approval. The second way focuses on the feeling of joy inherent to the resolution to act. According to the second way, an agent unsure of how to proceed may consider several possible actions — but according to Nietzsche, the agent will ultimately choose to proceed in the way most likely to bring about the feeling of joyous resolve to act. Producing the desired feeling is most important: Good mood was laid on the scales as argument and outweighed rationality: because mood was interpreted superstitiously as the workings of a god who promises success and allows his reason to speak through mood as the highest rationality (D 28) Hence Nietzsche shows that, while superstition animates both ways of explaining the feeling of joyous resolve to act, in the case of the second possible explanation, an argument beyond the creation of a mood is actually absent. Nietzsche goes on to suggest that “clever and power-hungry men” make effective use of mood as, or in place of, argument; by creating the mood, he says, “you can supplant all argument, vanquish any counter-argument!” (D 28). As Paul Franco has pointed out, even while Nietzsche does think that knowledge plays a role in action, such knowledge is directed at changing our “value-feelings” rather than at changing our goals or reasoning.28 With this account of Nietzsche’s strategic appeal to mood, in concert with the sustained criticism of customary morality, in place, we turn our attention to the question of what scope there is for a positive approach to the ethical in Dawn.

­Toward a Positive Ethics We have discussed how customary moral agents are conditioned by fear, individually and socially, and that their behavior and thinking is further conditioned by moral language whose conceptual and affective force is difficult to resist. In contrast, the



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people comprising the “we” to whom Nietzsche sometimes addresses himself in Dawn are emerging non-customary ethical agents, in two ways. First, their agency is not fixed or static — they are entities that are part of a process of development and change. Nietzsche’s thinking on drives, especially as developed in Dawn 119, is an important source of support for this point and will be discussed in more depth in our later Chapter 6 on subjectivity in Dawn. Second, the kind of approach to the ethical that these developing agents adopt is distinctive, because it not only involves ­throwing off old values but also experimenting with new ones.29 While the book creates a space for non-customary moral agents to come to know of themselves, Nietzsche does not provide a complete new ethical system in Dawn, and indeed he does not seek to do so. Making such an attempt would undermine the emphasis he places on the importance of perceiving, experiencing, and experimenting with ways of living and associated values as tools for challenging customary morality. Someone who seeks a set of rules to govern moral conduct might therefore find the positive dimension of Nietzsche’s approach to the ethical in Dawn to be dissatisfying. More seriously, such a person might also claim that Nietzsche’s ethical approach in Dawn is irresponsible, on the basis that, if we call customary morality into question without replacing it, we leave ourselves with no clear way to determine how and why our actions can be ethical or unethical. Nietzsche could, we think, make two replies to these concerns. First, the dissatisfied reader might consider whether they have sufficient grounds on which to demand a fixed set of rules in place of the kind of ethical opportunity Nietzsche opens up, namely to critically examine customary morality and to pursue possible new alternatives to it, exploring non-customary moral agency in the process. These grounds would have to be supremely compelling in order to render Nietzsche’s position inferior; short of affirming the existence of knowledge of an absolute truth about moral systems, such compulsion is not readily available. Nietzsche’s psychological argument concerning fear of questioning customary morality is the more likely explanation behind the dissatisfied reader’s demand. Second, the reader attributing irresponsibility to Nietzsche cannot base their claim on the assumption that Nietzsche’s account must bear the burden of proof with regard to a question that is relevant to all proposed approaches to responding to moral dilemmas, namely how we can know whether or not we act ethically. All approaches to ethical dilemmas may be flawed, and the phenomenon of moral luck illustrates that the correct application of a particular moral rule may not result in a satisfactory moral outcome.30 It is critical to understanding Dawn to attend to the point that the campaign against morality is conducted in aphoristic form. Graham Parkes has pointed out that there are both practical and philosophical reasons for Nietzsche’s aphorism use in the free-spirit writings, including Dawn. Beginning with Nietzsche’s composition of Human, All Too Human, increasingly poor eyesight made it impossible

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for Nietzsche to spend extended periods of time in writing extended prose, while philosophically, use of aphorism best supports philosophical work that is ­“resolutely unsystematic and psychologically experimental.”31 Aphorism ­supports Nietzsche’s experimental disruption of the social and emotional systemic functioning of customary morality in this text, and allows for exploration of alternatives to the mood of fear that, as we observed earlier, Nietzsche shows to be pervasive to customary morality. Notice that in the aphorisms, readers are explicitly encouraged to engage in exploring the affects involved in adopting the role in question. Nietzsche links this affective approach to understanding values to his conception of the ethical as a way of living: To be in possession of a dominion and at the same time inconspicuous and renouncing! To lie constantly in the sun and the kindness of grace and yet to know that the paths rising to the sublime are right at hand! That would be a life! That would be a reason to live, to live a long time (D 449) The aphorism is a powerful transformation tool: through it, readers can access the possibility of such a positive ethic and engage with it for themselves. Hence, the incompleteness of Nietzsche’s positive alternative to customary morality in Dawn is a sign of his commitment to the view that values in thinkers — moral values or other types of value  —  are works in progress. Nietzsche encouraged his friend Peter Gast to use the text of Dawn as a means to transformation of feeling; as he writes in a letter of June 23, 1881, “When you receive the copy of Dawn, please do me the honour: take it with you to the lido one day, read it as a whole and try to make it into a whole for yourself — in other words, a passionate state. If you don’t do that, nobody will.”32 We see this same commitment in later free-spirit writings, for instance in talk of “future philosophers” who will be very free spirits — freed not least from prejudices and rules (BGE 44). But such claims have an important grounding in Dawn. Values, on Nietzsche’s account in this text, are not static. As an example, consider Nietzsche’s examination of four cardinal ways of being virtuous  — ­probity [Redlich], brave, magnanimous, and polite (D 556). Of these, he claims that probity or worthiness [Redlichkeit] is the youngest, most immature, and most misunderstood and mistaken, and points out that it is among neither the Socratic nor the Christian virtues (D 456). Probity or worthiness [Redlichkeit], Nietzsche suggests, is a virtue in the process of becoming (D 456).33 It gives us a kind of device — a thumbscrew — that we could use to torture anyone wishing to impose their beliefs on the world; yet as he cautions, having tested this thumbscrew on ourselves, we should take care when directing it toward others (D 536). Nietzsche supports his claim for values as constant works in progress by using an allusion to water. While he claims to love people who are “transparent water” and who “do not hide from view the turbid bottom of their stream,” he also



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c­ autions against vanity in hiding transparency (D 558).34 In a discussion of dissimulation, Nietzsche points out that the more customary version of the relevant virtue, honesty [Ehrlichkeit] has “been reared to maturity on the requirement that one seem honest and upright” (D 248). In contrast, as Melissa Lane points out, for Nietzsche probity [Redlichkeit] is “something in the making” that we can “advance or retard” as we wish.35 Nietzsche uses the example of tranquility (both domestic tranquility, and tranquility of the soul) to claim that “[o]ur customary mood depends on the mood in which we manage to maintain our surroundings” (D 283). He indicates that an alternative mood, which may motivate us in our campaign against customary morality, might be that of powerful kindness — which he likens to the kindness of a father [Machtvolle Milde, wie die eines Vaters] (D 473). The imagined father is no traditional authoritarian. In a previous aphorism, Nietzsche suggested the model of a father confessor who works as a humble “doctor of the spirit” to the benefit of himself and others, embodying virtues such as helpfulness, humility, and love, yet at the same time, virtues such as self-interest, and self-enjoyment (D 449). Readers are encouraged to engage in exploring the affects involved in adopting the role in question: To be able to be humble so as to be accessible to many and humiliating to none! To have experienced much injustice and have crawled through the worm tunnels of every kind of error in order to be able to reach many ­hidden souls along their secret paths! Always in a type of love and a type of self-interest and self-enjoyment! (D 449). While Nietzsche has to balance possibility against the present, grim, reality of a customary morality rooted in fear, his description of such a possible life is strikingly positive. The construction of the aphorism and the image that it presents of an emotionally rich and constructive social climate are compelling. The written aphorism becomes a feature of the environment and, as such, is able to facilitate Nietzsche’s campaign to counter the prevailing mood of superstitious fear on individual and social levels.36 We can see why this is important when we consider the possibility of the failure of Nietzsche’s campaign against morality. Nietzsche contends that freethinkers, and more specifically freedoers, who can “break the spell of a custom with a deed,” have an important role to play in history (D 20). As he points out, such freedoers are often — wrongly — described as evil and subjected to abuse (D 20). To resist the seduction of moral language in their self-assessments as well as in society’s assessments of them is not easy, as mentioned earlier. But if the reader, or Nietzsche himself, falters in commitment to the campaign against morality, the text remains available as a vital external component of the cognitive work involved in campaign participation. Because of the sheer difficulty of campaigning against morality as a single individual, we might

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consider the aphoristic text of Dawn  —  to borrow from an account by Mark Rowlands  —  as an environmental structure that, having been constructed to manipulate and transform our mental processes, intervenes in relevant mental processes when either Nietzsche or ourselves, or indeed groups such as classes of students, engage in reading it.37 Nietzsche further encourages exploration of a possible new approach to the ethical through new ways of being. He uses the example of pregnancy to support this point: Is there a more consecrated condition than that of pregnancy? To do everything one does in the unspoken belief that it must be for the good of the one who is coming to be in us! This has to enhance its mysterious value upon which we think with delight! One thus avoids a great deal without having to force oneself too hard. One thus suppresses a violent word, one offers a conciliatory hand: the child must emerge from the mildest and best of conditions. We shudder at the thought of our sharpness and abruptness: what if it poured a drop of calamity into our dearest unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, full of presentiment, one has no idea how it will go, one waits it out and seeks to be ready (D 552) But while Nietzsche suggests here that we take responsibility for determining the outcome of the pregnancy, he also points to the importance of our irresponsibility and lack of complete control: In which time there reigns in us a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility, rather like a spectator has before the closed curtain: it is growing, it is coming to the light of day: we have in our hands nothing to determine, either its value or its hour. We are thrown back solely on that mediate influence of protecting. “It is something greater than we are that is growing here” is our innermost hope: we are preparing everything for it so that it will come into the world thriving: not only everything beneficial but also the affections and laurel wreaths of our soul. — One ought to live in this state of consecration! One can live in it! (D 552) On the one hand, Nietzsche claims that we care for the “one who is coming.” On the other hand, he acknowledges that we cannot be wholly responsible for determining the value or the time of this “one.” Nietzsche works to bring to our attention the limitations of our control over ourselves as well as of our control over others. We are pregnant with ourselves, and we do not have complete (or even, necessarily, particularly good) self-knowledge: we are always already in an expectant state. While we might try to explain ourselves in terms of consciousness and



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will, Nietzsche suggests, we can legitimately claim to “have no relationship other than pregnancy,” which logically holds, in the context of these aphorisms, for relationships of self-identity as well as relationships with others and with the broader natural world (D 552). We may meaningfully pursue the “mediate influence” of protection in an expectant state. Hence, Nietzsche advocates a mood of ideal selfishness for ourselves and others (D 552). When we are seized by a beneficial mood that promotes fruitfulness, we may adopt the relevant social setting in which the mood is produced (D 473). Being ideally selfish, Nietzsche claims, involves quite a different mood to the mood of the superstitious fear that is generated and reinforced by customary morality: the mood in which we live, this proud and tempered mood, is a balsam that extends far and wide around us even onto restless souls (D 552) We can, in other words, carefully observe our own and others’ reactions to natural and social environments in order to identify, exemplify, and inhabit behaviors and locations that help us to flourish. The mood of ideal selfishness is in part ecological, not purely individual.38 By attending to our flourishing in these ways, we can gradually shift ourselves out from the fetters that keep us locked within the pervasive mood of superstitious fear. Nietzsche’s appeal to this ideally selfish mood also opens up more support for the possible replies to the objections of potential dissatisfied and irresponsibilityattributing readers discussed earlier. Nietzsche acknowledges that the pregnant “are strange,” that pregnant persons should not find it problematic to be strange, and that we “should not be annoyed with others if they need to be so!” (D 552).39 On the same basis that he defends and indeed celebrates being “strange,” Nietzsche highlights the importance of the intellectual conscience (D 149). Nietzsche considers that a rational person of conviction might think a compromising action on their part with regard to social custom does not matter overmuch in the broader scheme of things. He gives several examples of compromise: an atheist having their child baptized in a Christian church; a pacifist completing military service “like everybody else”; and a “shameless” man marrying the woman with whom he is in a sexual relationship solely because her pious family expect a marriage to take place (D 149). In all three cases, it seems easier for everyone concerned simply to go along with custom. The point is that all such compromise achieves is to lend greater credence to the custom as a rational form of behavior. Deviance — even slight and seemingly insignificant deviance  —  contributes to Nietzsche’s campaign against morality by sustaining the mood of ideal selfishness. This mood also sustains two other important aspects of Nietzsche’s engagement with the possibility of a positive ethics in Dawn: (i) nourishment and (ii) the feeling

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of power. In his detailed discussion of drives in Dawn 119, Nietzsche attributes importance to our diet; because “laws of alimentation” are largely unknown to us, nourishment is essentially a matter of chance. Yet our diet and health are important, not least because they are not yet receiving the attention they require. As Nietzsche points out, “we lack above all the physicians for whom what up until this point we have called practical morality will have been transformed into a part of their science and art of healing” (D 202). As yet, he notes, instructions on the body and diet do not form part of the regular school curriculum, and such considerations have yet to be applied to our thinking about criminal justice (D 202). He rails against the customary diet of the “well-to-do class” on the basis of its unsuitability for promoting health (D 203). And in the same vein, he looks ahead to a future in which the modern human, whom he characterizes as “homo pamphagus,” will become incapable of digesting everything that they encounter, and will develop a “more refined” taste (D 171). As well as aiming to develop a more refined taste in what we incorporate, Nietzsche also indicates that our health would be benefited if we learned to seek out and promote the feeling of power (D 112, 113). Assessing rights and duties on the basis of power, he identifies duties as rights that others have over us, and our own rights as the part of our power that others concede to us and wish us to keep (D 112). Rights arise as degrees of power that are recognized and guaranteed to the extent that the power relationships on which they are based are stable; when these power relationships shift, rights disappear and new ones are established, both interpersonally and with respect to relations between nation states (D 112). Because of this “transitory nature of human affairs,” Nietzsche points out that fair-mindedness will take a great deal of practice and is difficult to achieve (D 112). This is especially the case with the striving for distinction, which Nietzsche identifies as the striving for domination of the other “be it very indirect and only sensed or even only imagined” (D 113). In a claim that prefigures his thinking on the ascetic in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche conceives of the striving for distinction as a ladder from barbarian to ascetic or martyr, in which the individual moves from torments, blows, and terror, to joy and serenity, to inflicting torments (D 113). The climbing of the ladder ends in tragedy: The ascetic’s triumph over himself, his eye trained inward throughout, beholding the human being cloven asunder into sufferer and spectator and henceforward only glancing into the exterior world in order, as it were, to gather from it wood for its own funeral pyre, this the last tragedy of the striving for distinction whereby there remains only a Single Character who burns to ash inside (D113) As Nietzsche points out, happiness  —  understood as “the liveliest feeling of power” — is perhaps greatest in the souls of ascetics (D 113).



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But, as he also considers, it might be possible to pursue this process once again from the beginning, hurting others in order to hurt oneself, and thereby to ­triumph over oneself and one’s pity, hence enabling us “to luxuriate in utmost power!” (D  113). He reimagines the tragedy of the ascetic as a moment of necessary destruction, in a message brought by a phoenix: Poet and bird. — The bird Phoenix showed the poet a flaming scroll turning to ashes. “Do not be terrified!” it said, “it is your work! It does not possess the spirit of the times and still less the spirit of those who are against the times: consequently it has to be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many types of dawn” (D 568) Nietzsche had earlier claimed that in the feeling of power, humans have developed their most refined taste and “subtlety”; as he puts it, “in this regard humans can now compete with the most delicate balance that measures gold” (D 23). Pursuing the feeling of power may involve pain, but it is, he thinks, the route most clear to us to develop the kind of taste that would facilitate our development from out of the unrefined, all-consuming, state of the modern human (D 171). If we listen to the message of the phoenix then we can seek the feeling of power without needing to be afraid. The image of the flaming scroll should remind us that Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in Dawn incorporates a campaign against the presumptions of moral philosophy. Although human beings of every epoch have believed they have known what is “good and evil, praise- and blameworthy,” Nietzsche points out that contemporary scholars are under the impression that they know this “better now than in any other epoch” (D 2). Yet this impression is a presumption — one that Nietzsche claims is a particular problem for the German approach to morality, because German scholars, according to him, are “the most German of Germans” in their tendency to obey, and to idealize obedience (D 207). Teachers of morality have had poor success in their work, because they have been over-ambitious in ­laying down “precepts” for everyone; the “animals” advised by teachers of morality to turn into “humans” find their lessons “boring” and unamenable (D 193). If scholars were able to retain their “proud, straightforward, and patient manner” and their independence of mind, then it might be possible to expect “great things” of them (D 207). Such scholars would be, Nietzsche suggests, “the embryonic state of something higher” (D 207). This embryonic scholar will find a more complete expression in Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche counts the philosophers of the future as “very free spirits” because “they will not be free spirits merely, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different” (BGE 44). Nietzsche’s prompting of human (and indeed scholarly) development and flourishing is the core purpose behind his mounting of a campaign against customary morality, and his pursuit of the possibility of a fresh approach to the ethical.

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Yet there is one further major barrier to his campaign: the significance of the virtue of compassion within customary morality. In Dawn, as we show in Chapter  3, Nietzsche develops a sustained set of criticisms of compassion in order to advance his campaign against morality. In his critical engagement with compassion, we suggest that Nietzsche displays a certain indebtedness to Kant and Schopenhauer, while also differentiating his approach to the ethical from these historical influences upon him.

Notes 1 Earlier versions of some parts of the material in this chapter were developed in Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House]), 139–58; Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76; and in Rebecca Bamford, “Dawn,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas (London: Routledge, 2018), 27–43. 2 Clark, “On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100–22. 3 See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985), especially chapters 1 and 10. 4 See e.g. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Ethics: the Essential Works 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1997), 253–81. 5 Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 417. 6 Schacht, Nietzsche, 417. 7 Schacht, Nietzsche, 418. 8 See Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110. See also Smith’s note in Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 291; and Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 59, 64, 199. We use customary morality throughout for the sake of clarity and consistency. 9 Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 83; Smith, Dawn, 291. 10 Paul Franco suggests that Nietzsche draws his concept of customary morality [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] (D 9) from Walter Bagehot’s notion of the “yoke of custom,” and also emphasizes the irrationality of morality’s primitive origins according to Nietzsche in Dawn. See Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 59, 63–64. In their



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essay on Dawn, Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter point out that for Nietzsche, customary morality includes the philosophical-moral sensibility of later societies as well as the custom-following superstitions of earlier societies, both of which are grounded in feelings. See Clark and Leiter, “Introduction,” in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxxii–iii. Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 83. See Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 280; Smith, Dawn, 291. Katrina Mitcheson draws attention to Nietzsche’s connection in GM between self-sublation and self-overcoming and the Hegelian inheritance that grounds this connection in Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. Christine Daigle finds that Nietzsche makes this claim twice: on the back cover of the first edition of The Gay Science, and in a letter to Lou Salomé of March 7, 1882, where he writes of “the work of 6 years (1876–1882), my whole ‘free-spiritedness’!” See Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit in Human, All Too Human,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015), 33–48, 33. The emphasis on “dawn” in this aphorism from the Preface to Dawn illustrates why we think the standard translation of the title of the book in common use should ideally be “Dawn,” which we use consistently throughout this volume, and not “Daybreak,” as in some of the available scholarship. Robertson, “The Scope Problem,” 82. The gendering of language is clearly evident in modern languages such as German, French, Spanish, and Russian, and ancient languages such as Greek and Latin, but is not so obvious in English. As an example, note that in German, “time” is feminine (die Zeit), “day” is masculine (der Tag), and “writing” is neuter (das Schreiben). Translation amended from “mores” to “customs.” Robert C. Solomon makes this point of the general trajectory of Nietzsche’s thinking on morality: Nietzsche does not advocate immorality; instead, he argues that a morality based on imperatives such as “thou shalt not” is inadequate as it ultimately leads to life denialism. See Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What The Great “Immoralist” Has To Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50. As one of us discusses in greater depth elsewhere, this theory of empathy is consistent with Nietzsche’s broader drive-based psycho-physiological explanation for the way in which customary morality consistently reinforces a social mood of superstitious fear. See Bamford, “Dawn.” See also later chapters in this volume. David E. Cooper, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 31.

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22 We will discuss the importance of probity or Redlichkeit in more depth later in this chapter. 23 Carl B. Sachs has shown that it is the drive psychology in Dawn that enables Nietzsche to explain the “material conditions of subjectivity,” including ­historical, social, psychological, and biological conditions. See Carl B. Sachs. 2008. “Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Toward a Naturalized Theory of Autonomy.” Epoché 13(1): 81–100. 24 Smith, Dawn, 288. 25 Lars Svendsen argues that low-intensity fear — which he defines as fear that “surrounds us and forms a backdrop of our experiences and interpretations of the world” — has the nature of a mood, rather than of an emotion. See Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 46 (originally published 2007 as Frykt, Universitetsforlagt, Oslo). See also Stanley Corngold. 1990. “Nietzsche’s Moods.” Studies in Romanticism 29(1): 67–90; Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism,” and Bamford, “Dawn.” 26 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 27 On morality and feeling, see also Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 76–77. 28 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 77. 29 We discuss the account of subjectivity that underpins this dimension of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality, and his critical reflection on compassion, in later chapters. 30 On forms of moral luck, including resultant and causal luck see, for example, Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 57–71. 31 Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 116. See also the letter of March 30, 1881 to Peter Gast in the Appendix to this volume, where Nietzsche writes: The bad condition of my eyes is pronounced, now. For example, after this winter’s work I have to let pass many days, without reading or writing a word; and I can hardly grasp how I managed to finish this manuscript. Full of desire to learn something and knowing perfectly well where the precise thing I wanted to learn was lodged, I have to let my life drift — as demanded by my miserable organs, head and eyes! And there is no question of a recovery! Everything becomes more wretched, and the darkness grows! 32 See the full letter in the Appendix to this volume. 33 Robert C. Solomon and Clancy Martin both agree that honesty is a Nietzschean virtue, although while Solomon thinks it is an emotion, Martin treats honesty as a drive or impulse. If emotions, feelings, moods, and related phenomena are drive-based, however, then neither of these accounts needs to be in conflict.



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Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Clancy W. Martin. 2006. “Nietzsche’s Homeric Lies.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 31: 1–9. 34 Nietzsche alludes directly to Alexander Pope in making this remark, but it is not clear to which work of Pope he refers. As one of us has shown in an earlier essay, it is most likely that Nietzsche is referring here to Pope’s letter to Congreve of 16 January 1714–15, in which Pope writes: Methinks, when I write to you, I am making a confession, I have got, I cannot tell how, such a custom of throwing myself out upon paper without reserve. You were not mistaken in what you judged of my temper of mind when I writ last. My faults will not be hid from you, and perhaps it is no dispraise to me that they will not. The cleanness and purity of one’s mind is never better proved than in discovering its own fault at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water.

See Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, volume 6; Correspondence, volume 1, ed. John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1871), 411. See also Bamford, “Daybreak,” 153. 35 Melissa Lane, “Honesty as the Best Policy?: Nietzsche on Redlichkeit and the Contrast between Stoic and Epicurean Strategies of the Self,” in Histories of Postmodernism: The Precursors, The Heyday, The Legacy, ed. Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing (New York: Routledge, 2007), 25–51. See also Herman Siemens and Katia Hay, “Ridendo Dicere Severum: On Probity, Laughter and Self-Critique in Nietzsche’s Figure of the Free Spirit,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 111–35. 36 In a previous paper, Rebecca Bamford pointed out that in previous analyses there are individual and social aspects to be balanced. In his book, Christopher Janaway focuses on the individual’s mood being changed by rhetoric, while in her essay, Bamford emphasizes that the environment (social, but also natural) not only plays a role in producing the individual’s mood but also actively contributes to the mood of social groups. See Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 98, and Bamford, “Dawn,” 30. 37 Mark Rowlands describes his active externalist view as “a thesis of constitution” involving that “[a]t least some mental processes are literally constituted, in part, by the manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of appropriate environmental structures; that is, some mental processes contain these operations as constituents.” See Mark Rowlands. 2009. “The Extended Mind.” Zygon 44(3): 628–41, 630. Daniel Conway has defended a related claim concerning Nietzsche’s texts as constituting a training ground for continuous self-improvement and self-development. See Daniel Conway “Nietzsche’s Perfect Day: Elegy and

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Rebirth in Ecce Homo” in Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo,” ed. Duncan Large and Nicholas Martin (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, in press). 38 For further discussion of this claim as based on extended cognition, see Bamford, “Mood and aphorism,” 70; and Bamford, “Dawn.” 39 Carl Sachs differentiates between heteronymous subjectivity as an internalization of domination, and an autonomous subjectivity that is capable, at least to some degree, of organizing itself. He claims that, “heteronomy and autonomy are characterized by attitudes of avoidance or acknowledgement with respect to the totality of conditions and relations which make them possible” (“Nietzsche’s Daybreak” 2008, 93). According to the terms of this argument on mood, we may classify heteronymous subjects as fearful and autonomous subjects as capable of moderating fear by means of sustaining different mood(s) such as ideal selfishness.

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3 Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity Nietzsche’s analyses of religion in Human, All Too Human and Dawn shows him at his philosophical strongest, featuring as they do probing analyses that combine fearless psychological insight, novel sociological observation, and skeptical ­acumen. In this chapter, we wish to focus on Nietzsche’s analyses of religion and Christianity, as well as a religious figure such as Saint Paul, so as to highlight the character of his critical procedures and the probing manner in which he subjects so-called “spiritual” phenomena and matters to psychological scrutiny. For Nietzsche, at the heart of religious passions and ideals is the feeling of power, and the need for this feeling to satisfy itself. Out of a commitment to intellectual ­probity he wants to convince his readers of the need to bravely confront the “human, all too human” when it comes to elevated phenomena such as religious matters. We will first examine Nietzsche’s remarks in Human, All Too Human, in order to show how this discussion paves the way for his subsequent analysis in Dawn. The chapter on religion in Human, All Too Human affords excellent insight into Nietzsche’s deflationary efforts in the text that aim at exposing the “human, all too human” at the heart of ideal things and so-called “spiritual” matters. In Human, All Too Human 110 Nietzsche articulates his specific appreciation of religion. While acknowledging that the Enlightenment failed to do justice to religion, it is just as certain that in the period of the reaction against the Enlightenment — with the rise of romanticism, for example — injustice was also committed. Here we find an attempt to do justice to religion by claiming it contains allegorical truths, some age-old wisdom that is folk wisdom itself. On this basis, such seekers of religious truth and science sought harmony. Nietzsche maintains that religion and proper science dwell on different stars, and he is keen to expose two things: first, the “tricks of theology”, and second, those poetizing philosophers and philosophizing artists who have allowed their own experience of religious sensations to exert an influence on the conceptual structure of their philosophical systems. Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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His argument is that a religious sensibility has “crawled into existence” on “errant paths of reason”. Although it may have been endangered by a scientific way of thinking at a point in its development, religion has survived by mendaciously absorbing a philosophical doctrine into its system of belief. This is a “trick” of theology we can see at work in early Christianity where we encounter “the religion of a learned age saturated with philosophy”, and from this there has been generated superstitions concerning a “sensus allegoricus” (HH 110). Regarding the  second point, Nietzsche argues that philosophers have frequently practised philosophy either under the direct influence of religious habits or under the ancient hereditary power of the metaphysical need, so arriving at doctrines that can appear strikingly similar to beliefs we find in Jewish, Christian, and Indian religious systems. Now, however, Nietzsche thinks humanity will make progress in its quest for maturity if philosophers stop spinning fables about a family ­resemblance between religion and scientifically-minded philosophy. In Christianity Nietzsche locates a curious psychology of salvation: it seeks to crush and shatter the human being, to sink them into slimy depths; then as if by a miracle, in the midst of this feeling of complete depravity, there shines the gleam of a divine compassion [Mitleid], “so that someone surprised and stunned by grace let out a cry of rapture and for a moment believed that he bore the whole of Heaven within him” (HH 114). All the psychological discoveries of Christianity, Nietzsche notes, are made to work on this pathological excess of feeling: “it wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate; there is only one thing it does not want: ­measure, and hence it is, when understood most profoundly, barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, non-Greek” (HH 114). For Nietzsche, then, a false psychology, including a fantasizing in the interpretation of motives and events, “is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian and feeling the need for salvation” (HH 135). Nietzsche is attempting to develop a purely psychological explanation of the religious states, including the need for salvation, one that will be free of mythology (HH 132). He notes that it is by comparing himself with a superhuman being, one capable of so-called purely unegoistical actions and who lives in perpetual consciousness of an unselfish way of thinking, and with a god, that the religious person looks upon his or her human nature so gloomily, as if it were deformed. To arrive at such a way of being, which also includes the perception of a god full of wrath and menace, a god as judge and executioner, is not, Nietzsche insists, due to guilt or sin but solely the result of a series of errors in reasoning: “It was the fault of the mirror if their nature appeared to them so gloomy and hateful, and that mirror was their work, the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgment” (HH 133). The first error is to suppose that there exists a being capable of purely unegoistical actions since this is even more fantastic than the phoenix. Such an idea is neither clear nor distinct and cannot withstand close examination. Nietzsche notes that informing an action is always some personal motive or need, hence the ego cannot act without ego. Second, is the error of supposing a god who

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is wholly love. Here Nietzsche draws on the ideas of Georg Lichtenberg who asks us to consider whether love without some corresponding pleasure of the self is possible. The whole psychology of love needs exposing: even if some human being should wish to be just like that god, to be love, to do and to want everything for others, nothing for himself, it would be impossible, if only because he must do a great deal for himself just to be able to do some things for the sake of others. And then it presupposes that the other person is enough of egoist to accept that sacrifice, that living for him, over and over again: so that loving, self-sacrificing people have an interest in the continued existence of egoists who are without love and incapable of self-sacrifice, and in order for the highest morality to be able to persist, it would really have to force immorality to exist (whereby it would admittedly negate itself) (HH 133) The Christian, then, experiences self-contempt owing to errors of reasoning, “that is, due to a false, unscientific interpretation of his actions and sensations.” Is it not the case that the feeling of contempt, and of displeasure in general, does not persist, “how hours occasionally arrive when all this is blown away from his soul, and he once again feels himself free and courageous”? What has carried off the victory is in part his own strength (combined with the necessary decrease in every profound stimulation), but the new self-love the Christian experiences strikes him or her as something unbelievable and has to be seen as the unmerited radiance on them of some luminous grace from above. Where the Christian previously saw warnings, threats, and punishments, he or she now reads divine goodness into their experiences: the judge-like god is now a merciful god. In truth, Nietzsche argues, what is called grace and a prelude to salvation is really self-pardoning and self-redemption. In Human, All Too Human137 Nietzsche seeks to explain “defiance of oneself” and the ascetic forms it takes in terms of the need to exercise a passion for power [Gewalt] and domination [Herrschsucht] (in HH 142 Nietzsche speaks of “the feeling of power [das Gefühl der Macht]”). Where this lacks objects, it can be turned on the self, that is, on certain parts of one’s nature. The shattering of oneself, including the mockery of one’s own nature, is, Nietzsche contends, a “very high degree of vanity.” A large part of morality and its success can be explained in these terms: The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount fits in here: people have a genuine pleasure in violating themselves with excessive demands and then idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in their souls afterward. In every ascetic morality [Moral] people worship a part of themselves as a god and therefore need to diabolize the remaining part (HH 142)

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In Human, All Too Human 138 Nietzsche seeks to show that acts of self-denial are basically not moral actions as they are taken to be, in which they are carried out strictly with regard to others. He begins by noting that human beings are not equally moral at all times and that if we judge a person’s morality by their aptitude for great, self-sacrificing resolve and self-renunciation (what is called “holiness”), then, “they are the most moral in regard to affect.” Some increase in the level of simulation presents a person with new motives, ones that they would consider themselves to be capable of in their ordinary sober state. In Human, All Too Human 139 Nietzsche seeks to invert our typical appreciation of the saintly existence as a phenomenon of some heroic feat of morality. He notes that the relinquishing of the will once and for all is, in fact, easier than relinquishing it occasionally, just as the renunciation of a desire is easier than keeping it within measure and unconditional obedience is more convenient than a conditional kind. Therefore, the saint makes their life easier by renouncing his or her personality. Indeed, subordination carried out in this manner can be a powerful means of achieving self-mastery, “we are occupied, hence not bored, and yet have no wilful or passionate impulses; after carrying out an action, the feeling of responsibility and hence the agony of regret are absent.” However, the most common means that the saint and the ascetic have at their disposal as a way of making their lives endurable is that of occasionally waging war on themselves, locating the enemy within, so alternating between victory and defeat: He makes use especially of his proclivity for vanity, ambition, and love of power, and then of his sensual desires, in allowing himself to look upon his life as an ongoing battle and himself as a battlefield on which good and evil spirits struggle with varying success … It was in their interest to maintain this battle at some level of intensity because through it … their empty lives were sustained (HH 141) By battling and overcoming this enemy within the saint is able to present themself ever anew to the non-saint as a supernatural being: Their upward and downward fluctuations of the scales of pride and humility entertained their brooding heads just as well as the alternation between desire and tranquility of soul. Back them psychology served not only to make everything human seem suspicious, but also to slander, to flagellate, to crucify; people wanted to consider themselves as bad and evil as possible, they sought out anxiety about the soul’s salvation, despair of their own strength (HH 141) As Nietzsche astutely notes, giving the example of the erotic, everything natural to which humanity attaches ideas of badness and sinfulness, serves to trouble and

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darken the imagination and makes us uncertain and mistrustful: “even our dreams assume an aftertaste of the tormented conscience” (HH 141). He makes the simple point, almost exasperatedly, that our suffering in this manner from what is ­natural  —  sensual desire, for example  —  “is wholly ungrounded in the reality of things” and is the result of our opinions about things. It is a trick of religion and metaphysicians to make nature seem so suspect: “Living for a long time in what is natural, they gradually feel themselves oppressed by such a ­burden of sins that supernatural powers become necessary for lifting this ­burden; and with this, the aforementioned need for salvation enters the scene” and corresponding only to an imagined sinfulness (HH 141). Nietzsche even contends that the aim in Christianity is not to make people moral, since it profits much more from them considering themselves to be as sinful as possible. If in the world of antiquity ingenuity was expended in an effort to increase the joy in life through festivals and festive cults, then in the Christian era, a huge amount of spirit has been spent on making people feel sinful in every way. Nietzsche speculates that such a stimulation and invigoration of the affects may be the sign of an enervated and over-cultivated time or age. In a situation where the circle of natural sensations had been run through dozens of times and the soul had grown tired of them, the saint and the ascetic discover a new class of enlivening stimulants: The eye of the saint, directed upon the significance, dreadful in every respect, of a brief earthly existence, upon the nearness of the final judgment concerning endless new stretches of life, this scorching eye in a halfdestroyed body made the people of the ancient world tremble to their depths; to look, shudderingly to look away, to sense anew the stimulating attraction of the spectacle, to give in to it, to sate oneself with it until the soul trembles with fever and chills — that was the final pleasure that antiquity discovered after it had itself grown indifferent to the sight of contests between animals or between men (HH 141) It is not what the saint is but what he or she has meant to non-saints that has given the saint a “world-historical value” (HH 143). It is people’s mistaken perception of saints that has allowed them to assume a superhuman appearance, beings that were neither especially good nor wise but that reached beyond human measure in goodness and wisdom. The saint has been devoid of self-knowledge, he or she did not understand themself: “What was perverse and sick in his nature, with its coupling together of spiritual poverty, faulty knowledge, ruined health, and overexcited nerves, remained as hidden from his own glance as from those contemplating him” (HH 143). So long as the belief in the saint is maintained there is belief in divine and miraculous things and in a religious meaning for all existence, including an imminent, final, Day of Judgment. In the final section of this part of the book Nietzsche acknowledges that a different, more pleasing picture of the saint could be drawn if one also considered the

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Indian saints. He also mentions Christ as the begotten son of God and who felt himself to be without sin and who thus reached the same goal that we now obtain though science: the “complete freedom from responsibility” for our nature (HH 144). For Nietzsche, then, religion has its sources in human ills. Instead of identifying the cause of an ill we concentrate on the effect and attempt to reinterpret it and change the effect it produces on our sensibilities. Religious priests in fact live on the narcotizing of human ills (HH 108). One of Nietzsche’s most important aphorisms in Human, All Too Human concerns the origin [Ursprung] of the religious cult (HH 111). If we transport ourselves back to the ages when the religious life flourished most vigorously, we discover a deep conviction that we no longer share and that shows that this way of life is now closed to us, namely, our traffic with nature. In short, Nietzsche’s argument is that here any notion of “natural causality” is lacking; early humans know nothing of natural laws, and events are not constrained by any compulsion: a season, sunshine, or rain may come or fail to come. When we row a ship, it is not the rowing that moves the ship but a magical ceremony that compels a demon to move it. Illness and death are not natural events but the result of magical influences. We only see the idea of a natural occurrence coming into human consciousness in a late phase of humanity, with the older Greek civilizations and the conception of “Moira” (fate) that is enthroned above the gods. If we look at the old religious sensibility, then we encounter a world that we no longer recognize, a world in which artifacts and the whole domain of nature are treated as being alive with spirits and with irrational forces at work (i.e. forces that transcend what we can understand as humans): “In the conception of religious people, all of nature is a sum of actions of conscious and intentional beings, a colossus complex of arbitrary actions.” Whereas the human is the domain of the rule, nature is taken to be the domain of irregularity because it is irrational or arbitrary (its logic exceeds the human grasp). The difference between our modern sensibility and that of ancient peoples is enormous, according to Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human. On the one hand, they are determined themselves by law and by tradition, in which the individual is tied to these almost automatically and moves with the regularity of a pendulum. On the other hand, nature appears as mysterious, something to be dreaded and something that cannot be comprehended. To engage with it, recourse to magic and sorcery is required. Nature is seen as a domain of freedom, that is, of caprice, a higher power, something like a superhuman mode or stage of existence, such as a god. The challenge for early humans is how to exert an influence over these terrible, unknown powers, in order to fetter this immense domain of freedom. It is here that the religious cult is born. The idea arises that constraint can be exercised on the powers of nature through prayers, pleadings, and ceremonies, through submission, through the giving of gifts, sacrifices, and flattering glorifications.

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

It is in the religious cult that Nietzsche in fact locates the origins of law, such as treaties, the pledging of securities, and the exchange of oaths. Many of our nobler ideas have their sources in this context, such as relations of sympathy between human beings, the existence of goodwill and gratitude, treaties between enemies, and so on. Nietzsche also holds that the cult is the source of the feeling of the sublime [der erhabenen]. The inner world of the sublime — affected, tremulous, contrite, expectant states — is, he contends, born in the human being through the cult (HH 130). Today, however, our feelings about nature are clearly different. As Nietzsche points out, for us nature is now regular, and can be made subject to control: we see nature as something that is characterized by uniformity. Today we go to nature for composure and its inspiration, not out of fear; we seek to incorporate the uniformity of nature into ourselves as a way of coming to an enjoyment of ourselves. This approach signifies that we have developed a new feeling for nature. This difference in feeling becomes evident in Dawn, where, for example, Nietzsche makes reference to Rousseau on this point and to his experience of walking in mountains, which we moderns find beautiful, and not terrifying or aimless. Rousseau is credited with introducing us into a new emotion that amounts to a “love of nature” (D 427). Nietzsche also uses a series of garden metaphors in Dawn that further reflect his recognition of humanity’s ongoing development of a love for nature (see e.g. D 56, 174, 248, 382, 560). In Dawn, Nietzsche analyzes thinking in terms of the metaphor of gardens and gardening (D 382), as well as feelings (D 174).1 For the moment, we turn to the analysis of religion and especially of Christianity we find in Dawn in light of this point on the significance of feeling.

­Nietzsche on Christianity in Dawn One prejudice Nietzsche attacks in Dawn is that of “pure spirit” (D 39). He seeks to expose the costs to the health of the body of a teaching of pure spirituality. By definition, such a teaching is excessive and, in the process, destroys much nervous energy: “it taught one to despise, ignore, or torment the body and, on account of all one’s drives, to torment and despise oneself” (D 39). The teaching succeeds in producing human beings who feel melancholy and oppressed and conclude that the cause of their distress and anxiety must reside in the body, which continues to flourish. As Nietzsche points out, in such cases it is in fact the body that registers a protest against such derision (D 39). Once again, he draws attention to the irrational mode of existence that spiritual excess results in: “A pervasive, chronic hyper-excitability was eventually the lot of these virtuous pure spirits” since “the only pleasure they could muster was in the form of ecstasy and other harbingers

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of madness” (D 39). Their mode or system of being or existence thus reaches an apogee when ecstasy is accepted as the highest goal in life and the as the standard by which all earthly pleasures and things are condemned. This kind of approach to so-called “religious phenomena” also informs Nietzsche’s appraisal of Christianity as a religion. Nietzsche construes Christianity as a religion of the affects and as a popular protest against philosophy, which teaches rational mastery of the affects (D 58). He claims that Christianity “disallows all moral value to virtue as it was conceived of by philosophers … condemns rationality altogether,” and wants the affects to be revealed in their utmost strength, for example, as “love of God,” “fear before God,” “fanatical faith in God,” and as “blindest hope for God” (D 58). Nietzsche points out that Christianity is said to possess a “hunter’s instinct” for those who can be brought to despair in life and over life (D 64). And he notes wittily that Pascal attempted through his wagerexperiment to find out whether everyone, “aided by the most incisive knowledge,” could be brought to despair — “the experiment miscarried, to his second despair” (D 64). Pascal held that, even if the Christian faith was not capable of proof, it is the fearful possibility that it is in fact true that should compel us to prudently become Christian. Pascal is a figure that fascinates Nietzsche. In Assorted Opinions and Maxims 408 Nietzsche mentions him as one of several figures from whom he will accept judgment,2 while in Ecce Homo (“Why I am so Clever” 3) he describes him as “the most instructive victim of Christianity” and in a note from 1887 as “the admirable logician of Christianity” (WP 388). Pascal embodies in his intellectual being what characterizes Christian faith from the start, as Nietzsche makes clear in Beyond Good and Evil 46: “a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-­confidence of the spirit,” and, at the same time, “self-mockery, self-mutilation.” The Christian faith is marked by a cruelty and self-mutilation, “religious Phoenicianism,” which afflicts a conscience that is over-ripe, manifold, and pampered (BGE 46). Here we have a peculiarly religious psychology in which, Nietzsche says, “the subjection of the spirit” must hurt indescribably3 In Dawn 86, Nietzsche notes how Pascal sought to interpret physiological phenomena, such as the stomach, the beating of the heart, the nerves, the bile, and the semen, as moral and religious phenomenon, asking whether salvation or damnation was to be discovered in them, and how this led him to twist and torment his system of thought and himself so as to be in the right (see also D 9, 83). Nietzsche claims that Christianity has brought into the world “a completely new and unlimited imperilment,” creating new securities, enjoyments, recreations, and evaluations. Although we moderns may be in the process of emancipating ourselves from such an imperilment, we keep dragging into our existence the old habits associated with these securities and evaluations, even into our noblest arts and philosophies (D 57). Christianity, he suggests, has sought to transform the

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great passions and powers, such as Eros and Aphrodite, which are capable of ­idealization, into “infernal kobolds and phantoms of deceit,” arousing in the conscience of the believer tremendous torments at the slightest sexual excitation (D 76). The result is to fill human beings with a feeling of dread at the sight of their natural animal conditions of existence, making necessary and regularly recurring sensations into a source of inner misery to the point where inner misery becomes a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon in human beings. This may even be a misery we keep secret and is more deeply rooted than we care to admit (Nietzsche mentions in this regard Shakespeare’s confession of Christian gloominess in the Sonnets). Christianity has contempt for the world and makes a new virtue of ignorance, namely “innocence,” the most frequent result of which is the feeling of guilt and despair: “a virtue which leads to Heaven via the detour through Hell” (D 321; see also D 89).4 In Dawn 70 Nietzsche considers the fact that the Christian church is “an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and viewpoints of the most diverse origin,” which makes it highly suitable for proselytizing. He even contends that the reason for its spread as a world religion lies not in what is Christian in it but rather in the “universal heathenism of its rituals” (D 70). Christianity proclaims itself to be, and is often taken to be, a universal religion proclaiming universal notions and doctrines, such as the inviolability of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the brotherhood of men. Nietzsche notes that from the very beginning its tenets are rooted in Jewish and Hellenic traditions but it has succeeded in transcending racial and national boundaries as if all such distinctions between peoples were merely “prejudices.” On the one hand, he suggests, there is something to admire in this force or power that has enabled the most disparate elements to grow into one another and entwine; on the other hand, however, he thinks there is a contemptible quality to this power, which is evident in the crude self-satisfaction of the intellect during the age in which the Christian church was being formed, accepting in its process of formation “every sort of fare and thus to digest oppositions like gravel” (D 70). In Dawn 38, Nietzsche has sought to establish that considered in themselves drives are neither moral nor immoral but only become so through being subject to the power of custom. It is, for example, under the reproach of custom that a drive may develop into a painful feeling of cowardice, while under the influence of a Christian custom or more the same drive can be declared to be good and so transform it into a feeling of humility. Both a clean and a guilty conscience can thus be forced onto a drive. However, as Nietzsche points out, “[a]s with every drive, it, per se, has neither these nor any other moral character nor name whatsoever nor even a definite accompanying feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (D 38). Rather, he thinks, it acquires its “second nature” only when it comes into relation to other drives that have been baptized good or evil, in short, with a system of moral evaluations. Nietzsche also notes that the Greeks felt very differently about envy than

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we moderns do, so that Hesiod could reckon envy as among the effects of the good and benevolent Eris and in which there was nothing offensive in it to the gods (D 38). As Nietzsche acknowledges, this evaluation of envy by the Greeks operated of course in the cultural context of the agon or contest, where competition was evaluated as good.5 As he claims, unlike we moderns, the Greeks considered hope to be something blind and even malicious; the Jews considered wrath something holy and created a wrathful, holy Jehovah in the image of their wrathful and holy prophets (D 38). In Dawn 76, Nietzsche continues with this kind of treatment by arguing that to think something evil is to make it evil. Christianity, he suggests here, is to be taken to task for transforming necessary affects and sensations  —  sexual awakenings being an obvious example  —  into a source of inner misery; it even wants this inner misery to be the normal state for every single human being as part of their lot on earth (D 76). Once again, Nietzsche’s appeals to philosophical reason and Enlightenment over this religious decline into self-torment: Must we then always label anything evil that we have to struggle to keep under control or, if need be, banish altogether from our thoughts! Is it not the way of base souls always to think that their enemy has to be evil! And ought one to call Eros an enemy! (D 76) Nietzsche seeks to revalue sexual feelings by arguing that, like feelings of sympathy and worship, a pleasure is transferred from one person to another on the basis of giving oneself pleasure, and such a benevolent arrangement is all too rare in nature (D 76). Is this not a good reason for thus valuing such feelings? Instead Christianity has enjoined to them the guilty conscience and demonized Eros.6 But as a result of this censorship, the Church has only succeeded in making the erotic more interesting to people than all the saints and angels put together, and Nietzsche points out the comedy of this: “to this very day, the effect of such secretiveness has been that the love story became the only real interest that all circles have in common — and to an excess inconceivable in antiquity, an excess that will, at a later date, elicit laughter” (D 76). In Dawn 78 Nietzsche notes that while today we have a new sensibility with respect to torments of the body — we cry with indignation and rage whenever something inflicts torment on another’s body, be it a person or an animal — we have not yet extended such a sensibility to torments of the soul. This is another reason for his objection to Christianity, which according to him is the supreme religion when it comes to such torments. Christianity, he claims, has put these torments to use to an unprecedented and shocking degree. The Christian religion has succeeded in making of the earth a wretched place, “merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere, thereby branding the earth as the place ‘where the righteous are tortured to death!’” (D 78). It is Christianity that has turned the deathbed into

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

a bed of torment, and against which Nietzsche espouses in his middle and late periods the virtue of the rational or free death (we shall examine this in Chapter 7). In short, Christianity has robbed the misfortune of life of its innocence, as Nietzsche makes clear in the next aphorism where he contrasts it unfavorably with Greek religion. The passage is worth citing at some length: Misfortune and guilt  —  Christianity has placed these two things on one scale: such that whenever the misfortune ensuing from an instance of guilt is great, the greatness of the guilt itself is then apportioned, completely involuntarily, in relation to the misfortune. This is, however, not antique, which is why Greek tragedy, which deals with misfortune and guilt so often and yet in such a different sense, is one of the greatest liberators of mind and spirit … They had remained harmless enough not to establish an “appropriate relationship” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their tragic heroes is indeed the tiny stone over which they stumble and, as such, the reason why they indeed do break an arm or put out an eye, at which point the antique sensibility responded: “Yes, he should have made his way a bit more cautiously and a bit less presumptuously.” But it was left up to Christianity to say for the first time: “There is a grave misfortune here, and underneath it there must lie hidden a grave, equally grave guilt, even if we don’t yet see it clearly. If you, misfortunate one, don’t feel this way, then you are obdurate — you will have even worse things to go through!” (D 78) Nietzsche’s fundamental claim here, then, is that although misfortune existed in Greek antiquity it was deemed innocent; it is only with Christianity that the becoming of life loses its innocent quality and everything becomes instead punishment, even well-deserved punishment. With every malady, the sufferer now feels morally reprehensible and depraved. Nietzsche is also keen to take Christianity to task for the poor philology or art of interpretation of its scribes and scholars. It fails to foster the sense of integrity and justice that is necessary to the practice of good philology, replacing this with the advancement of conjectures presented as dogmas: Again and again they claim “I am right, for it is written —” and then ­follows such a brazenly arbitrary explication that, upon hearing it, a philologist, caught in the middle between outrage and laughter, stops dead in his tracks and asks himself again and again: Is this possible! Is this honest? Is it actually event decent? (D 84) The congregation is thus trained in all forms of “the art of reading badly.” Nietzsche holds that we should not really be surprised by this sorry state of affairs, since not much is to be expected from the after-effects of a religion that

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performed “a scandalous philological farce” on the Old Testament. By this he means, he tells us, “the attempt to snatch the Old Testament right from under the Jews’ very noses by claiming that it contains nothing but Christian teachings and belongs to the Christians as the true people of Israel: whereas the Jews had only usurped this role for themselves” (D 84). Against the protest of Jewish scholars, the Old Testament was said to speak everywhere of Christ and only of Christ, especially Christ on the cross: “wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff turns up, that signifies a prophesying of the wood of the cross” (D 84). Nietzsche points to further distortions and philological connivances on the part of the Christian founders, pointing out that what was being engaged upon was a “battle” over interpretation in which “one thought about the enemy and not about integrity” (D 84). Christianity shows itself to be an enemy of truth when it declares doubt to be a sin: “Void of reason, one is supposed to be tossed into faith by a miracle and then to swim in it as if it were the clearest and most uncomplicated of elements … What is wanted are blindness and delirium and an eternal psalm above the waves in which reason has drowned” (D 89). Although some people may find life unendurable without the idea of a god, this says nothing as to the rational nature of it. It may simply be that we have grown so accustomed to such ideas that we cannot desire a life without them — and while such ideas may seem to be necessary for a person and their preservation, such a fact indicates nothing about the truth of the matter. As Nietzsche exclaims, “As if my preservation were something necessary!” (D 90). Christianity is also taken to task by Nietzsche on account of the way it “reads” into life “the moral miracle,” and involves the sudden and often inexplicable alteration of value judgments and the sudden abandonment of all habits (D 87). The appeal to the miracle, of course, blocks off proper inquiry and adequate explanation. At the same time Christianity must teach the impossibility of morality except as a ceaseless striving of the flawed or sinful individual: “The New Testament sets up a canon of virtue, of the fulfilled law: but only such that it is the canon of impossible virtue,” so that faced with it those who strive to be moral are made to learn that they are always farther and farther from their goal, leading to despair at virtue and “then at last to cast themselves on the bosom of the God of mercy” (D 87). The pursuit of such a melancholy endeavor prepares the individual for the moral miracle or the awakening into grace. This is not to say, however, that the struggle for morality and virtue is necessary. As Nietzsche notes, the miracle often overtakes the sinner when he is “leprous with sin,” and in which it even seems that the leap out of the forlorn state into its opposite is both easier and, as proof of the miracle, more desirable. At the end of the aphorism, Nietzsche indicates a naturalist or materialist inquiry into such a phenomenon: what the sudden ­irrational reversal, the amazing switch from profound misery to profound bliss, indicates physiologically is best left for the psychiatrist to ponder — for example,

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

is it disguised epilepsy?  —  and who have plenty of opportunities to observe “‘miracles’ of this sort” (D 87). Nietzsche attempts a balanced assessment of Christianity, and does not wish to be unjust to it. He notes, quite seriously, that Christianity has wanted to free human beings from the burden of the demands of sober morality by showing a shorter way to perfection, perhaps imitating philosophers who wanted a “royal road to truth” that would avoid wearisome and tedious dialectics or the gathering of rigorously tested facts. In both cases, a profound error is at work, even though such an error has provided comfort to those caught exhausted and despairing in the wilderness of existence (D 59). Christianity has emerged from a “rustic rudeness” by incorporating the spirit of countless people whose need is to take joy in submission, “all those subtle and crude enthusiasts of self-mortification and other-idolization” (D 59). As a result, he contends, Christianity has evolved into a “very spirited religion” that has made European humanity something sharp-witted and not only theologically cunning (D 60). The creation of a mode of life that tames the beast in man, which is the noble end of Christianity, has succeeded in keeping awake “the feeling of a superhuman mission” in the soul and in the body. Here one takes pride in obeying, which, Nietzsche notes, is the distinguishing mark of all aristocrats. Given Nietzsche’s remarks on the importance of obedience as a contemporary virtue in his remarks on knowledge (and one to be challenged by free-spirited inquiry), for example, in Dawn 207 it seems plausible to understand aristocrats temporally as well as spiritually. Nietzsche’s example here is of lords spiritual: as he claims, it is with their “surpassing beauty and refinement” that the princes of the church prove to the people the church’s “truth,” which is itself the result of a harmony between figure, spirit, and task (D 60). Nietzsche then asks whether this attempt at an aristocratic harmony must also go to grave with the end of religions: “can nothing higher be attained, or even imagined?” (D 60). It is important to note that Christianity, as well as free-spirited alternatives to it, depends on affects (D 58, 60). When Nietzsche invites sensitive people who are still Christians from the heart to attempt for once the experiment of living without Christianity, he is in search of an authentic mode of life that is similarly dependent on body and affects, not only conceptual understanding: “they owe it to their faith in this way for once to sojourn ‘in the wilderness’ — if only to win for themselves the right to a voice on the question whether Christianity is necessary. For the present they cling to their native soil and thence revile the world beyond it” (D 61). After such a wandering beyond his little corner of existence, a Christian may return home, not out of homesickness, but out of sound and honest judgment. In this example of an experiment with life in the wilderness, Nietzsche sees a model for future human beings who will one day live in this way with respect to all evaluations of the past: “one must voluntarily live through them once again, and likewise their opposite — in order, in the final analysis, to have the right to let them fall through the sieve” (D 62).

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The closing aphorisms of book one of Dawn indicate that Nietzsche thinks that Christianity is a religion facing its eventual demise and self-surpassing. There are various reasons for this. On the one hand, he holds, genuinely active people today are inwardly without Christianity, while the more moderate people of the spiritual middle class possess a “wondrously simplified Christianity” (D 92). What remains of Christianity at its best and most vital are meekness and resignation elevated to a godhead. But this means that it has passed over into a “gentle moralism,” and this signals, he thinks, its euthanasia (D 92). New skeptical inquiry is also leading to Christianity’s waning of influence: God in this context is no longer understood as truth, but as “the vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror, the chilling and enchanting delusion of humankind” (D 93). Nietzsche regards historical refutation as the decisive form of refutation. Today, the task is to not to prove or disprove God’s existence, but rather to demonstrate how belief in his existence could arise, and by what means such belief gained in gravity and importance. Viewing the task in these terms means that a counter proof to God’s existence in effect becomes superfluous: atheists today are becoming better skilled at making a clean sweep (D 95). In the final aphorism of book one, Nietzsche, as we have seen, maintains that, with respect to religious matters, Europe needs to catch up with the free-minded naiveté of the ancient Brahmans (D 96). The Brahmans taught that priests were more powerful than the gods and that their power rested with the observances: they never tired of praising them as the true bestowers of all things good, such as payers, ceremonies, sacrifices, hymns, and verses. To go one step further, Nietzsche thinks, is to cast aside the gods altogether  —  “which Europe must also do one day!” (D 96). Even one more step further and one no longer needs the priests and mediators; Nietzsche thinks this step was actually taken in India with the appearance of Buddha, the teacher of “the religion of selfredemption” (D 96). This is an extremely rare and beautiful level of culture, one which Europe lacks, and into which it needs to grow. When it has been attained, morality in the old or conventional sense of the word will have died.7 Nietzsche asks: What will come then? (D 96). He doesn’t answer the question — it is clear that in the rest of the book he will place the stress on experimental living — but rather encourages Europe to catch up with India on the level of culture. An initial step forward is for those millions of people who no longer believe in a god to make a sign to one another, and forge a new power in Europe.

­Nietzsche on the First Christian Dawn 68 is one of the longest aphorisms in book one, in which Nietzsche discusses the apostle Paul as the founder of Christianity and without whose intervention and influence it may have remained a little known Jewish sect. Nietzsche entitles the aphorism “the first Christian,” but begins by noting that the Bible is a

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

book that people read so as to edify themselves, reading oneself into and out if it, finding in one’s great or small personal distress the wink of solace or consolation. But how many know, Nietzsche asks, that the Bible also portrays the story of an ambitious and importunate soul, of a superstitious and cunning mind? The treatment of Paul is one with the concerns of the book as a whole: Nietzsche’s emphasis is on exposing Paul’s states of “intoxication” and his “fanaticism.” He argues that without this “peculiar story” and the confusions of such a mind, there would be no Christianity. He appeals to Enlightenment reason as a way of exposing the real nature of Paul’s scriptures, which need to be “read, really read, not as the revelations of the ‘Holy Spirit’ but instead, with an honest and open mind and without thinking about all our personal needs in the process” (D 68). The success of the ship of Christianity, which threw a good portion of what Nietzsche calls Jewish ballast overboard, and reached out to the heathens, is bound to the story of one man, who Nietzsche describes as “very tortured, very pitiable, very unpleasant,” even to himself. It is not simply that he suffered under a fixed idea but rather under an ever-present fixed question, namely, what is stake in the Jewish law and its fulfillment? In his youth, Nietzsche notes, Paul was keen to do all he could to satisfy it and was ravenous for the highest distinction Jews can imagine: “this people, which pushed the fantasy of moral sublimeness [Erhabenheit] higher than any other people and which alone succeeded in creating a holy God, along with the idea of sin as an offence against his holiness” (D 68). It was Paul who became the fanatical defender and the honor guard of such a god as well as of his law: he devoted his life to lying in wait for the transgressors and doubters of the law, being brutal and malicious to them and in favor of the most extreme of punishments. At some point, Paul discovered something disconcerting about himself — that he too was unable to fulfill the law. Nietzsche analyzes Paul’s psychology by raising the following question: “Is it really the carnality of ‘flesh’ which turned him into a transgressor over and over again?8 And not rather, as he later suspected, what lay behind it, the law itself, which must prove constantly its unfulfillability and which lures with irresistible magic to transgression?” (D 68). It is the Jewish law that afflicts Paul: “The law was the cross on which he felt himself nailed: how he hated it! How resentfully he dragged it along behind! How he searched about to find a means of destroying it — of no longer having to fulfil it himself!”9 It is in this context of the problem of the law and the difficulty of fulfilling it that Nietzsche understands Paul’s redemption and conversion: And finally the redeeming thought flashed before him, simultaneously with a vision, as could only have been the case with this epileptic: to him, the raging zealot for the law, who was dead tired of it inwardly, there appeared on a lonely road that Christ, the light of the Heavenly Father streaming from his face, and Paul heard the words: “why persecutest thou me?” (D 68)

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Up to the point of his conversion, Paul had considered Christ’s ignominious death on the cross to be a principal argument against the messianism preached by the adherents of the new teaching; now he had discovered in it a means to abolish the law. It is the suddenness of the decision that arouses Nietzsche’s psychological interest and suspicion: “Afflicted by the most injured pride, he feels himself, in one fell swoop, completely recovered, the moral despair gone, as if blown away, for morality has been blown away, destroyed — or rather fulfilled, there on the cross!” (D 68). Thus, “with one stroke,” Paul becomes the happiest person on earth, now “the fate of the Jews, no, of all humanity seems to him bound together with this insight, this his instant of sudden, flashing illumination”; now he possesses the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, and the light of lights; he has solved the riddle of his, of humankind’s, existence and now history will turn around him alone. His fate is to become “the teacher of the destruction of the law!” (D 68). Thus, to become one with Christ is to have become with him the destroyer of the law and to have died with him is to have withdrawn from the law. One is now outside the law:10 If I now wanted to take up the law again and subject myself to it, then I would turn Christ into the accomplice of sin: for the law was only there that people might sin, it always induces sin … God would never have decided for the death of Christ if, without this death, any fulfilment of the law whatsoever had been possible; now, not only is all guilt carried away, but guilt as such has been destroyed; now the law is dead, now the carnality of flesh in which it lives is dead (D 68) For Paul, then, Christ represents or signifies the end of the law as a way of righteousness and there is now a new “law,” the law of Christ.11 In the Colossians it is stated that Christ “has cancelled the bond which pledged us to the decrees of the law. It stood against us, but he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2. 14). For Paul, the old law is the law of sin and death. With such insights, Paul’s intoxication, Nietzsche says, reaches its summit and “with the idea of becoming-one, every shame, every subordination, every barrier is removed from it, and the untameable will to lust for domination reveals itself as an anticipatory revelry in divine splendours” (D 68). Paul has a desire for control; the irony is that it is this desire that sends him out of control and into transgression.12 As should be evident, Nietzsche’s analysis of the phenomenon of Paul is essentially psychological in character. He is concerned with how the problem of the law afflicts Paul and is a human, all too human, story of the torment of the body and the soul. Paul’s salvation is presented in the Bible as if it amounted to a miracle of conversion, involving sudden transformations and decisions of the heart. Nietzsche cannot find in the story the “foundation of universalism,”13 as

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

Alain  Badiou (2003) has construed Paul’s teachings, because of the human psychology involved in it; it has a different lesson to teach us, namely, how the mind can be led to experiencing such a state owing to a misreading of its bodily condition and how the body is made to suffer through the severe demands place on it and the affects by such a strict regime of the law. Behind all of Paul’s strivings and conversion is a “lust for domination,” the need to control other people. As Christa Davis Acampora has pointed out, Saul has a thirst for power that the law constrains; in search of his freedom he becomes Paul, “pursuing his liberation through the revenge of overturning the law.”14 Later, in The Anti-Christ (1888), Nietzsche depicts Paul unfavorably with Christ. For Nietzsche, Christ is a great symbolist for whom the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, possess merely the value of a sign and a metaphor. Christ (and not Paul) is in a sense a “free spirit” who cares nothing for what is “fixed” (the word kills because everything fixed kills), and both the concept and experience of “life” for him is opposed to any kind of formula, law, faith, or dogma.15 Nietzsche insists that Christ did not bring into the world a new religion and a church but rather the “true evangelic practice.” Here, “blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality - the rest is signs speaking for it” (A 33). In the Gospel of Jesus, then, there is no guilt and punishment, no sin and redemption. The “glad tidings” speak of every kind of distancing relation between God and man having been abolished. There is no message from the “beyond,” the beyond is here and now and consists in living a life of renunciation (including the renunciation of judgment): “A new way of living, not a new belief … the kingdom of God is not something one waits for, it has no yesterday or tomorrow…it is an experience within the heart” (A 33). This is why Nietzsche stresses that the bringer of glad tidings died as he lived and taught  —  not to redeem mankind but to show how one ought to live. Thus, what he bequeathed to mankind is his “practice”: his bearing before the judges, before his accusers and every kind of calumny and mockery, his bearing on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no step to avert the worst that can happen to him, and so on. Indeed, in his middle writings, Nietzsche had advised his readers to be inspired by Christ’s example and not to judge but instead strive to be just (AOM 33). In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of a new habit forming within ourselves in which we no longer love or hate, such is the increase in our knowledge (see HH 133, 292). This theme continues in Assorted Opinions and Maxims, where Nietzsche once again stresses our non-accountability (as pieces of nature and necessity) and refers to Christ as providing a model for the future human being: a being that does not judge but instead seeks to be just. The advancement we are to make in our knowledge and self-enlightenment can only lead in the direction of a growing appreciation of our ignorance with respect to the sources of morality

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(HH 107). Nietzsche is continuing this theme in the analysis he offers in Dawn: Schopenhauer and other moral philosophers have no right to posit a “moral” ­significance to the world on the basis of their insights into character or human nature. Humanity will now struggle with the problem of accountability (the scapegoat problem): someone has to be culpable; there must be someone or something to blame. Must there not be sinners and judges and executioners? The philosopher, then, has to be like Christ, and proclaim, “judge not but be just.” Nietzsche qualifies this praise of Christ in The Wanderer and His Shadow 81, where he acknowledges that the founder of Christianity wanted to abolish secular justice and remove judging and punishing from the world, but only because all guilt is conceived as sin, that is, an offense against God and not the world. The history of Christianity is for Nietzsche, then, the history of a progressively crude misunderstanding of an original symbolism. The Christian Church is the morbid barbarism that has assumed power. It expresses a mortal hostility to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open-ended and benevolent humanity. Therefore, according to Nietzsche, to use the word “Christianity” is already a misunderstanding, for in reality there has only been one Christian and he died on the cross (A 39). Nietzsche names Paul as the key figure who invents Christianity as a metaphysics and a morality: the lie of the resurrected Jesus and the belief in immortality. Nietzsche writes on this point: “on the heels of the glad tidings there then came the worst of all  —  Paul, the genius of hatred” (A 42). Through Paul and the lie of the equality of all souls before God, Christianity wages a war against every feeling of reverence and distance between human beings, that is, against the preconditions of every elevation and increase in culture, it wages a war against everything noble, joyful, and high-spirited (A 43). Nietzsche says that “immortality,” now granted to every Peter and Paul, has been the greatest and most malicious outrage on noble mankind ever committed (A 43). An important point to note is that, on Nietzsche’s account, Paul and Christianity both stand in opposition to science. According to Nietzsche, Christianity is said to be a religion out of touch with reality and is mortally opposed to the wisdom of the world or to “science”; furthermore, “it will approve of anything that can poison, slander, or discredit discipline of spirit, integrity or spiritual rigour of conscience, or noble assurance and freedom of the spirit” (A 47). It is this focus on science, including the skeptical methods of science, that Nietzsche promotes in Dawn. In The Anti-Christ, the ire of Nietzsche’s intellectual conscience is focused on Paul: Paul understood that lying — that “belief” was necessary; later, the church understood Paul. — The “God” Paul invented for himself, a God who “confounds all worldly wisdom” (to be exact, the two great rivals of all superstition, philology and medicine) is in truth just Paul’s firm decision to do it himself: to call his own will “God”, Torah, that is Jewish to the core. Paul

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

wants to confound all “wisdom of the world”; his enemies are the good philologists and doctors from the Alexandrian schools —, he wages war on them. In fact, you cannot be a philologist or doctor without being antiChristian at the same time. This is because philologists look behind the “holy books”, and doctors see behind the physiological depravity of the typical Christian. The doctor says “incurable”, the philologist says “fraud” (A 47; see also A 49) As we have already discussed, Nietzsche suggests that experimentation as a means to knowing is possible both through the sciences and through our ways of living. Obedience, which Nietzsche challenges as a virtue in, for example, D 207 and which he contrasts with experimentation, is identifiable as a characteristic of Paul’s approach in this remark from The Anti-Christ 47. The “obedience toward a person” that Nietzsche takes to characterize contemporary German virtue in Dawn 207, and about which he raises concerns, is here identifiable as Paul’s obedience to Paul’s own will. Hence, in his search for liberation from the law, one reason why Paul fails to be a Nietzschean free spirit becomes clearer: Paul fails to express what Nietzsche calls “freedom of feeling,” and which he aligns with Mediterranean skepticism (D 207). The real difference between Nietzsche and Paul concerns the nature of the event. Although in his late writings Nietzsche constructs himself on the model of a Pauline figure — as the event of the conjuring of a decision, as a decision that will split humanity into two (those who come before and those who come after), as the founder of true “great politics” (the mastery of the earth) — in his middle writings, Nietzsche entertains no such grandiose ambitions or fantasies of inauguration. The “event” depicted in Dawn — the event of a new plow, cleaving the ground and “rendering it fruitful for all” — is one of a long durée involving a slow therapy and carefully administered small doses. In Dawn, Nietzsche does not develop as a rival to Christianity his own “thought of thoughts,” or an exemplar of a life to rival the story of Christ. Neither does he rule out universal interests emerging or growing out of the new, free-spirited, ways of living with which he encourages experimentation. His idea of a new plowshare turning over the earth with a promise of flourishing explicitly allows for the possibility of “universal interests” emerging through the difficult and slow, painful labor that plowing entails (D 146). As Nietzsche discusses toward the end of this aphorism, a key part of this slow labor involves our examining whether or not we can “get beyond our compassion,” and whether, through sacrifice, we could “strengthen and elevate the general feeling of human power” (D 146). Compassion, one of the chief legacies of the history of Christianity with which the history of the pursuit of knowledge is entwined in European thought, emerges as one of Nietzsche’s chief targets in his critical engagement with the presumptions of morality in Dawn, alongside the question of whether treating compassion skeptically is even possible for us.

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Notes 1 On garden metaphors in Dawn, see Rebecca Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 85–109. 2 Nietzsche mentions eight figures in all, divided into four pairs: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. 3 Without the Christian faith, Pascal thought, we would become, no less than nature and history, “a monster and chaos,” and this requires our negation of nature, history, and man (WP 83). Pascal employs moral skepticism as a means of exciting the need for faith and for it to be justified. In short, Christianity breaks the strongest and noblest souls and Nietzsche says in a note of 1887–88 that he cannot forgive Christianity for having destroyed a man like Pascal (WP 252; see also WP 276 on the gloominess of the strong, such as Pascal and Schopenhauer). 4 On two senses of innocence in Nietzsche, one of which is critically interpreted as we see in Dawn 321, and the other of which — the innocence of b ­ ecoming — Nietzsche affirms, see Joanne Faulkner. 2008. “The Innocence of Victimhood Versus the ‘Innocence of Becoming’: Nietzsche, 9/11, and the ‘Falling Man’.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35(1): 67–85. 5 On contest in Nietzsche, see e.g. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 6 For broader discussions of Eros in Nietzsche, see Babette E. Babich. 2000. “Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Problem of the Artist as Actor–Jew–Woman.” Continental Philosophy Review 33: 159–88; and Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2010). 7 In Chapter 2, we differentiate between Nietzsche as engaged in a critique of morality in its entirety in Dawn, and as engaged in a critique of morality as we currently understand it, based on social customs. On this issue, see Simon Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and QuasiAesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110. 8 See 2 Corinthians 12: 7 and Paul’s famous “thorn of the flesh.” 9 At this time, Nietzsche had been studying Hermann Lüdermann’s, The Apostle Paul’s Anthropology and its Position within his Doctrine of Salvation of 1872. More recent studies bear out his interpretation of Paul. Sandmel writes of Paul, for example: “It is not his Christian convictions which raise the Law as a problem for him, but rather it is his problem with the Law that brings him ultimately to his Christian convictions,” quoted in Michael Grant, Saint Paul (London: Orion, 2000), 76.

Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity

10 See Romans 6: 14: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” 11 See Romans 3:31: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.” 12 Nietzsche uses the word Herrschsucht for domination and the root “herrsch” is the same word as for control. See Brittain Smith, note to Dawn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 13 The full title of Badiou’s book is, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 14 Christa Davis Acampora. 2002. “Nietzsche Contra Homer, Socrates, and Paul.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24: 25–53. See also Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), especially chapter 4. 15 Acampora “Nietzsche Contra Homer, Socrates, and Paul,” 37.

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4 Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination When Schopenhauer writes in praise of compassion, he knows that there are many thinkers in Western philosophy who have not accorded compassion any value, and indeed that many have regarded it with suspicion. In his book On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer mentions in this regard the Stoics (such as Seneca), Spinoza, and Kant as intellectual figures that positively reject and condemn compassion.1 It is the likes of Spinoza and Kant that Nietzsche calls to his aid when he says that the task today is for us to call into question our uncritical and unreflective valuation of the value or virtue of compassion (GM Preface). Schopenhauer refers to one great moralist before him who made compassion (la pitié) central to his reflections on human existence, namely, Rousseau. Schopenhauer calls him the greatest moralist of modern times and a profound analyst of the human heart. This is the same figure that Nietzsche went on to denounce as a fanatic and dangerous idealist (see Nietzsche “contra Rousseau” D 163). A great deal is at stake in our appreciation of compassion, of attempts to write in praise of it, and those that try to cast a deep suspicion over our estimation of it, such as Nietzsche. But we have to be careful: we would go wrong if we supposed that Schopenhauer proves himself as a great moral philosopher in his account of  the sources of compassion, while Nietzsche confirms all our worst fears of him — that he is an immoral monster — on account of his attack on compassion. The issues at stake are much more complex than this. Even attempting and daring to question the value of compassion is, in the eyes of some, to condemn oneself to immorality or immoralism. In what follows in this chapter, we examine Nietzsche’s thinking on the concept of Mitleid  —  we will discuss the complexities of translating this concept into English later — in Dawn. We will examine how Nietzsche’s critical engagement with this concept is importantly dependent on the role of drives in his wider moral psychology in this text. As part of this line of argument, we provide a friendly Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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amendment to previous accounts that have given substantial weight to the role of the individual in understanding Nietzsche’s critical engagement with an ethic of compassion. To do so, we examine the role of mood and social transmission of feeling in his critique, arguing that these factors play key roles in Nietzsche’s development of a substantial critique of an ethic of compassion, and in his pursuit of an alternative ethic. We will also show how Nietzsche’s exposure of an ethic of compassion as fundamentally flawed opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration of the concept of moral imagination, and facilitates development of a more robust, creative, and experimental concept of ethical imagination as a part of Nietzsche’s broader effort to provide a framework for ongoing moral therapy.

­Approaches to Nietzsche’s Engagement with Mitleid Let us begin by taking stock of the main lines of approach to Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid in the available scholarly literature.2 One strand of the available scholarship of Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid has tended to interpret his remarks primarily in terms of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Schopenhauer’s ethics. For example, David Cartwright has pointed out that, while Schopenhauer’s ethics “describes an emotion that serves as an incentive which has as its end another’s well-being,” Nietzsche’s ethics are concerned with a moral emotion that “has as its end the interests of the agent.”3 For Cartwright, the relevant moral emotion targeted by Nietzsche’s critique  —  pity  —  is judged as morally undesirable by Nietzsche “insofar as it expresses contemptuous attitudes towards others and relegates some of the most vital interests of others to interests that are of dubious worth to the agent.”4 Mitleid as pity, on this account of Nietzsche’s thinking, embroils us in a failure to respect others as well as in augmentation of our feelings of “self-esteem and superiority” by means of devaluing others.5 Cartwright contends that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion ultimately fails, because its target misses: a critique of pity does not engage an ethics of compassion.6 Moreover, Cartwright suggests that Schopenhauer’s thought remains an essential influence upon Nietzsche’s thinking about Mitleid even given his largely critical approach to Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion [Mitleids-Moral].7 A second line of scholarly inquiry has suggested that the principal function of Nietzsche’s critical remarks on Mitleid throughout his works is to foster the revival of Stoic values, especially the values of “self-formation and self-command.”8 According to Martha Nussbaum, Nietzsche’s attack on pity is a core component of his critical engagement with the “roots of cruelty and revenge.”9 Like the Stoics, Nussbaum argues, Nietzsche’s repudiation of pity is not a matter of callousness or of brutality: it is rather a matter of developing invulnerability to external influence through the extirpation of passion, and of pursuing redemption from the perceived need for revenge.10

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination

Renewed attention to Nietzsche’s Stoicism within the available scholarly literature has also incorporated the earlier view that Nietzsche’s “principal object of criticism” is Schopenhauer’s (and indeed Rousseau’s) ethics of pity.11 And, as Michael Ure has pointed out, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with the concept of Mitleid draws significantly on the Stoic view that pity ultimately produces cruelty and vengefulness.12 According to Ure, Nietzsche accomplishes this by attending to psychoanalytic insights that he builds into an account of “our subterranean intrapsychic and intersubjective stratagems for restoring to ourselves the illusion of majestic plenitude.”13 A third scholarly approach has focused in most depth upon ways in which the ethics of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid are tied up with his thinking on human psychology.14 This approach overlaps with aspects of the second Stoicbased approach described earlier, but is distinctive in its attention to relations of power in Nietzsche’s thinking. As a part of a broad project that develops a psychodialectical reading of logic and libido in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Henry Staten has offered an analysis of suffering and Mitleid that identifies complementarity between the aggression of the Freudian libido and the aggressive eroticism of pleasure in excitation of will to power.15 For Staten, this complementarity is best explained through Nietzsche’s exploration of sadomasochistic subjectivity, which he shows incorporates intersubjective fluidity — the interchangeability of active and passive subject positions in the relationship between the sadist and the masochist.16 Staten points out that such fluidity is present in Nietzsche’s remarks on the striving for distinction in D 113.17 In a more recent book, Christopher Janaway has provided a sustained analysis of the complexity of the psycho-physical states involved in Nietzsche’s remarks on the “polyphonic” concept of Mitleid in Dawn, focusing in particular upon aphorisms 132–38 of this text.18 A fourth line of criticism has sought to attend to the complexities that the issue of translation from German to English contributes to the debate on approaching Nietzsche’s remarks on Mitleid. In English, the term “Mitleid” may be translated as a referent of “pity” or of “compassion.” It is a translation question as to whether, by Mitleid, Nietzsche’s remarks on this concept are best reflected by the word “pity” or by the word “compassion,” and whether or not Nietzsche consistently uses Mitleid in a way that can be translated uniformly within each relevant text, and across all of his writings. However, it is a philosophical question as to whether and how the moral emotions of pity and compassion might be distinguished from one another, including within Nietzsche’s philosophy. In English-speaking Nietzsche scholarship, these two distinct questions of translation and philosophy have a tendency to be taken together and to be used to inform one another. However, Mitleid is not the only word that one finds in Nietzsche’s writing that is used to convey moral emotions such as pity or compassion; another key term, Erbarmen, is also present in Nietzsche’s discussions of moral emotions.19 This complicates both translation and philosophy questions.

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In an effort to clarify the issues pertaining to Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid, Alan Schrift has provided a status report on the Stanford University Press project of translating the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe edition into English, which includes a note on the translation policy of this project with respect to the issue of translating Mitleid and Erbarmen, along with other derivative terms such as Bemitleidenwerden.20 The translation project policy is to translate “Erbarmen” as “pity” and “Mitleid” as “compassion.”21 Schrift’s explanation of this policy decision is that while “pity is consistently regarded by Nietzsche as something negative and harmful insofar as it offers little other than condescension toward its object,” the project directors think that a sense of “fellow feeling connoted by the ‘mit’ of ‘Mitleid’” more accurately reflects Nietzsche’s understanding of compassion as a “suffering with.”22 Schrift claims that Nietzsche is critical of this “suffering with” for different reasons than the ones he uses as a basis for his critique of pity, namely because compassion “often does little to assist those with whom one is identifying when suffering with (leid mit) and also that it at the same time purposelessly expends the strength of the one being compassionate.”23 There is of course precedence for this policy decision in the previous scholarly literature concerning the thorny issue of Nietzsche’s use of Mitleid in his writing. David Cartwright has argued that where Schopenhauer uses Mitleid to refer to compassion, Nietzsche uses the term to refer to pity.24 More recently, Gudrun von Tevenar has advanced a similar claim to Cartwright’s view.25 Von Tevenar contrasts Nietzsche’s criticisms of pity with his remarks on compassion or “great Mitleid [grosse Mitleid]” in On the Genealogy of Morality III 14, suggesting that by keeping a distinction between uses of Mitleid to refer to pity and uses of Mitleid to refer to compassion in mind, Nietzsche’s criticisms of pity emerge as based on pity being detrimental to its recipients, while his criticisms of compassion or “great Mitleid” emerge as being based on concern for the detriment that this moral emotion has to the giver, rather than the recipient.26 Although these lines of inquiry on Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid are clearly helpful, none of them — taken independently of one another — presents us with a full explanation of the function of Nietzsche’s remarks on this issue. Moreover, bringing them into alignment is a particularly challenging project, as it involves balancing ancient and modern history of philosophy with Nietzsche scholarship, across a diverse range of translations. This is no small task. In addition, these main threads of scholarship have tended to group Nietzsche’s remarks on Mitleid together across the range of his writings. While this approach carries the advantage of making the broader consistency of Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid and its relation to his wider ethical concerns more apparent, it also tends to obscure our understanding of whether and how Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid is related to the development of specific philosophical projects within the contexts of individual texts by Nietzsche. This makes the project of clearly identifying the target and

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination

purpose of Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid across the body of Nietzsche’s writings even more challenging. More recently, efforts to analyze the specific projects contained within individual texts has revitalized efforts to further clarify our understanding of Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid. At the same time, insights gleaned from attending to Nietzsche’s critical response to Schopenhauer’s ethics, to Nietzsche’s Stoicism, and to his investigation of psycho-physiology, have been integrated into an approach that prioritizes the therapeutic dimension of Nietzsche’s ethics.27 Pursuing this approach, Keith Ansell-Pearson has argued that Nietzsche’s critical remarks on Mitleid should be taken as forming part of Nietzsche’s effort to engage in the work of moral therapy, and to prompt similar such engagement on the part of his readers.28 According to Ansell-Pearson, moral therapy distinguishes Nietzsche’s contribution in Dawn.29 This new line of argument is promising, and in what follows we will review the reasons why, while also proposing a further development of this approach. Ansell-Pearson argues that Nietzsche develops more of a meditative and ruminative therapeutic resource than a standard philosophical argument in Dawn; according to him, Nietzsche leaves the more fruitful possibilities that might arise from critical engagement with the presumptions and prejudices of morality, and leaving the text open for the reader to develop their own intimate relationship with it in order to explore for themselves a new possible future heralded by the book.30 Furthermore, Nietzsche contrasts the tyranny of the ruling ethic of sympathy with an ethic of self-fashioning. This enables us to pursue self-fashioning in two ways: (i) by taking seriously and exploring personal, small, ethical questions and concerns; and (ii) by relieving those emerging individuals who reject customary morality from the guilty consciences with which the ethic of sympathy troubles them, and from the “moral” interpretation of the body and its affects that inhibits a naturalist approach to refashioning of the self.31 In order to engage effectively in self-fashioning, according to Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche emphasizes two necessary things. First is the importance of experiencing solitude, which helps us to think better of things than constant contact with others (D 443, 485, 491).32 Second, in light of work by Ruth Abbey, we can note that, for Nietzsche, achieving greatness in pursuing knowledge through freer thinking than has been possible under the tyranny of customary morality requires us to be able to “endure, inflict, and witness pain” and to sustain the necessary fortitude to endure and resist in the face of hardship, all of which is challenged by Mitleid.33 If one of our primary presumptions as customary moralists is to adopt an ethic of sympathy, then a substantial part of Nietzsche’s ethical project in Dawn must be to call the ruling ethic of sympathy into question. The approach adopted in Dawn constitutes, we suggest, a significant new direction compared with Nietzsche’s previous engagements in psychological dissections, the benefits of which to humanity were far from clear to him: in works such

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as Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche indicated that he was not wholly convinced of the benefit of such an anatomical investigation, yet in Dawn, Nietzsche deems the therapeutic proposal of this text worthwhile.34 We can explain this shift from the earlier to the later text by appealing to changes in Nietzsche’s stance on the relationship between morality and the unegoistic.35 Nietzsche had previously adopted Paul Rée’s naturalist view that morality is coextensive with unegoistic drives, which shares the view found in Kant and in Schopenhauer that actions of moral worth must be unegoistic. However, in Dawn, he pursues the possibility that there might be other moralities, and questions the assumption that morality must be coextensive with the unegoistic.36 On this basis, we can summarize the three main concerns that Nietzsche develops with Mitleid in Dawn as follows.37 First, an ethic of compassion encourages us to exist as fantasists, and to promote a potentially dangerous, implausible, and unnatural doctrine of universal love. Second, and relatedly, an ethic of compassion wrongly assumes that it is possible for us to act from a single motive. This is undermined, Nietzsche thinks, by its reliance on Schopenhauer’s account of how the experience of Mitleid makes two beings into one (D 142).38 It is also undermined by Nietzsche’s account of drives and affects, which shows that Mitleid is a drive, like other drives.39 Third, in light of analysis by Martha Nussbaum, an ethic of compassion tyrannically encroaches on the possibility of self-fashioning, and wrongly limits the scope of the ethical; for Nietzsche, since there is no “absolute morality” (D 139), such a limit would be artificial.40 We follow Ansell-Pearson’s pointing out of the value of solitude to a project of selffashioning in a post-Mitleid ethical context, and his earlier emphasis on Nietzsche’s attendance to diverse motives for ethical action via his drive psychology.41 Yet we also suggest that more still needs to be said in order to connect Nietzsche’s attention to the role of the individual in pursuing an ethic of self-fashioning with the social dimension of Mitleid and the problem it creates for pursuing a proposed ethic of selffashioning. It is also important to develop a clearer understanding of how Nietzsche explores ways of mitigating the workings of this moral emotion in the social context. Here we follow Christopher Janaway, who has suggested that even if the explanatory facts about a person are located in their psycho-physiology, such facts are still shaped by culture: inclinations, aversions, and drives that give rise to beliefs are culturally developed and acquired.42 According to Janaway, the psycho-physical dimension of belief must encompass the “drives, affects, and rationalizations” of other human beings and is not only a matter of single individuals.43 There is an important moodbased social component to the way in which a customary morality centered on compassion functions, and which plays a significant role in Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality.44 Where Janaway opts to emphasize Nietzsche’s imaginative provocation of the affects through rhetoric in his analysis, we contend that mood alteration is also an

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination

important factor in Nietzsche’s work that demands attention.45 We agree with Janaway that Nietzsche does work to engage his readers’ affects through his aphoristic construction of the text; yet at the same time, we think that Nietzsche’s efforts in this regard are critical to the task of targeting the mood of superstitious fear that weighs on humans in much of contemporary society as an entire social group through the operation of customary morality. Let us now expand on some of the textual evidence supporting these points.

­Mood, Mitleid, and Customary Morality In Chapter 2, we showed how the primary ethical project embedded within Dawn is the development of a substantial challenge to what Nietzsche terms customary morality [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], which is set alongside Nietzsche’s development of a set of experimental, playful, aphorisms that encourage exploration of new ethical alternatives to customary morality, and its ethic of compassion.46 Customary morality problematically inhibits us from having new experiences, from correcting old, harmful customs, and from developing new, better customs (D 19). In short, customary morality gets in the way of humans being human beings. Someone might point out that this may appear to be the point of customary morality. However, as Nietzsche identifies, the feeling for custom is not based as clearly on what is perceived to be useful or harmful to humans as might be assumed, but is rather based on the age-induced sanctity of the custom (D 19). Nietzsche suggests that our obedience to traditions and moral customs is made far more consistent through our susceptibility to a special type of superstitious fear, which arises for us out of concern for the consequences of transgressing against an “inexplicable, indeterminate power” (D 9).47 The superstitious fear that arises is best understood as a mood, because our fear of transgression against an unseen and unknowable power isn’t ultimately directed toward one single action or event, but rather surrounds us and frames all of our moral reflections and experiences.48 We are all, Nietzsche suggests, constantly concerned about committing an individual thought or action in a way that might negatively affect the broader community; this is why, he suggests, customary morality insists that “the individual must sacrifice” and the self must be overcome in order to protect tradition from individuals and indeed from originality (D 9). In order to mount a successful campaign against customary morality, Nietzsche’s survey of the problem in the first book of Dawn shows that a way must be found to counter three specific issues.49 First, when considered from the perspective of customary morality and its socially entrenched authority, a project devoted to challenging that morality is deemed immoral — undertaking such a project is therefore likely to be inhibited in, or rejected by, anyone concerned by

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the possibility of experiencing moral censure. Second, this problem is made more complex and difficult to overcome by the seductive power of the language of morality; pointing to the confusion caused by words, Nietzsche reminds us that we only have words for “superlative” aspects of psycho-physical processes and drives such as “compassion,” and not for milder or lower processes and drives, which form our characters even though we are unaware of them.50 Third, customary morality promotes a mood of fear among us, which further inhibits possible challenges to its authority.51 Yet it is unclear how is it possible to engage in such a campaign, or to pursue moral therapy, especially if according to Nietzsche’s analysis of customary morality, much of what motivates our moral behavior is unconscious and mood-based. In considering how best to respond to this concern, it is worth noting that in his translation of Nietzsche’s 1864 essay “On Mood,” Stanley Corngold has argued that mood provides Nietzsche with a way to engage with what lies outside of articulable understanding.52 Corngold develops this view on the basis of Nietzsche’s assertion in the essay that: (i) moods come about from inner battles or from external pressure on an inner world; and (ii) because the soul is made up of the same or similar stuff as events, an event carrying a burden of mood can affect someone significantly even if it does not “touch and kindred string.”53 Rhetorical composition affords Nietzsche a fundamental and important technology by which to target the problematic mood of superstitious fear, and through which to open up space for creation of a new mood that is more conducive to our development of a new ethic of self-fashioning.54 We shall explore two examples of how Nietzsche’s work in Dawn opens up space in which this may occur. First, we should note that even in Nietzsche’s discussions of the individual moral agent, substantial attention is given to the relationship between the individual and other individuals. In a later aphorism, for example, Nietzsche explores why Mitleid might contribute to an agent’s need for forbearance or patience, which he characterizes as “forbearance twice” [Zweimal Geduld!] (D 467). The aphorism asks us to consider how someone may warn us that, “You will cause a lot of people pain that way [“Damit machst du vielen Menschen Schmerz],” as we consider taking a specific action (D 467). The aphorism suggests the following reply to the imagined interlocutor: “I know it; and know as well that I will suffer doubly for it, once from compassion [Mitleid] with their suffering and then from the revenge they will take on me. Nevertheless, it is no less necessary to act as I am acting” (D 467). This indicates not only that Nietzsche envisages how the possible ethics of self-fashioning agent is embedded in a web of social connections but also how this embeddedness and the agent’s understanding of it is shaped by the ethic of compassion as a part of customary morality. The social scope of the possible new ethical agent’s task is substantial.

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With this in mind, let us return to Dawn 113, the aphorism that inspires Staten’s psychoanalytic approach to reading Nietzsche on Mitleid, mentioned earlier. In this aphorism, Nietzsche argues that the empathy and “being-in-the-know” that the drive for distinction requires is not “harmless or compassionate or benevolent” and is better understood as the “striving for domination” (D 113). Any joy experienced through the striving for domination is brought about by someone having placed their “imprint” on the soul of another person (D 113). At one end of the spectrum of striving for domination, Nietzsche places the “barbarian” who delights in inflicting suffering on the other whose recognition he seeks; at the other end, Nietzsche places “the ascetic and martyr” who experiences the highest pleasure from personally enduring, through his own striving for distinction, the same suffering that the barbarian inflicts upon the other (D 113). Staten identifies that an intersubjective power-relationship is at work in this aphorism. He claims that the person who inflicts suffering forces the sufferer “to turn towards him and grant him an absolute recognition”; in so doing, the person who inflicts suffering “appropriates the substance of the sufferer as mirror of his own being.”55 Added to this, Staten suggests that, for Nietzsche, the sufferer reflects the person inflicting suffering back to themselves “with an intensity and inevitability which belong only to the being of the inflicter of pain.”56 On this basis, Staten claims that, for Nietzsche, recognition is forced, cruelly, upon the passive sufferer by the person who is actively inflicting pain. Both the barbarian and the ascetic in Dawn 113 do seem to conform to Staten’s suggested model of an intersubjective power-relationship. While the barbarian’s power-relationship is with an external other, the ascetic’s power-relationship is with himself. Nietzsche suggests that the ascetic or martyr performs a “triumph” over themselves; their eye is “trained inward” and it beholds “the human being cloven asunder into sufferer and spectator” (D 113). Henceforth, he suggests, it only glances “into the exterior world in order, as it were, to gather from it wood for its own funeral pyre” (D 113). The final “tragedy” of the striving for domination is, Nietzsche contends here, the reduction of humanity to a “Single Character” who “burns to ash” inside themselves (D 113). For Nietzsche, this circle of suffering can be redrawn to include the “pitying god,” so that whether human or divine the logic of Mitleid involves the agent in “doing hurt unto others in order thereby to hurt oneself” such that, through this, the agent can “triumph” over themselves and their “pity” once again (D 113). Through this, the agent can “luxuriate in utmost power!” (D 113). Staten’s view is that the subject position of the sufferer is always passive. However, the spectrum of suffering infliction that Nietzsche sketches out in Dawn 113  —  along with his account of the circular logic of Mitleid — ultimately shows that, for Nietzsche, there is no clear passive role in suffering after all. This point is given further support by Nietzsche’s connection of his discussion of Mitleid with an account of the function of drives; for example, in

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Dawn 119, which he clearly prefaces when he identifies the striving for distinction as a “drive [Trieb]” at the beginning of aphorism 113.57 This is important, because it underlines why Nietzsche finds the idea that we are united by Mitleid to be ultimately implausible, and also helps us to see why he thinks that it might be worthwhile for us to risk the suffering of others, and the censure of customary morality, as well as to risk our own suffering, by challenging customary morality. Even the possibility of doing so may be helpfully disruptive of the prevailing social mood of superstitious fear. Second, Nietzsche’s account indicates that moral feelings are socially transmitted.58 Nietzsche explicitly argues that mood replaces logical argument in the sustaining of customary morality (D 28).59 He claims that good mood was weighed as “argument” and that it “outweighed rationality,” since mood was understood “superstitiously” rather than naturally, as coming from a god that allows their reason to speak through mood as the highest form of rationality (D 28). Nietzsche’s insight is that, if mood can be used by customary morality to do philosophical work such as vanquishing counter-arguments, then mood may also be used to challenge the dominance of customary morality over society (D 28).60 Nietzsche supports this analysis by claiming that feelings, but not thoughts, are inherited (D 30), that moral feelings are transmitted through children observing adults’ inclinations for and aversions to actions and then imitating these inclinations and aversions (D 33), and that while judgments originate in feelings, our feelings originate in prior judgments that we inherit in the form of feelings of inclination and aversion (D 35).61 One of Nietzsche’s explicit examples of mood transmission concerns Mitleid as a core feature of customary morality. As he discusses, while living in accordance with customary morality, we communicate to our neighbors a mood, or “frame of mind [(Stimmung)],” in which our neighbor sees themselves as a “sacrifice”: we talk him into the task for which we wish to use him. In this case do we lack compassion? But if we wish also to get beyond our compassion and to gain a victory over ourselves, does this not constitute a higher and freer bearing and attitude than when one feels safe once one has ascertained whether an action benefits or hurts one’s neighbor? (D 146) In this aphorism, Nietzsche suggests that while we may be under the impression that Mitleid is a humanizing moral feeling, it is, in fact, a dehumanizing and hypocritical dimension of customary morality. This form of morality involves each individual in playing a functional role within the self-sustaining economy of moral custom: the individual turns his or her neighbors into creatures who think of themselves as obedient at best, and as potential sacrifices for the alleged moral benefit of their community at worst.62 Everyone remains superstitiously afraid of contravening

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custom, incurring divine wrath, and garnering negative consequences for one’s community. As Nietzsche suggests, this is a “narrow and petty bourgeois morality”; in contrast to this form of morality, a “higher and freer” way of thinking would look beyond immediate consequences and work toward more distant aims, such as furthering human knowledge and moral understanding, even if doing so comes at the cost of others’ suffering (D 146). As Nietzsche goes on to argue, we would: through sacrifice — in which we and our neighbors are included — strengthen and elevate the feeling of human power, even though we might achieve nothing further. But even this would be a positive increase in happiness (D 146) The “we” of whom Nietzsche speaks in this remark are, of course, not to be understood as members of our current community, who are bound together by a morality of compassion. Rather, the “we” in this aphorism refer to new possible ethical agents, who are focused on self-fashioning, and who, as an emergent possible community of the future, are engaged in throwing off old values, including Mitleid, and who are active experimenters with new values. Nietzsche denies immorality, he claims, because there is no reason for people to feel immoral according to the presumptions of customary morality  —  and as he points out, such denial means needing to promote moral actions and avoid immoral ones for different reasons than those we have taken for granted up until now, in order that we may think differently, and ultimately feel differently (D 103). This latter claim doesn’t undermine the emphasis that we claim ought to be given to the importance of mood within Nietzsche’s account in Dawn: the conceivability of an alternative to the ethic of compassion may itself help to create the mood change that Nietzsche suggests is necessary in order for anyone to challenge customary morality. Because of its basis in human drive psychology, Mitleid is particularly well-suited to sustain and shape the superstitious fear that customary morality inculcates in us, and because of the length of time by which this moral emotion in particular has shaped customary morality, its ongoing contributions to the negative effects of customary morality are especially pernicious. Moreover, although Nietzsche’s account suggests that a campaign against customary morality also involves campaigning against Mitleid, we should note that this does not entirely rule out that an experience of Mitleid could be a potentially fruitful experience at some point in the future, for one of the new, experimental, ethicists of self-fashioning, perhaps. Even while such an experience is unlikely to be a fruitful one for almost anyone living at the present time, according to Nietzsche, this future possibility cannot be ruled out. Additional analysis of the possible positive value of Mitleid in Nietzsche’s Dawn might explore the scope for positive experience of this moral emotion.63

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­ he Critique of Mitleid and the Concept of Moral T Imagination Let us now turn to discussion of a much smaller and more specific opportunity that Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid facilitates for contemporary ethics. In this final part of our discussion in this chapter, we want to suggest that Nietzsche’s thinking on mood, developed as a part of his critique of customary morality, opens up some important consequences for our thinking about the concept of moral imagination.64 In much of the available scholarly literature discussing the concept of moral imagination, this concept is taken to be valuable because it enables us to step into another person’s shoes, and to imaginatively inhabit their perspective.65 As Solomon Benatar has pointed out, a sharp sense of moral imagination thus conceived is taken to be vital to the end of promoting solidarity and cooperation in an increasingly interdependent, globalized, world.66 However, as other commentators have pointed out, there are some reasons to find the concept of moral imagination conceived along purely empathetic lines concerning. Using resources from cognitive science, Mark Johnson has shown how our moral theories are grounded in a conception of human rationality that fails to pay adequate attention to the imaginative competence that is required for effective ethical reasoning.67 More recently, Julian Savulescu has identified a similar tendency toward dogmatic rule-following, and away from imaginative engagement, in bioethical inquiry.68 Savulescu characterizes unimaginative moralists as belonging to the type of inquirer who, in bioethical contexts, “slavishly” appeals to ethical codes of practice such as the Declaration of Helsinki, and treats these as definitive on moral issues. According to Johnson, proper moral activity is fundamentally imaginative, because it uses “imaginatively structured concepts and requires imagination to discern what is morally relevant in situations, to understand empathetically how others experience things, and to envisage the full range of possibilities open to us in a particular case.”69 As he claims, ethics of right action theories have thus tended to foster the notion that imagination is unimportant in moral matters, compared with correct rule-following. As an alternative, Johnson calls for an “imaginative rationality” that is “insightful, critical, exploratory, and transformative,” and for replacing pursuit of moral knowledge understood in terms of absolute moral laws with moral knowledge understood as “imaginative moral understanding.”70 Johnson’s drawing of our attention to the need for moral imagination in contemporary ethics does mention Nietzsche, but only does so once, and then only in order to point out that even though Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality is worthwhile, his critique does not make it indefensible for us to seek moral guidance and governance and to want these in our lives.71 While we doubt that Nietzsche would disagree with Johnson that some form of ethical engagement

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is meaningful within human existence, Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality is only one part of his broader ethics, which also incorporates exploration of what a revitalized ethical engagement might mean. We think Nietzsche does have something substantial to offer with respect to our contemporary understanding of the concept of moral imagination in light of the critique of customary morality that he develops in Dawn. To understand what it is that Nietzsche can provide, we need to begin with a brief account of how the concept of moral imagination found its way into contemporary ethical debate. The modern philosophical concept of moral imagination was introduced by Edmund Burke, in a well-known 1790 discussion of the French Revolution.72 Burke develops his concept of moral imagination through a discussion of the death of chivalry and the ending of the divine right of kings to rule, characterized as signs of the end of the glory of Europe.73 In a lament of the damage done to Europe by the upheavals of the Revolution, Burke writes: now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.74 Clearly the wardrobe of moral imagination, and the “decent drapery” that Burke suggests it proffers to society, inform the criticism of unimaginative and dogmatic moral philosophy that concern contemporary debates on moral imagination. Notice, however, that Burke’s notion of decent drapery is commensurate with Nietzsche’s broad characterization of customary morality as grounded in superstitious fear. Burke’s mention of our “naked shivering nature” as having been brought into the light from under the trappings of moral imagination immediately brings to mind Nietzsche’s discussion of the “great task [tolle Aufgabe]” of translating humanity back into nature, which is discussed by him in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 230). Of this great task, Nietzsche writes: we ourselves may well be the least inclined to dress ourselves up in the finery of those kinds of moralistic word sequins and fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this very taste and its merry opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom,

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sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful  —  there is something in them that makes the pride swell up in a man. But we hermits and marmots, we persuaded ourselves long ago, with all the secrecy of a hermit’s conscience, that this worthy verbal pomp also belongs with the old lying finery, rubbish, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that underneath such flattering colours and repainted surfaces we must once again recognize the terrifying basic text of homo natura. (BGE 230) In this aphorism, Nietzsche explicitly cautions us against the illusions of moral imagination that Burke’s introduction of the concept praises as pleasing and dignity-promoting.75 The “we ourselves” to whom Nietzsche refers at the beginning of the quoted section of the aphorism are the “very free spirits [sehr freien Geistern],” or spirits who approach the disentanglement and value-transvaluation of the freed spirits of Nietzsche’s late works.76 Unlike Burke, Nietzsche is willing to criticize the type of aristocrat whose power and authority is drawn from the wardrobe of the moral imagination. For example, he charges the aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France with having become corrupt and thus having lost their meaning and relevance (BGE 258). He contrasts this corrupted aristocracy with a healthier one, which is based on a type of human who affirms life (BGE 258). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche defines the concept of will to power as the will to life, and suggests on this basis that organisms expressing power, or engaging in contest, are not fundamentally immoral for so doing (BGE 259). As he points out, it is simply a feature of living organisms to exploit one another in various ways (BGE 259). Nietzsche’s explanation of will to power as will to life gives us one reason why we might pursue a goal of developing healthier humans  —  new human types who can create values (BGE 261). Such a human type is one that finds itself within Nietzsche’s great project of translating themselves back into nature (BGE 230). A similar emphasis on the importance of the natural in ethical analysis is also to be found in Dawn. One important example of this occurs in Nietzsche’s application of what he calls a “theory of empathy [Theorie der Mitempfindung]” to the phenomenon of Mitleid as discussed by moral theorists such as Schopenhauer (D 142). In this aphorism, Nietzsche explores how we understand others, characterizing empathy as our reproducing of another person’s “feeling in ourselves [um sein Gefühl in uns nachzubilden].” We discussed this aphorism in Chapter 1, when pointing out Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with the practice of skepticism in philosophy, and his criticism of Schopenhauer for his metaphysical mysticism. Building on that point, we want now to emphasize Nietzsche’s concern with the natural in the context of the ethical. In previous work, Rebecca Bamford has pointed out that Nietzsche identifies two possible mechanisms as to how we might reproduce another person’s feeling:

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(i) we ask the reason why a person feels something such as depression, so that we may feel that same feeling in response to our mental awareness of this same ­reason; and (ii) we produce the feeling in ourselves “according to the effects it exerts and displays on the other person [das Gefühl nach den Wirkungen, die es am Anderen übt und zeigt],” specifically by working to reproduce similar play of muscle, innervation, eye expression, gait, voice, and bearing as the other person, or even the reflection of such bearing in artworks, including those composed of “word, painting, music” (D 142).77 Added to these possible empathy mechanisms, Nietzsche points out in the same aphorism that humans are distinctive by virtue of being naturally “the most timorous of all creatures” (D 142). Human “timidity [Furchtsamkeit]” has been the “instructress” of our empathy or “rapid understanding of the feelings of others (and of animals as well)” (D 142). This timidity has led humans to see “a danger” in “everything alien and alive,” since, owing to the physical mirroring mechanism described in the first part of Nietzsche’s account, humans reproduce the relevant expression and bearing, and derive conclusions about the “type of malevolent intent” informing and directing these (D 142). In addition, this empathetic capacity is so efficient that it even applies our interpretations of movements “as emanating from intentions” to “inanimate things” and their nature; Nietzsche suggests that this is the foundation for what he calls “a feeling for nature [Naturgefühl]” (D 142). As Bamford suggests, Nietzsche’s theory of empathy ­provides a drive-based psycho-physiological explanation for the way in which ­customary morality consistently reinforces a social mood of superstitious fear, which inhibits creative experimentation and curiosity.78 As well as explaining how the mimetic arts are fostered through the promulgation of social fear, this “theory of empathy” also provides the basis for a second claim against an ethic of compassion (D 142). As Nietzsche shows, and as mentioned already, the supposed mystical process by which Schopenhauer’s “compassion [Mitleid] transforms two essential beings into one and to such an extent that each is vouchsafed unmediated understanding of the other” is revealed, he suggests, to be “rapturous and worthless poppycock [schwärmerischen und nichtswürdigen Krimskrams]” by virtue of drive-based power-relations (D 142). Schopenhauer’s morality of compassion is inadequate, Nietzsche suggests, when compared with the theory of empathy [Mitempfindung] that he has himself ­presented, with its basis in observation of human behavior in reasoning and in physical activity. Nietzsche provides further support for this implication of his theory of empathy by asking us to join in performing a thought experiment. If we imagine that “the drive for attachment and care of others” were twice as strong as is already the case, Nietzsche proposes, then we would see that “life on earth would be unbearable” (D 143). He makes this claim on the basis that in caring for ourselves, we constantly commit acts of foolishness and are insufferable in the process; as he suggests, if we became the object of others’ foolishness in caring,

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then even the mere possibility of engaging with others would drive us to run away. In light of this, Nietzsche asks us to imagine: wouldn’t we also in such circumstances heap “the same imprecations on sympathetic affection that we currently heap on egotism?” (D 143). The question mark at the end of this aphorism signals the opportunity for the reader to actively engage with their assumptions about sympathetic affection, by reflecting upon and digesting the possibility Nietzsche opens up for us.79

­Conclusion By way of drawing this analysis of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with compassion in Dawn to a close, let us mention some possible results that might arise from the reflection and digestion that the thought experiment in Dawn 143 prompts. Nietzsche’s cautioning of us against the illusions created by an ethic of compassion in Dawn  —  specifically, the illusion that compassion unifies us and that Mitleid should be uncritically assumed to be a positive value — neatly prefaces his remarks on the same topic in Beyond Good and Evil. As we saw, those remarks provide a strong criticism of Burke’s social conservativism and his apology for bankrupt aristocratic values as a basis for his account of moral imagination. Burke’s characterizing of the concept of moral imagination in terms of a “wardrobe” promoting social “dignity” is revealed by Nietzsche’s account to be nothing more than the adornments of a highly problematic customary morality, which Nietzsche has called into question.80 As well as opening up the idea that Burke’s model for the concept of moral imagination has been poorly conceived, Nietzsche’s approach offers a tangible framework from which we can begin the necessary work to revalue the concept of moral imagination. First, instead of simply assuming that any perspective based in an ethic of compassion is always morally defensible, we might begin to subject this ethic to critical question on a more consistent basis. Imaginatively inhabiting another person’s perspective is a useless endeavor if such an imaginative act is strictly limited in its scope by the presumptions of customary morality based in compassion, or, alternatively, if analysis of the flight path of an unfettered imagination is circumscribed by dogmatic adherence to the moral language of a moral theory grounded in customary morality, such as a right action theory. Second, and in line with Nietzsche’s broader interests in experimentalism as critical to the ethos of inquiry, the production of new experiences requires that we transgress against the moral norm: that we engage in “tiny deviant actions” (D 149) and that we explore multiple, diverse, ways of making “novel experiments” both “in ways of life” and in “modes of society” (D 164).81 Doing so would allow us to engage in acts of imaginative resistance to the orthodoxy of customary morality, as well as to carry out acts of imaginative affirmation of new ethical possibilities.

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Further investigation of this possibility would show how such imaginative resistance and imaginative affirmation hold the potential to revive non-dogmatic engagement with ethical problems, which as mentioned earlier, is of increasing concern within practical ethics. It is tempting to conclude this chapter by suggesting that Nietzsche opens up the prospect of an immoral imagination. However, as Robert Solomon has pointed out, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid, and with customary morality more generally, need be treated as neither immoral nor antimoral; in general, Nietzsche is arguing in favor of an affirmative form of ethics.82 For this reason, it seems more plausible to us to suggest that Nietzsche’s critique of an ethic of compassion opens up space for a free (and potentially at least, free-spirited) ethical imagination.83 The possibility of a free and creative ethical imagination, and the pathway to securing such an ethical imagination through rejection of mindless adherence to compassion-based morality, constitutes the most fundamental and important example of moral therapy that we can attribute to Nietzsche in Dawn.

Notes 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 183. 2 This section builds on and develops an earlier discussion in Rebecca Bamford, “Dawn,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas, (London: Routledge, 2018), 25–40. 3 David E. Cartwright. 1988. “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity.” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch 69: 557–67. 4 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. 5 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. Similarly to Cartwright’s analysis, Brian Leiter has pointed out that Nietzsche’s “well-known polemics against Mitleid as a moral ideal are clearly directed at Schopenhauer’s ethics,” listing HH 50, HH 103, D 134, GS 99, BGE 201 and BGE 225 as textual evidence in support of this claim. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 57. 6 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. 7 David E. Cartwright, “Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy for Life,” in Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Christopher Janaway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 116–50. 8 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 139–67. 9 Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy,” 146–47.

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10 Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy,” 146–147. 11 Michael Ure. 2006. “The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32(1): 68–91. 12 Ure, “The Irony of Pity,” 68. See also the detailed discussion provided in Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). 13 Ure, “The Irony of Pity,” 68. 14 Some of the remarks in this paragraph are developed from an earlier discussion in Rebecca Bamford, “The Virtue of Shame: Defending Nietzsche’s Critique of Mitleid,” in Nietzsche and Ethics, ed. Gudrun von Tevenar (Berne: Peter Lang Verlag, 2007), 241–62. 15 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 100. 16 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. See also Bamford, “The Virtue of Shame: Defending Nietzsche’s Critique of Mitleid,” 250. 17 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. 18 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63–67. 19 For example, in Dawn, Nietzsche uses Erbarmen rather than Mitleid in aphorisms 30, 73, 77, and 329. We are grateful to Carol Diethe and to Graham Parkes for informative and generous conversations on the complexities of translating these two terms into English, which have helped us to think more carefully and critically about what might be meant when we talk about Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid in Dawn. 20 Alan Schrift. 2012. “The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: A Status Report.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43(2): 355–61. 21 Schrift, “The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,” 357. 22 Schrift, “The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,” 357. 23 Schrift, “The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,” 357. 24 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 557–67. Brian Leiter also notes this same point on translation in his Nietzsche on Morality, 57. In a later essay, Cartwright remains “neutral” on the issue, using “Mitleid” to refer to the “motive” that he suggests Schopenhauer treated as the basis of morality, and to the “passion” that Nietzsche criticizes. See Cartwright, “Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy for Life,” 116–17. 25 Gudrun Von Tevenar, “Nietzsche’s Objections to Pity and Compassion,” in Nietzsche and Ethics, ed. Gudrun von Tevenar (Berne: Peter Lang Verlag, 2007), 263–82. 26 Von Tevenar, “Nietzsche’s Objections to Pity and Compassion,” 279. 27 Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2011. “Beyond Compassion: on Nietzsche’s Moral Therapy in Dawn.” Continental Philosophy Review 44(2): 179–204. See also Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works.

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28 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. For a more detailed discussion of the influences of Epicurus and Guyau on Nietzsche’s ethics in Dawn, see also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Selfishness: Epicurean Ethics in Nietzsche and Guyau,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 49–68. 29 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 30 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182–83. 31 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 188–90, 199. 32 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 202. 33 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 202. See also Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61. 34 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 35 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 36 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 37 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 38 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 186–87. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 39 We shall have more to say on Nietzsche’s thinking on drives in Chapter 6. For now, we simply note that for Nietzsche in Dawn, Mitleid fits within his drive psychology and is not an absolute moral value standing outside drive psychology. 40 Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy;” Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 41 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion.” Mark Alfano has also recently pointed out the importance of solitude in Nietzsche in chapter 10 of his Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 42 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 43 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 44 For further discussion see Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76. 45 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 98. Bamford, “Dawn,” 30. 46 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 55–76. 47 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. 48 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. 49 Some remarks in this paragraph are developed from an earlier version in Bamford, “Dawn,” 27. See also Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” 50 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 193. 51 Nietzsche’s thinking on fear as a social phenomenon produced through the functioning of customary morality is reflected in his later works, as David E. Cooper has pointed out. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche discusses how fear is taken as the determinant of the power relations within a

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52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

specific community as well as across different communities; fear becomes the source of morality because moral values become established in terms of how certain actions will affect the wellbeing of the group (BGE 201). SeeCooper, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 31. See also Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 55–76. Stanley Corngold. 1990. “Nietzsche’s Moods.” Studies in Romanticism 29(1): 67–90. Corngold, “Nietzsche’s Moods,” 67–90. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 65–66. Both Janaway and Bamford have explored the affective power of rhetoric in this context, though it is important to note that they have done so in different ways: Janaway focuses on the individual’s capacity to be changed by such rhetoric, while in drawing on the concept of active externalism, Bamford’s account incorporates attention to why the environment, including the social ­environment, might play a plausible role in constituting mental processes of which we are aware, and mental processes that remain largely unknown to us yet, which still play a role in our moral behavior. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 48–49. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 70. See also Mark Rowlands. 2009. “The Extended Mind.” Zygon, 44(3): 628–41. See also Chapter 1 of this volume. Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 147. Nietzsche’s discussion in HH 50 of the unfortunate sufferer who inflicts his laments and whimpers on the spectator and who thus inverts the apparent power relationship between them, turning the spectator into a sufferer. On this, see Bamford, “The Virtue of Shame: Defending Nietzsche’s Critique of Mitleid,” 251. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 45–46. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 66. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 67. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 45–47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 28. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 67. As Andreas Urs Sommer has pointed out, the “freed spirits [freigewordne Geister]” that we find in Nietzsche’s writings of 1888 are not always separable from the “we ourselves, we free spirits” that Nietzsche describes as being “already a ‘transvaluation of all values’” in others of his late writings (AC 13). The question of how and when a very free, or freed, spirit should exhibit Mitleid while remaining consistent with Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality might benefit from further attention in analysis of the development of free spirits. See Sommer, “Is There a Free Spirit in Nietzsche’s Later Writings?” in

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64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

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Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 253–65. See also Bamford, “Dawn,” 37. Bamford, “Dawn,” 37. See e.g. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Soloman Benatar. 2005. “Moral Imagination: The Missing Component in Global Health,” PLoS Medicine 2(1): e400. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). Julian Savulescu. 2015. “Bioethics: Why Philosophy is Essential for Progress.” Journal of Medical Ethics 41: 28–33. Johnson, Moral Imagination, x. Johnson, Moral Imagination, 187, 243. Johnson, Moral Imagination, 30. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75–77. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. Sommer, “Is There a Free Spirit in Nietzsche’s Later Writings?” 259–60. Bamford, “Dawn,” 33. Nietzsche’s explanation in this 1881 aphorism is similar to the account of emotion provided three years later in William James. 1884. “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9: 188–205. Robert C. Solomon notes that even though James identifies the emotion with a conscious sensation, while Nietzsche does not, they are both claiming that an emotion is “a physiological phenomenon” rather than simply a mental experience. See Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73; Bamford, “Dawn,” 39. Bamford, “Dawn,” 34. On curiosity, see also Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32. The question mark functions similarly to the long dash in that it reinforces readers’ active engagement. On Nietzsche’s use of Gedankenstrich, see Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), xvii, 63. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. For a more detailed account of Nietzsche’s experimentalism, see Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. Solomon, Living With Nietzsche, 17. Bamford indicates this possibility, but does not develop it in detail, in “Dawn,” 37.

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5 The German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and the Passion of Knowledge1 As Nicholas Martin has pointed out, in the eyes of many of his adherents as well as opponents, Nietzsche has been treated as an anti-Enlightenment irrationalist; however, in fact, Nietzsche takes the Enlightenment very seriously: as a cultural critic of the late nineteenth century he cannot afford to escape it and its legacy.2 One of the reasons why a study of Dawn as one of Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings is important is because it can further illuminate why the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of Nietzsche is a caricature of his thought, if not an outright distortion. Nietzsche is hostile to the French Revolution, but seeks in his writings to sever the link between enlightenment and revolution. This is because he suspects that revolution breeds fanaticism and is a throwback to a lower stage of culture. Nietzsche is an admirer of the critical and rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, by which we mean both the eighteenth-century version found in the writings of Voltaire and Lessing, and earlier incarnations of this spirit identifiable in the thinking of Epicurus, Petrarch, and Erasmus. In Dawn, as we show, Nietzsche shares a number of the key ideas and commitments of the modern Enlightenment, including attacks on superstition, religious dogmatism, rigid class structures, and outmoded forms of governance and rule. The fundamental aspect of the modern Enlightenment with which Nietzsche concerns himself is one of demystification, of liberation of the human from its chains (WS 350), and as Martin has claimed, of seeking “to provide the individual with the critical tools to achieve autonomy, to liberate himself from his own unexamined assumptions as well as the dictates of others.”3 Nietzsche is an Enlightenment thinker, then, in this specific sense: his overriding aim is to foster the development of his readers, particularly of readers’ autonomy and maturity. In this respect, Nietzsche is an inheritor of Kant, as he acknowledges in Dawn, in an aphorism in which Nietzsche presents himself as being even more faithful to the rational spirit of Enlightenment than Kant was with his obscurantist residues, Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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such as the thing in itself and the categorical imperative that retains “occult qualities” (see D 142; see also D 207). To develop this view, Nietzsche contrasts the virtue of antiquity  —  personal distinction  —  and what he deems an appropriate Mediterranean “little bit of skepticism for each and every thing,” with German virtue — the subordination of oneself, or “categorical obedience,” whether such following is secret or public (D 207).4 As an example of German virtue, Nietzsche aligns what he calls Kant’s eventual “detour through morality” for the purpose of “arriving at obedience toward a person” with Luther’s earlier proof of God’s existence as the necessary existence of a person whom we can trust (D 207). At the end of the aphorism, contrasting the past with the possible future Dawn aims to sketch out, Nietzsche asks us to imagine what might become of German virtue if “disobedience” and a position for a German “where he is capable of great things” were possible  —  something that, as Nietzsche suggests, would involve overcoming morality (D 207). Nietzsche’s remark on his Kantian inheritance should not surprise us, given that Kant famously defines enlightenment as a human being’s emergence from their self-incurred immaturity, or the courage to use their own understanding without the guidance of another.5 With this distinctive sense of Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker in mind, let us examine Nietzsche’s relation to German philosophy and the Enlightenment in greater detail, in order to understand Nietzsche’s view in Dawn within the wider context of his free spirit writings. In Human, all Too Human 463 Nietzsche exposes what he takes to be a delusion in the theory or doctrine of revolution. The error, he contends, belongs to Rousseau, namely, that buried within the accrued habits and vices of civilization there lies concealed an original or primordial but stifled human goodness: There are political and social visionaries who ardently and eloquently demand the overthrow of all social order in the belief that the most splendid temple of a beautified humanity would immediately be raised, as if by itself. In these dangerous dreams, we can still hear an echo of Rousseau’s superstition (HH 463) Not only is there a stifled human goodness buried underneath the weight of civilization, but the blame for such stifling is to be leveled squarely at the institutions of culture, such as those we find embodied in state, society, and education. Nietzsche holds that historical experience teaches us an important lesson, namely, that revolutions bring with them, “a new resurrection of the most savage energies in the form of the long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages” (HH 463). He does not deny that revolutions can be a source of vital energy for a humanity that has grown feeble, but he contests the idea that it can work as an organizer and perfecter of human nature. He thus appeals to Voltaire over Rousseau,

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that is, in his eyes to a nature that knows how to organize, purify, and reconstruct, as opposed to a nature that is full of passionate follies and half-lies. Against the optimism of the spirit of revolution, Nietzsche wishes to cry with Voltaire, “Écrasez l’infâme!” (EH “Destiny” 8). It is the spirit of revolution that frightens off the spirit of enlightenment and “of progressive development” — and it is this spirit Nietzsche calls upon his readers to cultivate and nurture. Nietzsche locates in the French Revolution’s “histrionicism” a “bestial cruelty,” as well as a “sentimentality” and “self-intoxication,” and holds Rousseau responsible for being its intellectual inspiration and for setting the Enlightenment on “its fanatical head.” He sees the Enlightenment as alien to the Revolution, which — if it had been left to itself — he thinks would have “passed quietly along like a gleam in the clouds and for long been content to address itself only to the individual” (WS 221). Nietzsche is not opposed to reform or institutional change; it is rather that he thinks customs and institutions can be changed slowly and diligently. The task, he says, is to continue the work of the Enlightenment, in each and every individual, but also “to strangle the Revolution at birth” and ensure it does not happen (WS 221). In Dawn, Nietzsche argues contra Rousseau that it is our “weak, unmanly” societal notions of good and evil, and the way these notions dominate over body and soul today, that are making all bodies and souls weak and shattering the ­“pillars of a strong civilization” (D 163). For Nietzsche, strength in civilization can only reside in unfettered individuals, who are self-reliant and independent (D 163).6 The extent to which Nietzsche is an astute and informed reader of Rousseau is debatable. Martin explains that Nietzsche’s critical perspectives are more palatable if one sees his use of proper names as signifying psychological states and ideological positions rather than historical individuals.7 In places in his middle writings Nietzsche reveals he has a more subtle appreciation of Rousseau than is usually taken to be the case (see D 427, D 481). Ruth Abbey has shown that while Nietzsche’s mention of Rousseau as an influence may seem surprising (see AOM 408), as we tend to think of Nietzsche as “reviling” Rousseau, this view is really the result of scholarship having given Nietzsche’s middle writings a limited role in shaping our image of “Nietzschean” philosophy.8 What is clear is that Nietzsche strongly allies himself with progressive forces promoting the development of strong individuals — but that he also insists that desirable social transformation ought to be pursued patiently: for him there is no “miraculous” solution to human ills, and the chief enemy to transformation, as noted, is fanaticism. With this in mind, we shall move on to consider Nietzsche’s attitude toward German philosophy at this time. When Nietzsche discusses his favorite authors and books, it is usually at the expense of German authors and German philosophy. In The Wanderer and His Shadow 214, for example, he mentions some of his favorite reading, which includes the likes of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, and Chamfort. The works of these authors “constitute an important link in the great, still continuing chain of the Renaissance” (WS 214). What

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Nietzsche admires about them is that they are above the changes and vagaries of “national taste” and also above the “philosophical colouring” that every modern book radiates as a matter of rule and does so if it wishes to become famous. Moreover, these books “contain more real ideas than all the books of German philosophers put together” (WS 214). German philosophy books are characterized by “obscurity” and “exaggeration.” Even Schopenhauer, who has affinities in his style of writing with the French moralists, wanders among images of things rather than among the things themselves (WS 214). What Nietzsche admires about the French writers is their “wittiness of expression” and their “clarity and delicate precision.” Moral philosophy, Nietzsche contends, has taken a wrong turn with German thought, notably with Kant’s moralism (which, he notes, comes from Rousseau and the reawakened Stoicism of ancient Rome), and the moralism of Schiller too (WS 216). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, a “stream of moral awakening has flowed through Europe” with “virtue” becoming eloquent and teaching human beings to discover “unforced gestures of exaltation [Erhebung] and emotion” (WS 216). The ultimate source of this development for Nietzsche is Rousseau — but the mythical Rousseau, that is, the one constructed out of the impression produced by his writings and confessions. What worries Nietzsche is that this “moral awakening” has resulted in “retrogression for knowledge of moral phenomena,” or genuinely scientific inquiry into the sources and nature of morality. Against this development of retrogression, he champions the unfashionable (then and now) likes of Helvetius who sought to treat morality like all the other sciences, “founded on experiment, as well as natural philosophy”: What is the whole of German moral philosophy from Kant onwards … ? A semi-theological assault on Helvetius and a rejection of the open views or signposts to the right path which, gained by long and wearisome struggle, he at last assembled and gave adequate expression to. Helvetius is in Germany to the present day the most reviled of all good moralists and good men (WS 216) Nietzsche picks up this theme again in Dawn, with section 197 being the most important place in which he develops his views on it (but see also D 190, 193, 207, 481). This aphorism is entitled “The German’s hostility to the Enlightenment” (D 197). In it, Nietzsche wishes to take note of the intellectual contribution Germany, including German philosophers, have made to culture at large. He identifies German philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century as a retrogressive force: “they retreated to the first and oldest level of speculation, for, like the thinkers of dreamy ages, they found satisfaction in concepts rather than in explanations — they resuscitated a pre-scientific type of philosophy” (D 197).

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Nietzsche sees similar retrogressive forces operating in German history and German science (D 197). In the former, a general concern was to accord honor upon primitive sensibilities, especially Christianity, but also folk-lore and folklanguage, oriental asceticism, and the world of India. In the natural sciences, German scientists struggled against the spirit of Newton and Voltaire and, following Goethe and Schopenhauer, “sought to erect once again the idea of a divine or a daemonic nature suffused with ethical [ethischen] and symbolic significance” (D 197). From this, Nietzsche infers that the proclivity of the Germans runs contrary to the Enlightenment and to revolution in society. The German spirit is antiquarian: “piety toward everything then in existence sought to metamorphose into piety towards everything that once had existed in order that heart and spirit might once again grow full and no longer have any room for future, innovative goals” (D 197). German culture has, Nietzsche suggests here, erected a cult of feeling at the expense of a cult of reason with German composers — Nietzsche surely has in mind Wagner among others — being artists of the invisible, of raptures, and of the fairy-tale. Nietzsche objects to this cultural development, it is important to note, for one key reason that is directly in keeping with his admiration of Enlightenment spirit as discussed earlier, that it serves to retard, or even suppress, the development and acquisition of knowledge. This recalls Kant’s famous words to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) that he has found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith and thus to draw up the limits of knowledge. Nietzsche makes it clear that he champions the genuine Enlightenment against all the forces of obscurantism (see also AOM 27): And strange to say: the very spirits that the Germans had so eloquently invoked became, in the long run, the most injurious for their invokers — history, understanding of origin and evolution, sympathy with the past, the newly aroused passion for feeling and knowledge, after having for a time appeared to be beneficial companions of the spirit of rapturous obscurantism and reaction, assumed one day by a different nature and now fly on the widest wings above and beyond their earlier invokers as new and stronger geniuses of that very Enlightenment against which they had been invoked. This Enlightenment we must now carry on — unperturbed that there has a existed a “great Revolution” and then again a “great reaction” against it, that indeed both still exist: they are, after all, the mere ripple of waves in comparison to the truly great tide in which we surge and want to surge! (D 197) As Mazzino Montinari points out, a note written in the spring of 1881 — that is, just prior to the publication of Dawn — provides additional clues for deciphering

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Dawn 197.9 In this note, Nietzsche portrays the nineteenth century as one of reaction in which a conservative and preservative frame of mind predominates. The note runs as follows: 19th century, Reaction: people sought the basic principles of everything that had lasted, and sought to prove it was true. Permanence, fruitfulness and good conscience were seen as indices of truth! This was the conservative mentality: they called everything that had not yet been shaken; they had the egoism of the possessors as their strongest objection to the philosophy of the 18th century: for the non-possessors and malcontents there was still the church and even the arts (for some highly talented individuals there was also the worship of genius by way of gratitude if they worked for the conservative interests). With history [Geschichte] (new!!!) people proved things, they became enthusiastic for the great fruitful complexes called cultures (nations!!!). A huge part of the zeal for research and of the sense of worship was thrown at the past: modern philosophy and natural science forfeited this part! — Now a backlash! History [Historie] ultimately proved something other than what was wanted: it turned out to be the most certain means of destroying those principles. Darwin. On the other hand sceptical historicism as aftereffect, empathy. People became better acquainted with the motivating forces in history [Geschichte], not our “beautiful” ideas! Socialism has a historical foundation, similarly national wars for historical reasons! (KSA 9, 10 [D 88]) 10 What the note shows is that, for Nietzsche, then, it is “history” that serves as the means of destroying the conservative principle, and this history includes Darwin’s theory of evolution. What we need to learn and take cognizance of are the real forces operating in history, and not our beautiful ideas. Everything that comes into existence  —  for example, socialism  —  plants its own foundations in history. As Nietzsche presents it in Dawn 197, the basic idea is that the “enlightenment” project that he proposes is to make its claim, “not against but rather beyond a great revolution (socialism) and a great reaction, beyond the conservative frame of mind.”11 It is thus an error in Nietzsche’s account of the story to conceive of the Enlightenment as the cause of the Revolution, a misunderstanding that is the “reaction” itself. On Nietzsche’s account so understood, it would be equally an error to conceive the continuing enlightenment as the cause of socialism. As Montinari points out, the new great reaction in the form of the conservative mentality consists in this error, and as he further remarks, from 1878 onwards, Nietzsche considers a new enlightenment as the noble task for the free spirit of his own times.12 There have been, to date, two great historical periods in which an enlightenment has sought to flourish but has been halted by a paired revolution and reaction: first,

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the enlightenment of Italian and European humanism, or the Renaissance (exemplified in the work of Petrarch and Erasmus), but followed by the German Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; second, the enlightenment of France, exemplified by the work of Voltaire, with the French Revolution and German romanticism as the corresponding revolution and reaction. Nietzsche proposes a third enlightenment, conceived by him as a “new” enlightenment that contrasts itself to both the great revolution and great reaction of modern times, socialism and conservatism (see HH 26).13 Nietzsche claims in Human, All Too Human 26, entitled “Reaction as progress,” that in the previous two enlightenments the new “free spirited” tendencies were not powerful enough to withstand the appearance of impassioned but backward spirits who conjured up once again a bygone phase of humanity. This is the case with Luther’s Reformation in which “all stirrings of the freedom of spirit were still uncertain, delicate, youthful” and “science could not yet raise its head.” It is the case in the nineteenth century where Schopenhauer’s metaphysics showed “that even now the scientific spirit is not yet strong enough”: in spite of the achieved destruction of Christian dogmas in Schopenhauer’s doctrine, the whole medieval Christian world-view once again celebrated its resurrection. Although there is in Schopenhauer “a strong ring of science” this does not master his thinking; rather, it is the metaphysical need that does. But even in this reaction there is progress to be had, Nietzsche suggests: It is surely one of the greatest and inestimable advantages we gain from Schopenhauer that he sometimes forces our sensations back into older, powerful ways of viewing the world and people to which no path would otherwise so easily lead us. The gain for history and justice is very great: I believe that without Schopenhauer’s assistance, nobody now could easily manage to do justice to Christianity and its Asiatic relatives: to do so on the basis of present-day Christianity is impossible. Only after this great success of justice, only after we have corrected in so essential a point the way of viewing history that the Age of Enlightenment brought with it, can we once more bear the flag of the Enlightenment farther (HH 26) As Martin points out, Nietzsche wants an “enlightenment of the Enlightenment.”14 Nietzsche sees this task as a never-ending critical process; the problem with revolution as it is typically conceived of is that it aims at the achievement of an imagined end, and this longing for finality and resolution is ultimately seen by Nietzsche as a symptom and defining characteristic of nihilism.15 Given what we have said with regard to Nietzsche’s thinking on the German Enlightenment and on knowing, we can now ask with regard to Dawn: What is it according to Nietzsche in this text, to know the world and to know ourselves? How is such knowledge possible? What is the status of such knowledge? How do

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we pursue knowledge and who is best equipped to pursue it? Many aphorisms in Dawn reflect on these (and related) questions, and consider various solutions given to them in the history of philosophy from the ancients to the moderns, from Plato to Schopenhauer. One thing is immediately evident: to see the world anew, we may need to be shocked into thought or forced to think. This is one reason why Nietzsche begins Dawn with the contention that many things that have become saturated with reason in the course of history began their existence in unreason (D 1). Nietzsche’s new enlightenment in his free-spirit writings, including Dawn, demands a process of thinking against our customary habits of thought, which are radically ahistorical and nonhistorical and which tend to assume that things come into existence as if designed for some end or purpose (and as motivated by divine reason). It also demands a revival of the Mediterranean “freedom of feeling” understood as guarding against “unconditional trust,” and as holding back in the last recess of the heart “a little bit of skepticism for each and every thing, be it god, human, or concept,” which he affirms in Dawn 207, as we discussed earlier. Already in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche had commenced his free-spirited period of thinking by calling for “historical philosophizing”  —  and with it the virtue of modesty, a taste he was not to eschew, and which he affirms once again in the Preface to Dawn: “our taste is for more modest words,” he writes contra “morality” (D Preface 4). His basic idea is that if everything has become, which Nietzsche holds to be the case, then there are no eternal facts or absolute truths (HH 2). This is a deeply unsettling idea — has not even our faculty of cognition itself evolved? Is not everything that comes into existence historically conditioned? The fundamental task that Nietzsche outlines for philosophy is that of undertaking a “history of the genesis of thought” (HH 17–18). The scientific spirit is to be cultivated and at the expense of our inherited metaphysical need. In the opening section of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche raises the question of how something can originate in its opposite, and sets up a contrast between “metaphysical philosophy” and “historical philosophy.” The former answers Nietzsche’s question, by appealing to a miraculous source such as the thing in itself to explain the origin of something held to be of a higher value (this “in itself” denotes something unconditioned that resides outside the conditions of life — change, evolution, becoming, etc.). The latter, by contrast, which Nietzsche insists can no longer be separated from the natural sciences and which he names as the youngest of all philosophical methods, seeks to show that there are no opposites — but rather, that all things arise from and are implicated in a process of sublimation [Sublimirung]. On this basis, Nietzsche calls for a “chemistry of concepts and sensations” (chemistry being the science of change) (HH 1). He reinforces this by exploring how notions such as strictly nonegoistic actions or purely disinterested contemplation are “only sublimations, in which the fundamental element appears to have almost evaporated and reveals its presence only to the keenest observation”

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(HH 2). The human animal is the product of a pre-historic labor going back thousands of years. What humanity is now is not what humanity has been destined to be from time immemorial. An important consequence of this is, as Nietzsche contends, that one sign of a higher culture is its estimation of the small and unpretentious truths that are founded by the adoption of rigorous methods over the “blissful and blinding errors” that arise from metaphysical and artistic ages and peoples (HH 3). Nietzsche paints this contrast as one between sobriety and intoxication. We are to “hold onto” knowledge that has been laboriously acquired and that is certain and endures, and to do so in a way that demonstrates our valor, simplicity, and temperance. For millennia, Nietzsche thinks, the spirit or intellect was under no obligation to think rigorously and its seriousness consisted in “spinning out symbols and forms,” and it is this worship of “forms,” which in turn provides the measuring stick for the beautiful and the sublime, that will mock the esteem accorded to unpretentious truths (HH 3). However, this is now all changing. Nietzsche thinks: the earnestness shown to the symbolic is becoming regarded as a sign of a lower culture. We now judge differently — the arts are becoming ever more intellectual and our senses ever more spiritual: “a spirited glance can be worth more than the most beautiful structure or the most sublime construction” [erhabenste Bauwerk] (HH 3). In short, what is changing is how we conceive the human in relation to the cosmos: the human is becoming decentred as Nietzsche makes clear in the next section on “Astrology and Related Things” (HH 4). These passages from Human, All Too Human show that, for Nietzsche, it is through moral, religious, and aesthetic demands, along with their blind inclination, passion, and fear and their reveling in habits of illogical thinking, that the world has become what it is for us, namely, something colorful, meaningful, and soulful, and that we have been the colorists. In other words, Nietzsche thinks it is the intellect that makes appearances appear, and then carries over these intellectual errors into things (e.g. we feel ourselves to be originators of our acting in the world and so we conceive the world as following an entirely free course, as something that knows what it wants and that executes a plan). This important aspect of his earlier claims carries directly over into his project in Dawn. In this text, Nietzsche calls explicit attention to the way we construct and color the world for ourselves in an effort to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers. In an aphorism entitled “Everything has its day,” he notes how the German language attributes a gender to all nouns, and writes: When human beings first ascribed a gender to every single thing, they did so in all seriousness, believing they had gained a profound insight — only very late, and perhaps to this day not yet fully, have they admitted to themselves the enormous scope of this mistake. — In just the same way humans

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have conferred on everything that exists a relationship to morality and have laid upon the world’s shoulders an ethical significance. One day this too will have just as much, and no more, value as the belief in the masculinity or femininity of the sun has today (D 3) Nietzsche’s point, commensurate with his interest in a new enlightenment, is that it is through knowledge that we may conquer these delusions and rid the world of the many types of false grandeur that have been bestowed upon it. We can therefore be grateful that, as he notes, the “greatest achievement of humankind” so far is to have attained a state of awareness where “we need no longer be in constant fear of wild animals, barbarians, the gods, and our dreams” (D 5). Moreover, we can appreciate how the modern sciences are teaching us how to learn a different sense of space (D 7). As Nietzsche eloquently develops this point: Have real things or imaginary things contributed more to human happiness? It is certain that the breadth of space between highest happiness and deepest despair has been established only with the aid of imaginary things. Accordingly, the influence of the sciences is constantly diminishing this type of spatial sense: just as science has taught, and continues to teach us to experience the earth as small and the solar system even as a mere dot (D 7) And as Nietzsche also points out, the astonishment afforded to us by the sciences should be contrasted to that presented by “the conjurer’s art”: where the conjurer disguises complex causality with simplicity, the sciences compel us “to relinquish our belief in simple causalities at the very moment when everything seems so selfexplanatory and we are being the fools of what is before our very eyes” (D 6). The simplest things, Nietzsche asserts, “are very complicated” — and as he remarks, “one can’t marvel enough at that!” (D 6). Dawn continues, then, the critical and deflationary lines of new enlightenment inquiry established in Human, All Too Human, and advances a conception of plural modes and methods of knowledge. For Nietzsche, knowing is no longer a question of philosophers estranging themselves from sensory perception and exalting the mind to abstractions, in which we would then inhabit the palest images of words and things, playing with invisible, intangible, and inaudible beings and out of disdain for the physically palpable. In order to know, philosophers can no longer rely on Platonic admiration for the dialectic as our sole method and as practiced by the good, desensualized, person. Rather, we need to appeal to a multiplicity of faculties, methods, and procedures, as Nietzsche suggests: The thinker needs fantasy, the leap upward, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, critique,

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compilation of material, impersonal mode of thought, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least of all, justice and love towards everything present (D 43) Through adopting a multiplicity of new and refined practices of observation and self-observation, we as human beings — largely unknown to ourselves at the present time — retain the potential to become our own experiments. In order to do so, we would become strangers to our ordinary and habitual selves, by viewing ourselves afresh as experiments of living and feeling as well as of knowing. Nietzsche points out that the current notion of “human being” is a bloodless fiction, and “society” is a general concept (D 105). What his account in Dawn points towards is a new way of understanding humans and society, in part through a revised, broader, understanding of experimentation. It is important to note that Nietzsche holds scientific knowledge, as well as other ways of knowing — including self-knowledge — to depend on the revised conception of experimentation that he explores in Dawn.16 As well as making positive claims about what the sciences can offer us with respect to knowledge, Nietzsche points out that there is no one and only scientific method that leads to knowledge (D 432). Moreover, the sciences are themselves developing: for example, Nietzsche claims, the sciences of “physiology, medicine, sociology, and solitude” are not yet ready to construct “the laws of life and action anew,” and therefore, instead of simply turning over our thinking to science without question, we need to “be as far as possible our own reges and found little experimental states” (D 453). Nietzsche’s view here entails that the need to “proceed experimentally with things” explicitly involves forms of affective as well as conceptual engagement, in which we become “sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate” toward things and “allow justice, passion, and coldness toward them to follow one upon the other” (D 432). As one of us has shown elsewhere, according to Nietzsche in Dawn, engaging experimentally is a fundamental philosophical strategy of his new enlightenment: it supports critical engagement with past dogmatic understanding of inquiry, and promotes “critical, reflective, and creative or imaginative engagements with how we acquire knowledge of the world,” as well as with the value that we attach to knowledge and the behaviors that are involved with our pursuit of it.17 An important issue is raised by Nietzsche’s speaking in Dawn of “our” task as wanting to be experiments, as part of his appeal to a collective need to deploy diverse methods for knowing (D 432, 453). Who, exactly, are the “we” to whom he appeals? We suggest that, on this point, Nietzsche is best read as appealing to future free spirits, the moral — or immoral — innovators who will lead society into new ways of thinking, feeling, and existing. It is these free spirits that may be capable of regarding themselves as experiments: but in what sense are such free

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spirits experiments? The character of Nietzsche’s thinking on this particular point is complex: it is not immediately clear, for example, whether he is thinking of an evolutionary condition, and, if so, how to understand this. At one point in the text he argues against referring to evolution in terms of conceiving goals for humankind  —  since evolution aims not at happiness but at evolution and nothing more — and points out that, given this view of evolution, it is a presumption that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being is its highest happiness (D 108). This suggests that when Nietzsche claims that “we are experiments” in which our chief task is to want to be such, he is referring to a newly found existential condition: this is how “we”  —  understood as developing ­creatures — could now historically view ourselves. Put another way, “our” condition is a historical — and historically creative — one rather than some ahistorical or finite conception of human development. In keeping with this historically situated, creative, commitment to experimentation, Nietzsche affirms what he calls “the passion of knowledge” in Dawn. Just what does it mean to pursue knowledge as the object of a passion? To answer this question let us consider, in connection with Nietzsche’s conception of the passion of knowledge, Cornelius Castoriadis’ claim that passion is affirmed when an object of pleasure is transformed into a necessary object, that is, it is present when the object can no longer be lived without, “when the subject can no longer conceive of its life without possessing the object, without pursuing it, being absorbed in it.”18 This is certainly at work in Nietzsche’s thinking about the passion of knowledge, and it becomes especially evident in his remarks on this passion in The Gay Science. For example, Nietzsche imagines an “all-coveting self” that wants to “appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands” and “bring back the whole past” in terms of its own unique “possession.” He writes with great passion about such a free spirit: “‘Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn is a hundred beings!’ — Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge” (GS 249). In The Gay Science 283, Nietzsche once again emphasizes how “the search for knowledge” reaches out for us and takes hold of us: “it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!” (GS 283). Indeed, he goes so far as to envisage a “heroism of knowledge,” one that “will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences” (GS 283; on the nature of “possession” see GS 14). It’s also in The Gay Science that Nietzsche seeks to clarify for his readers some of the features of the passion of knowledge. In The Gay Science 123, for example, he notes that science (Wissenschaft) can well be promoted without this new passion and that, in fact, this is how the modern state, and formerly the church, understands knowledge, that is, as “a mere condition or ‘ethos’” (GS 123). For scholars who need to make use of their leisure the scientific impulse is merely “their boredom,” and in which simple curiosity is felt to be sufficient for the exercise

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or practice of knowledge. In this aphorism, Nietzsche also refers to antiquity — for example, the Stoic school of philosophy — in which, as he sees it, the “dignity and recognition of science” were “diminished by the fact that even the most zealous disciples placed the striving for virtue first,” so knowledge is essentially subordinated to ethical questions about the nature of the good life (see also HH 6–7). For these different reasons, then, Nietzsche is alerting us to the fact that today, “It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a mere means” (GS 123). Nietzsche’s conception of the passion of knowledge adds important insights to Castoriadis’ model of this passion and in two respects. First, he thinks that new courageous human beings — in effect, new free spirits — have to be prepared for and encouraged to exist as beings who “know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities.” These are human beings who wish to seek “in all things for what in them must be overcome” (GS 283). This new seeker after knowledge, then, “lives and must live continually in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities,” and this means they are no disinterested observer, “outside, indifferent, secure, and objective” (GS 351). Second, Nietzsche holds that, although the commitment of the new seeker of knowledge is to Wissenschaft, philosophy is needed so as to “beautify” it and in the process provide humanity with a glimpse of future virtues and ideals, so it is philosophy in fact that provides knowledge with this elevated type of passion (see D 427 and 551; see also GS 3). Of course, it can be acknowledged that there have been examples in the history of philosophy of exemplary skeptical and experimental thinkers who have construed the motivation for philosophizing as residing in a passion of knowledge and driven by the curiosity of an intellectual conscience (Hume readily springs to mind as an example of such a philosopher).19 However, it seems clear that Nietzsche is demanding something more from the thinker who lives and thinks in accordance with this passion. As we have seen, he couches this in the language of sacrifice, and he returns to this discourse of sacrifice in aphorism 351 of The Gay Science, which is from book five of the text that he added for the second edition published in 1887. In this aphorism, Nietzsche is contesting our idea of the sage, which has become prevalent among “the common people”; he insists that the true philosopher is a very different kind of creature. It is a mistake, he claims, to conceive the philosopher as one who is simply “clever,” who is “bovine” and “pious,” seeking only peace of mind and the “meekness of country pastors that lies in the meadow and observes life seriously while ruminating” (GS 351). Nietzsche is keen to mark a sharp distinction between the philosopher and the sage or “priestly type,” and he insists here that the true philosopher is driven by a “great passion.” In alerting his readers to the character of the true philosopher and what motivates him or her, Nietzsche is also keen to argue, interestingly and revealingly so, that

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in ancient Greece “it was modesty [Bescheidenheit] that invented the word ‘philosopher’,” so leaving “the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit” (GS 351). Nietzsche insists upon modesty here, since he holds that a fundamental part of being a philosopher is that he or she recognizes that it is insufficient to have the “belief” or “superstition” that one is a human being of knowledge. The philosopher is not entitled to the “presumption” of knowledge, but needs to continually go in search of it and to practice knowing as a “passion” in accordance with various intellectual virtues, such as courage, magnanimity, and honesty or integrity.20 Much of this processual passionate pursuit of knowledge is first heralded in Nietzsche’s corpus in Dawn. A further question can be asked: What is at stake in the passion of knowledge? Castoriadas answers this question by declaring the answer to be obvious: it is “truth,” in which truth is related to the results of knowing.21 This insight is, in fact, anticipated by Nietzsche: “for truth … no sacrifice is too great” (D 45). Castoriadis makes an important point relevant to our appreciation of Nietzsche when he notes that the researcher of truth needs to avoid intellectual narcissism — of identifying him or herself with the results of their research to the point where they stop questioning — and an obsession with system-building. Systems serve to inhibit questioning and tend to enslave the mind. As Castoriadis notes, the chief dangers to be avoided are dogmatism and fanaticism, and it is a concern over them that guides Nietzsche’s projects, including the passion of knowledge, in his middle writings and so evident in Dawn, and indeed it continues well into his late writings (see BGE Preface and AC 54). Finally, it is necessary to acknowledge that the ideal of truth to be posited in this conception of the passion of knowledge is one where we give ourselves over to questioning without limitations. There is an obvious risk here, one that Nietzsche stages for his readers in Dawn. Castoriadis writes, “we run the risk of forgetting that this infinite questioning will leave us as if suspended in mid-air because we lack any fixed markers.”22 Although this finds an echo in the famous parable of the madman announcing the death of God in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, it is evident in the imagery of seafaring he employs in Dawn, including the final aphorism on “we aeronauts of the spirit,” in which Nietzsche writes: Where is it tearing us toward, this powerful craving that means more to us than any other pleasure? Why precisely in this direction, toward precisely where heretofore all of humanity’s suns have set? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering toward the west, hoped to teach an India — that it was, however, our lot to shipwreck upon infinity? (D 575) When Nietzsche writes with such passion about the passion of knowledge, he is acutely aware of the need not to be fanatical about its pursuit. In the final aphorism

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of book two of The Gay Science, for example, he expresses an “ultimate gratitude to art.” As a “cult of the untrue” art allows for “the good will to appearance” in which we discover not only the hero but also the fool in our passion for ­knowledge. Nietzsche writes: “we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom” (GS 107). This complex insight is prefigured in Dawn 507 entitled “Against the tyranny of the true.” Nietzsche’s worry is that residing only in the domain of truth will make human beings “boring, powerless, and tasteless” (D 507). Yet it is only in his subsequent writings, starting with The Gay Science, that Nietzsche becomes bolder in his conception of the passion of knowledge, envisaging the waging of spiritual wars for the sake of new ideas and their consequences, and ultimately leading to his conception of the philosopher as legislator in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 211; see also BGE 209 on the passion of knowledge). In affirming the passion of knowledge in Dawn, Nietzsche speaks in glowing terms of those great philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle from the ancients and Descartes and Spinoza from the early moderns, who found in “knowledge,” that is, “in the activity of a well-trained, inquisitive, and inventive understanding,” and not in intuition, the highest happiness: as he notes, such thinkers “must have enjoyed knowledge!” (D 550). Nietzsche appears keen to contest the claims made by appeals to intuition and intuitive knowledge, especially the kind of “intellectual intuition” sought by the German idealists (see D 544). What Nietzsche opposes here is the notion that through such intuition one is genuinely searching for knowledge, and that examination of intuition is the sum total of the philosopher’s methodology in seeking knowledge: one may be searching, it can be conceded, but is one motivated by a philosophical drive or by a religious one in so doing? Nietzsche re-emphasizes this point in the Preface he appended to the initial aphorisms of Dawn, when he writes that faith in reason is “as faith, a moral phenomenon” (D Preface 4). While we should note the potential unfairness of these comments toward philosophers of intuition outside of the context of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality in Dawn, Nietzsche’s remarks in these aphorisms are nonetheless important because they clarify his wider philosophical commitments in this text. As Montinari (a commentator who had a rather intimate acquaintance with Nietzsche’s corpus) notes, Nietzsche “wanted nothing to do with flashes of inspiration.”23 Montinari cites from a passage to be found in a notebook of the summer of 1880 in which Nietzsche remarks that bits of knowledge arrived at through intuitions have as little reality as an hallucination (KSA 9, 4 [321]). Montinari emphasizes the following from Nietzsche: the “burning hot feeling of the enraptured … is an illness of the intellect, not a path to knowledge” (KSA 9, 4 [152]). As Montinari goes on to note, it is one of the distinctive qualities of Nietzsche’s style of philosophizing “that he does not for an instant abandon the knowledge given

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solid ground by historical and scientific standards and at the same time draws the limits of this sort of knowledge.”24 In Dawn, Nietzsche explores how an experimental approach to knowing and to knowledge involves us in adopting different ways of being toward things in the world, as well as toward ourselves and our experiences, and in using associated diverse methods of inquiry.25 As he recommends, pursuing knowledge involves that with regard to things in the world, we become: sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate towards them and allow justice, passion, and coldness towards them to follow one upon the other. One person converses with things like a policeman, another as father confessor, a third as a wanderer and curiosity seeker. Sometimes one wrings something from them through sympathy, sometimes through violent force; reverence for their mysteries leads one person forward and eventually to insight, whereas another employs indiscretion and roguery in the explanation of secrets (D 432). Knowing, on this account, is critically dependent upon experience as well as on conceptual understanding. Nietzsche explicitly prioritizes the importance of developing new experiences when he counsels us to encourage, and to avoid, both immoral and moral actions, claiming that he does not: deny that it is best to avoid and to struggle against many actions that are considered immoral; likewise that it is best to perform and promote many that are considered moral — but I maintain: the former should be avoided and the latter promoted for different reasons than heretofore. We must learn to think differently — in order finally, perhaps very late, to achieve even more: to feel differently (D 103).26 Nietzsche’s methodological claims on knowing in Dawn 103 and 432 encourage us to consider how our diverse affective responses to things and indeed to experiences might play an important role with respect to conducting experimental research, whether scientific, social, individual, conceptual, or affective in focus. He characterizes experimental researchers as roguish, piratical characters, because their morality is distinctive: experimental morality explicitly affirms risk taking, and is a “daring morality [verwegenen Moralität]” rather than a fearful, socially reinforced one (D 432).27 In a note from the end of 1880, Nietzsche writes that without the passions, the world is reduced to being simply “quantity and line and law and nonsense,” presenting us with “the most repulsive and presumptuous paradox” (KSA 9, 7 [226]). By the time of Dawn, the pursuit of knowledge has become a passion for him, if not the overriding one.

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For Marco Brusotti Nietzsche’s new emphasis on the passions represents a ­far-reaching break with the ideal of moderation and repose of soul that he had previously espoused in Human, All Too Human; as Brusotti claims, “[t]he concept of the ‘passion of knowledge’ … marks a clear turn in his interpretation of the free spirit. Dawn is the book in which this turn takes place.”28 While this might seem to exaggerate the difference between the texts, according to Paul Franco in a recent appreciation of the texts of the middle writings — is not the free spirit in Dawn characterized by detachment, moderation, and mildness? — it is important to note this point, as it indicates an important change in Nietzsche’s outlook.29 Franco rightly points out that while references to the moderating effect of knowledge are still to be found in Dawn, what catches our attention most is Nietzsche’s appeal to the passion of knowledge. As he eloquently puts it: “There is nothing utilitarian or bourgeois about the quest for knowledge for Nietzsche, and this gives his appropriation of the Enlightenment its peculiar, one might say romantic quality. He celebrates an Enlightenment that has been deepened by the experience of Tristan and Isolde.”30 Knowledge is not simply an idle activity for Nietzsche, or a quantity that one acquires, but something to be pursued as a “passion,” which requires a cheerfulness or serenity in the face of its highs and lows, its ecstasies and disappointments. As Nietzsche will later express the point in The Gay Science, life itself is to be treated an “an experiment of the seeker for knowledge,” and not as a duty, a calamity, or a piece of trickery (GS 324). Knowledge for some can be a diversion or a form of leisure, but for the passionate seeker it offers “a world of dangers and victories,” one in which “heroic feelings” can find places to dance and play. With the principle of “life as a means to knowledge” lodged in one’s heart it is possible to live both boldly and gaily, and to laugh gaily too: “who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?” (GS 324). Nietzsche regards the drive for knowledge as young and raw; when compared to the older and more richly developed drives, the knowledge drive is ugly and offensive (which all drives have been at some point in their development). However, he confides that he wishes to treat it as a passion, “as something with which the individual soul can work side by side, so that it can look back on the world in a helpful and conciliatory fashion: in the meantime, we need a non-ascetic renunciation of the world again!” (KSA 9, 7 [197]) Nietzsche places the passion of knowledge in the service of a philosophical project that aims at disabusing humanity of its consoling fictions — for example, concerning the uniqueness of its origins and destiny — and encouraging it to pursue new truths and a new kind of philosophical wisdom. Through observing ourselves and our interactions with the world with the requisite passion of knowledge, we human beings can become our own experiments of living, feeling, and knowing. It is important that we retain the Mediterranean skepticism toward ourselves (D 207) even given the passion of

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knowledge.31 For Nietzsche, we are problematically caught up in a phantom understanding of the ego that forms in the heads of others and is communicated to us; not only the ego but habits and beliefs are “foggy” and only partially formed (D 105). In contrast to this, Nietzsche imagines a “real” ego that is accessible and fathomable, and that would counter the effects of the fog of opinion in which we live (D 105). Foucault puts the point similarly in his reflections on the passion of knowledge: as he writes, the critical task is to break with accustomed habits of knowing and perceiving, so that one has the chance to become something different than what one’s history has conditioned one to be, to think and perceive differently. For Foucault, this gives us, in fact, a definition of philosophical activity today, which consists in the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself. Instead of legitimating what is already known, the task is to think differently, and this is an essential part of philosophical activity conceived as an askēsis.32 In 1881, Nietzsche had made an important discovery: he had a precursor. He was not to feel completely isolated and alone in his task as a teacher of humanity. This precursor is, of course, Spinoza. Indeed, a Spinozist inspiration hovers over the first sketch of the eternal recurrence of the same drafted in the summer of 1881, and which, like The Ethics, is a plan for a book in five parts, culminating in a meditation on beatitude (KSA 9, 11 [141]). In a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck postmarked July 30, 1881, on the eve of the experience of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche enumerates the points of doctrine he shares with Spinoza, such as the denial of free will, of a moral world order, and of evil, and also mentions the task of “making knowledge the most powerful affect [die Erkenntniß zum mächtigsten Affekt zu machen]”; KSB 6: 111).33 In a note Nietzsche also writes on Spinoza and himself as follows: “Spinoza: We are only determined in our actions by desires and affects. Knowledge must be an affect in order to be a motive. I say: it must be a passion to be a motive” (KSA 9, 11 [193]). Nietzsche first writes of the passion of knowledge (Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis) in his published writings in Dawn. In Dawn 429, he notes that the drive to knowledge has become so strongly rooted in us that we cannot now want happiness without knowledge. Knowledge has become a deep-rooted passion that shrinks at no sacrifice. Indeed, such is now our passion for knowledge that even the prospect of humanity perishing of this passion does not exert any real influence on us. However, as Edwin Curley has pointed out, to speak of knowledge as affect (or passion) is probably inexact from Spinoza’s point of view since it is not clear that Spinoza would count knowledge as an affect at all. What is important here is the power Spinoza ascribes to knowledge over the things he would count as affects, while recognizing that human power over the affects is limited.34 This raises the question: Why does Nietzsche want knowledge to be practiced as a “passion”? It seems that this passion is an intrinsic part of what it is for Nietzsche to practice the new science he outlines for his reader, “the gay science.”

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What is the character of Nietzsche’s investment in the passion of knowledge, which is clearly a curious passion? What hopes and expectations did he have with respect to practices of knowledge? One thing can be said for sure: with his attachment to the passion of knowledge Nietzsche wanted to become a different kind of philosopher to Schopenhauer, one less hemmed in by the fears and frailties of personality and genuinely open to the world and its enigmas. Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche will not cling to the need of metaphysics and the need for a metaphysical “system.” Indeed, Nietzsche deliberately cultivates the passion of knowledge contra Schopenhauer, whom he regards as superficial in psychological matters: he neither enjoyed himself much nor suffered much; a thinker should beware of becoming harsh: where would he get his material from then. His passion for knowledge was not great enough for him to suffer on its behalf: he barricaded himself in. His pride, too, was greater than his thirst for knowledge, in revoking, he feared for his reputation (KSA 9, 6, 381]) Franco has rightly argued that although Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s ideal of pure, will-less knowing, he is defending the life of knowledge and science, including their contemplative aspects. However, for Nietzsche, contemplation “does not mean passive reception but active, passionate experimentation.”35 This is why Franco suggests that Nietzsche advises, in his middle writings, the “prudent management of the passions”: such management is necessary if the passions are to be employed for the sake of knowledge. Again, Franco puts it well: “knowledge does not involve eliminating the affects or passions  —  that would be to castrate the intellect — but it does require that one be able to control the affects or passions so that one can deploy them in a productive way.”36 Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings, including Dawn, are works of a particular kind of enlightenment project that works against all expressions of fanaticism, especially religious and moral, and in an effort to temper emotional and mental excess. As he puts it in Human, All Too Human: shouldn’t we, the more spiritual human beings of an age that is visibly catching fire in more and more places, have to grasp all available means for quenching and cooling, so that we will remain at least as steady, harmless, and moderate as we are now, and will thus perhaps become useful at some point in serving this age as mirror and self-regulation? (HH 38) These texts are notably different to the stance adopted in The Birth of Tragedy with respect to matters of life and knowledge, as even Nietzsche acknowledges.37 In an unpublished note of 1877, he confides, in fact, that he has abandoned “the metaphysical-artistic views” of his early writings (KSA 8, 23 [159]). In particular, he

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wants to overcome what he calls his “deliberate holding on to illusion” as the foundation of culture (KSA 10, 16 [23]). Nietzsche was seeking to overcome what he called “Jesuitism,” which he located in his predecessors in German philosophy and himself. In the words of Mazzino Montinari, this means not allowing the uncovering of the limits of human knowledge to be conducted in such a way that the task also gives free rein to metaphysics.38 A different focus emerges with the publication of Human, all Too Human, one where Nietzsche’s principal concern is with the search for knowledge and, through it, the attainment of a new serenity and sobriety. Robert Hull has argued that Nietzsche’s love of knowledge is part of “an ongoing therapeutic praxis” designed to work against the seductions of philosophical and epistemological rhetoric, and this resistance may explain “why he also enlists a fresh vocabulary to express himself, one free of the hazardous emotional baggage of traditional philosophy.”39 As part of this search Nietzsche gives the impression of wishing to reduce all passions, with their “raptures and convulsions” (AOM 172), to their minimum articulation. Nietzsche speaks of their conquest, mastery, and overcoming and at this time he adopts Christ as a model. In an imitation of Christ, for example, he admonishes us not to judge but to be just (AOM 33). In The Wanderer and His Shadow 88 he writes of the “spiritually joyful, luminous and honest (aufrichtigen) human being” that has overcome its passions, while in aphorism 37 of the same text he invites his reader to “work honestly [redlich] together” on the task of “transforming the passions [Leidenschaften] of mankind one and all into joys” [Freudenschaften; this task is elaborated upon in the discourse “Of Joys and Passions” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra].40 In The Wanderer and His Shadow 53 Nietzsche makes it clear that he regards the overcoming of the passions as a means and not an end in itself: the aim is to overcome them so as to enter into possession of the most fertile ground. Nietzsche’s primary commitment in Dawn is to experimentation in which the love of, or passion for, knowledge gives humanity back its right to engage in selfexperimentation. He invites us to replace the dream of immortality with a new sobriety toward existence, as he makes clear in an important aphorism: With regard to knowledge [Erkenntnis] the most useful accomplishment is perhaps: that the belief in the immortality of the soul has been abandoned. Now humanity is allowed to wait; now it no longer needs to rush headlong into things and choke down half-examined ideas as formerly it was forced to do. For in those days the salvation of poor “eternal souls” depended on the extent of their knowledge acquired during a short lifetime; they had to make a decision overnight — “knowledge” took on a dreadful importance (D 501) Nietzsche argues that we are now in a new situation with regard to knowledge and as a result we can conquer anew our courage for making mistakes, for experimentation,

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and for accepting things provisionally. Without the sanction of the old moralities and religions, individuals and entire generations “can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness” (D 501). The passion of knowledge that Nietzsche envisages is strange and curious, and operates like an unrequited love; it presents tasks that run ahead of humanity that then has to prove equal to it, and humanity may perish of it if humanity experiments as Nietzsche hopes will become the case. In a note from 1880, Nietzsche seems sure that we shall meet our demise with this peculiar passion: Yes, we shall be destroyed by this passion! But that is not an argument against it. Otherwise, death would be an argument against the life of an individual. We must be destroyed, as humans and as humankind! Christianity showed the only way, through extinction and the denial of all coarse drives. Through the renunciation of action, of hatred of loving, we get to that point on the path of passion for knowledge. Contented spectators — until nothing more is to be seen! Despise us for that reason, you who act! We shall take a look at your contempt —: go away from us, from humankind, from thing-ness, from becoming (KSA 9, 7 [171]) Nietzsche seeks a new defense of the vita contemplativa, as he discusses explicitly in Dawn, in keeping with his interest in a new enlightenment. He raises the question whether the philosopher of the morning is really renouncing things or gaining a new cheerfulness or serenity: To relinquish the world without knowing it, like a nun — that leads to an infertile, perhaps melancholic solitude. This has nothing in common with the solitude of the thinker’s vita contemplativa: when he elects it, he in no way wishes to renounce; on the contrary, it would amount to renunciation, melancholy, downfall of his self for him to have to endure the vita practica: he relinquishes the latter because he knows it, knows himself. Thus he leaps into his water, thus he attains his serenity. (D 440) In light of this, it is important to point out that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the passion of knowing leads to a concern about the epistemic status of what we claim to know. Nietzsche himself questions whether knowledge is really anything more than a personal drive toward his personal prejudices (D 553). Aphorism 335 of The Gay Science provides further evidence that the direction of the philosophy of the morning developed in Dawn is already fixed on purification of our opinions and evaluations in pursuit of authentic law-giving, and on the creation of our own new tables of values.41 Keith Ansell-Pearson has previously argued that, for this reason, aphorism 553 of Dawn is a particularly important example of intellectual integrity on Nietzsche’s part.42 Nietzsche’s thinking on becoming an authentic

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law-giver is already clearly developed in the text: writing from a possible future, Nietzsche considers what it might mean to be able to exercise the law-giver’s power over oneself and suggests that it critically involves “freeheartedness, greatness and imperturbability” (D 187). Yet even given such a sketch of self-rule, Nietzsche admits that many people will struggle to achieve the experiences required for an account of self-rule that takes drive psychology into full account — or, if they do have such experiences, accomplished philosophers may ultimately falter in their experimental vigor and seek instead to become institutions (D 539, 542, 547).43 Earlier we noted the affinity Nietzsche experienced with Spinoza. However, as Yirmiyahu Yovel has pointed out, there are important differences between Spinoza and Nietzsche in their conceptions of knowledge. For Spinoza, the immediate affective tone of knowledge is joy (a feeling of the enhanced power of life), whereas in Nietzsche the painful nature of knowledge is repeatedly stressed (indeed, Nietzsche measures the worth of a person by how much “truth” they can bear and endure). For Nietzsche, then, pursuing knowledge  —  in the sense of critical enlightenment and disillusionment — is a source of suffering and primarily a temptation to despair, and this means that the gay science, or joyful knowledge, is “a task and goal,” not the “normal outcome” of inquiry.44 The passion of knowledge is neither a naïve nor a risk-free passion — and it is important that we affirm this for the sake of the experimentation Nietzsche advocates in Dawn that will enable us to know. In a revealing note from 1880, Nietzsche writes: People have warbled on to me about the serene happiness of knowledge — but I have not found it, indeed, I despise it, now I know the bliss of unhappiness of knowledge. Am I ever bored? Always anxious, heart throbbing with expectation or disappointment! I bless this misery, it enriches the world thereby! In doing so, I take the slowest of strides and slurp down these bittersweet delicacies (KSA 9, 7 [165]) For Nietzsche, the pursuit of knowledge in his new enlightenment must have its hazards and dangers — it cannot be a secure, risk-free, enterprise and still meet its purpose of assisting us in the countering existing values. This sentiment deeply informs the project of the gay science that we see prefigured in Dawn, in which life itself is understood as an experiment for the seeker of knowledge, and which rarely, if ever, disappoints. Nietzsche expresses this idea in a note from 1881 as follows: “I no longer want any knowledge without danger: let there always be the treacherous sea or the merciless high mountains around the seeker of knowledge” (KSA 9, 7 [165]). He develops this idea in Dawn, claiming that seekers of knowledge should not be discouraged from their task by the disapproval of others, even and especially if the passion of knowledge involves a challenge to social or intellectual conventions: “Like

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all conquerors, discoverers, navigators, adventurers, we researchers are of a daring morality and have to put up with being considered, on the whole, evil” (D 432).45 The new enlightenment that Nietzsche heralds in Dawn, in which humans affirm their passion for knowledge and pursue knowledge using multiple, complementary, methods of inquiry, is hence at root one that involves a substantial moral question. In order to square his critical inheritance of the German Enlightenment with his call for affirmation of the passion for knowledge, Nietzsche needed to engage critically with morality itself. This is why Nietzsche’s fundamental campaign in Dawn makes morality its prime target, but why he also could not avoid incorporating epistemological inquiry into his campaign.

Notes 1 This chapter develops material that was first published in Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), and Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Enlightenment and Fanaticism: on the Middle Writings,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas (London: Routledge, 2018), 11–27. 2 Nicholas Martin 2008. “Aufklärung und Kein Ende: The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought.” German Life and Letters, 61(1): 79–97. 3 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 80. 4 For a discussion of skepticism in Nietzsche’s wider philosophy, see also Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5 See Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (1784) in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Kant it is “religious immaturity” that is “the most pernicious and dishonourable variety of all” (Kant, Political Writings, 59). “Laziness and c­ owardice,” Kant writes, “are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance … nevertheless gladly remain immature for life.” Compare the opening to Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator. For an instructive comparison of Kant and Nietzsche on enlightenment see David Owen. 2003. “The Contest of Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 25(1): 35–57. 6 On free and fettered spirits, see Christa Davis Acampora, “Being Unattached: Freedom and Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 189–206; and Christa Davis Acampora. 2014. “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit.” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 13–33.

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7 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 94. 8 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144. 9 Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” in Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2003), 51, 57–69. 10 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 57–69. This note is not translated in Montinari’s essay and was prepared for Keith AnsellPearson by Duncan Large. 11 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 52. 12 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’.” 13 We adopt this schema of enlightenment in Nietzsche’s thought from Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 52. See also Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 89–90. 14 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 89. 15 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 94. 16 As Katrina Mitcheson has argued with regard to GS 110, Nietzsche rejects inquiry understood as involving only a fixed and single method, or strictly demarcated areas of inquiry that inhibit certain forms of investigation. See Mitcheson, “The Experiment of Incorporating Unbounded Truth,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 139–56. 17 Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29, 25. 18 Cornelius Castoriadis. 1992. “Passion and Knowledge.” Diogenes 160: 76. 19 For insight into Hume’s conception of a passion of knowledge see James A. Harris, Hume. An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 102–03. 20 On Nietzschean intellectual virtues, see Bernard Reginster. 2013. “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51(3): 441–63; Mark Alfano. 2013. “The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue Epistemologist.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21(4): 767–90; Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32; and Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 21 Castoriadis, “Passion and Knowledge,” 76. 22 Castoriadis, “Passion and Knowledge,” 78. 23 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 61. 24 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 61. On knowledge and boundaries of inquiry, particularly the incorporation of truth and knowledge and the possibility of an unbounded truth in Nietzsche, see also Keith Ansell-Pearson, ‘The Incorporation of Truth: Towards the Overhuman’, in

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Malden and Oxford: Carlton Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Horst Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Mitcheson, “The Experiment of Incorporating Unbounded Truth.” Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. Marco Brusotti. 1997. “Erkenntnis als Passion: Nietzsches Denkweg zwischen Morgenröthe und der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 26: 199–225. For insight into the “passion of knowledge” in Nietzsche see also Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 57–69. Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 61. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 91. On Nietzsche and skepticism, see Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). While Berry does give some attention to Dawn as part of her analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with ancient skepticism, she does not discuss Nietzsche’s allusion to Mediterranean skepticism in D 207. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 8. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 177. Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 128–09. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 97. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 97. In noting Franco’s point on the passions here, we do not claim that for Nietzsche, it is always possible to control all subjective drives. For further discussion of drives, see Chapter 6. See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 60. Robert Hull. 1990. “Skepticism, Enigma and Integrity: Horizons of Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Philosophy.” Man and World 23: 375–91. For further insight see Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Transforming the Passions into Joys: On the Middle Writings and Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche, penseur de l’affirmation. Relecture d’Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, sous la direction de C. Bertot, J. Leclercq et P. Wotling (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2019), 73–90.

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41 Ansell-Pearson. 2010. “Nietzsche, the Sublime, and the Sublimities of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Dawn.” Nietzsche-Studien 39(1): 20132. Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House], 2012), 139–58. 42 Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche, the Sublime, and the Sublimities of Philosophy.” 43 On Nietzsche’s use of the ad hominem strategy in Dawn, see Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, and also Bamford, “Daybreak,” 139–57. 44 Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 106. 45 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15.

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6 Nietzsche on Subjectivity Drives, Self, and the Possibility of Autonomy A full and satisfying explanation of the possibility of knowing, free, and ethical actions in Dawn requires some attention to Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity, the self, and drives. However, understanding Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity and the self, especially in relation to the drives, involves significant challenges. Much has been made of Nietzsche’s skeptical remarks with regard to the self, which seem to call our understanding of subject unity — or even the possibility of such unity and associated agency — into question, and that may ultimately commit Nietzsche to an incoherent position.1 As previous scholarship has noted, while Nietzsche makes skeptical remarks about the unity of the self in Dawn, he also seems to make some more affirmative remarks concerning the possibility of, and indeed the need for, self-cultivation — yet it is unclear how self-cultivation is possible if there is no unified subject.2 In order to resolve some of these challenges, we shall take it that the specific textual context of Nietzsche’s remarks on subjectivity, the self, and drives should be given priority in assessing whether or not Nietzsche commits himself to either skepticism or incoherence with regard to subjectivity and the self. Certainly, the mere fact of skeptical remarks should not lead us to assume that Nietzsche abandons any possibility of a unified subject altogether; we should weigh these remarks against Nietzsche’s affirmations of coherent subjectivity in the specific context of each of his texts.3 While we will connect some of what Nietzsche has to say to his other writings, our focus will be on the subject(s) of Dawn. In this chapter, we aim to clarify several of the main aspects of Nietzsche’s work on subjectivity, self, and drives in Dawn. We show how Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity, the self, and drives in Dawn emerges from his affirmation of the Enlightenment spirit, his hope for a new enlightenment, and his critical engagement with morality. First, we examine the skeptical dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity and the self. We point out how Nietzsche criticizes some of our Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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common presumptions about subjectivity and the self, using the notion of drives to stimulate the critical engagement he is calling for. Next, we examine how Nietzsche maintains a commitment to the notion of self-cultivation in Dawn, even despite his skeptical remarks on subjectivity and the self. In light of this, we consider how Nietzsche’s undermining of such presumptions leads him to make an important distinction between the subjectivity of an agent shaped by customary morality, and that of a free-spirited ethical agent.4 Our account includes attention to some sources of Nietzsche’s thinking on subjectivity and the self in Dawn, in order to reinforce the point that Nietzsche’s remarks on subjectivity and the self are made fundamentally for critical-ethical purposes: Nietzsche’s promotion of the conditions for ongoing development and self-cultivation of free-spirited ethical agency requires exposure of the presumptions that support customary moral agency. One of the key presumptions that Nietzsche claims we need to abandon is belief in the immortality of the soul (D 501).5 Understanding souls as mortal, he thinks, provides substantial advantages for the passion of knowledge and hence for our experimental pursuit of understanding: from a mortal perspective, “everything is less important” (D 501). Employing mortality as a framework for knowledge means that we can afford to make mistakes, and to treat what we are doing as provisional, instead of choking down half-formed ideas as if they were truths, which Nietzsche suggests is what we currently tend to do (D 501). Thinking of the soul purely in mortal terms means that humans are no longer playing a zero-sum game in which they either choose well while alive and enjoy a glorious afterlife, or choose poorly while alive and endure an eternity of agony and torment. Nietzsche’s claim in Dawn 501 is prefaced by a detailed story that he provides concerning the effect of Christian morality on subjectivity and individual subjects, which we discussed in greater depth in Chapter 3. Briefly to reiterate two key points. First, Nietzsche contends that doctrines of pure spirituality teach us to “despise, ignore, or torment the body” and to “torment and despise oneself” on account of all our drives (D 39). Second, he suggests that Christianity powerfully affects subject development: as he puts it, Christianity has “chiseled out” fine human social figures, and the “powerful beauty and refinement of the princes of the church” and indeed their “pride in obedience” operate as marks of, and demonstrations of the truth of, the church to the people (D 60). The mechanism by which the chiseling out and “complete spiritualization” of subjects occurs operates according to what Nietzsche calls the ebb and flow of two kinds of happiness: “the feeling of power and the feeling of surrender” (D 60). As Nietzsche points out in a later aphorism, one effect of this on our understanding of ourselves and of our bodies is ignorance: it means that “we know so little” of the “whole contingent nature of the machine” (D 86). Another effect of complete spiritualization is the placing of a tremendous interpretative burden onto Christians; Nietzsche provides the figure of Pascal as an example: “Oh what an unfortunate interpreter! How he has to twist and torture his system! How he has to twist and torture himself so as to stay in the right!” (D 86). A Christian

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such as Pascal, according to Nietzsche, must perform profoundly awkward intellectual contortions in order to maintain a ­spiritualized understanding of bodily functions — by which Nietzsche specifies anything that “stems from the stomach, entrails, heartbeat, nerves, gall, semen” — as moral and religious phenomena (D 86). Nietzsche points out that these contortions are inimical to self-understanding, as well as to our flourishing. According to Nietzsche, a second fundamental presumption about the self involves the relationship between drives and intellect. In Dawn 109, Nietzsche provides an inquiry into the “ultimate motive” of self-mastery and moderation, in which he identifies and isolates six different methods for combating the intensity or vehemence of a drive. The six methods are: i)  Avoiding opportunities for the drive’s gratification and causing it to weaken and even wither away through long periods of abstinence. ii)  Imposing on oneself a tightly regulated regimen of gratification in which the drive is subsumed under some rule and enclosed within its ebb and flow within fixed time periods — here one gains intervals during which the drive no longer intrudes. iii)  One can give oneself over to wild, uncontrolled gratification of the drive so as to become satiated with it and through this “cultivated disgust” gain control over it. iv)  Through in intellectual ploy in which one yokes the gratification tightly to an extremely distressing idea — such as shame, wounded pride, or dire consequences — where, and after some practice, the idea of gratification will come itself to be experienced as distressing. v)  One can seek to dislocate one’s energy resources by imposing some difficult and strenuous task on oneself or by deliberately subjecting oneself to new stimulants and pleasures, thus directing thoughts and energy into other channels. vi)  Through general debilitation and exhaustion, which is an extreme measure requiring the debilitation of the one’s whole physical and spiritual constitution. Having identified these six methods, Nietzsche points out that when we combat the vehemence drive in one of these ways, our wanting to do so is not something within our control, as we often presume: On the contrary, in this whole process our intellect is manifestly only the blind tool of another drive that is the rival of the one tormenting us with its vehemence: be it the drive for quietude, fear of shame and other evil consequences, or love. Whereas “we” believe ourselves to be complaining about the vehemence of a drive, it is, at bottom, one drive that is complaining about another (D 109)

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This claim, and the argument in Dawn 109 overall, commits Nietzsche to the view in this text that the self is a battleground of different drives, and that the intellect is not the only important facet of being a subject, as spiritualization has prompted us to imagine. A third and related presumption that compounds our misunderstanding of the subject is language, and the prejudices on which language is based.6 These reinforce the mistaken simple view that the intellect is the seat of the self, and that the self is unified. Nietzsche draws attention to the problem of language as misleading when he complains that “words get in our way” because “perpetually petrified” words pose impediments to “every act of knowledge” instead of providing us with the means to developing solutions (D 47). In Dawn 115, Nietzsche expands on this complaint by noting that words exist only for superlative degrees of processes and drives. As he claims, when words are not available to us, we tend not to engage any longer in precise observation: “[w]rath, hate, love, compassion, joy, pain,” and so on are all names for extreme states, while the milder middle degrees, as well as the lower ones that are constantly in play, “elude us” (D 115). Hence, for Nietzsche, language reinforces the presumption that subjects are good readers or interpreters of themselves and that subjects have access to anything remotely resembling transparent self-knowledge: We are none of us what we appear to be solely in those states for which we have consciousness and words — and hence praise and censure; we misconstrue ourselves according to these cruder outbursts, which are the only ones we register; we draw a conclusion from material in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this seemingly clearest block print of the Self (D 115) The particular irony here is that our opinions and valuations of ourselves bring us through the mistaken route that becomes our so-called “ego” [Ich], and collaborate “in the formation of our character and destiny [Schicksal]” (D 115).7 Yet we should not overlook how Nietzsche also points out that, “it is precisely they [words] that weave the web of our character and our destiny” (D 115). He later reinforces this same point when he notes that we express our thoughts in those words that “lie ready to hand,” and suggests further that, “we have at every moment only that very thought for which we have ready to hand the words that are roughly capable of expressing it” (D 257).8 As we will see later on, a complex problem is raised by this concerning Nietzsche’s tackling of presumptions about the effect of language on our knowledge of the self. We will return to this problem later in this chapter. A fourth presumption concerns self-knowledge. Nietzsche argues that from earliest times to the present day, the most difficult thing for human beings to comprehend has been their ignorance of themselves (D 116). The oldest kind of realism, he says,

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is the kind of moral and metaphysical realism we encounter in Schopenhauer, which holds that each one of us is a competent and perfectly moral judge that exhibits an exact knowledge of good and evil. While we think we know how human action comes about in every case, Nietzsche points out that this is an age-old delusion, based on the inherited prejudice that “God sees into the heart,” or that the doer can adequately reflect upon their deeds and thereby know them clearly: “I know what I want, what I’ve done, I’m free and take responsibility for it, I hold others responsible, I can call by name all ethical possibilities and all inner motives that exist in the face of an action; no matter how you might act  —  in whatever situation I’ll understand myself and you all!” That’s how everyone used to think, that’s how everyone more or less still thinks today. (D 116) Holding that the proper or correct action needs to follow on from knowledge of what is appropriate is a deep-seated prejudice of ours. Nietzsche encourages his readers to consider that the “terrifying truth” is that whatever we can know about a deed never suffices to guarantee its being carried out, and that there is an enormous chasm separating knowledge from specific actions. According to Nietzsche, it has taken centuries for humankind to learn that external things are not what they appear to be, and we still have much to learn with regard to the domain of “inner things” or the “inner world”: “[m]oral actions are, in truth, ‘something other’ than moral truths … and all actions are essentially unknown” (D 116) Physiology is an important factor in Nietzsche’s assessment of the presumptions we have about the self. We already saw that Nietzsche claims that spiritualization obscures the significance of the body by teaching us to “despise, ignore, or torment” it (D 39). In an aphorism entitled “In prison,” Nietzsche extends this point, noting how it might seem disappointing to us that human sensation and perception are constituted by specific and limited horizons, meaning that we are bound and finite in what we can do and know (D 117). What may seem to be the prison of the body sets a limit on our perceptual experiences of the world: It is according to these horizons, within which our senses enclose each of us as if behind prison walls, that we now measure the world, we call this thing near and that distant, this thing large and that small, this thing hard and that soft: this measuring we call perception — and all of it, each and every bit, are errors through and through! (D 117) Each of our senses, Nietzsche claims, enclose us “as if behind prison walls” — hence, we measure the world according to the limits of the senses, and we call this measuring “perception” (D 117). Added to this, Nietzsche thinks that

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habituation forms a key part of how the experience of perception reinforces the presumption that there is a unified “knower” of a set of clearly and directly knowable facts about things in the world as well as ourselves: The habits of our senses have woven us into perception’s wile and guile: it, in turn, is the foundation for all our judgements and forms of “knowledge” — there is no escape whatsoever, no underused or underhanded way into the real world! We hang within our web, we spiders, and no matter what we capture in it, we can capture nothing whatsoever other than what allows itself to be captured precisely in our web (D 117) Nietzsche further considers that the effect of perception on knowing is so significant that while, on the one hand, if we had different eyes, ones more sensitive to proximity, humans would appear monstrously tall or even immeasurable to us; on the other hand, organs could be imagined on a scale whereby entire solar systems would be perceived as contracted and constricted as if a single cell (D 117). Sensory perception, then, poses a particular kind of constraint on human animals.9 Nietzsche extends this insight on the constraints of perception in Dawn 117 by examining the example of a neighbor (D 118). He asks what we comprehend of the neighbor other than their boundaries, which, as he points out, the neighbor inscribes themselves and impresses on us. The answer is that, according to Nietzsche, the only thing we understand about the neighbor is the “alteration in us of which he is the cause” (D 118). This is because our knowledge of the neighbor “resembles a formed hollow space … we mold him into a satellite of our own system” (D 118). What this example shows us is that our knowledge of the other, like our knowledge of ourselves, is far more limited and uncertain that we tend to assume. When he suggests that we inhabit a world of phantoms, “[i]nverted, topsy-turvy, empty world, dreamed full and upright nonetheless,” what Nietzsche is showing is not that knowledge is impossible but that the passion of knowledge has been curtailed by the belief that knowledge derived from the body or from perception is problematic because it is transient and incomplete (D 118). In Dawn 119, one of the longest aphorisms of Dawn, and one of the sections best known as an example of Nietzsche’s skepticism about the unified subject, Nietzsche further explores the drives and notes that no matter how much we struggle for self-knowledge, nothing is more incomplete to us than the image of the totality of our drives. We cannot call our cruder drives by name; their number and strength, their play and counter play, and most of all what Nietzsche calls the laws of their “alimentation” remain completely unknown to us: This alimentation thus becomes the work of chance: our daily experiences toss willy-nilly to this drive or that drive some prey or other which it seizes greedily, but the whole coming and going of these events exists completely

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apart from any meaningful connection to the alimentary needs of the sum drives: so that the result will always be two-fold: the starving and stunting of some drives and the overstuffing of others (D 119) Our perceptions and experiences, then, are types of nourishment; the problem is that there is lack of understanding on our part of this. Nietzsche appeals to the image of the polyp in providing a detailed analysis of how our self-knowledge is unproblematically incomplete, owing to our necessarily partial knowledge of the drives that constitute subjectivity: With every moment of our lives some of the polyp-arms [Polypenarme] of our being grow and others dry up, depending on the nourishment that the moment does or does not supply. As stated earlier, all our experiences are, in this sense, types of nourishment [der Nahrung] — seeds sown, however, with a blind hand devoid of any knowledge as to who hungers and who already has abundance (D 119) George J. Stack and Brian Domino have both suggested that the work of Julien Offray De La Mettrie informs Nietzsche’s use of the polyp in this aphorism.10 In Man–Machine, La Mettrie’s discussion of Tremblay’s auto-regenerative polyp appears first in a discussion of health, which La Mettrie suggests is required for unbelief as well as for inquiry that grows out of unbelief. The polyp as an autoregenerating organism is used as an example of how causality, if understood as a part of nature, need depend neither on chance nor on God, and how natural causality can thus be separated out from these two mistaken factors in our efforts to explain phenomena.11 The polyp is also used in a broader sense, as an illustration of how coming to know the “weight of the Universe,” as La Mettrie puts it, “will not affect” a true atheist negatively, rather than this weight of knowledge “crushing” the atheist as some might expect.12 The polyp next appears as part of a comment by La Mettrie on the existence of the soul, in which La Mettrie criticizes the view that the soul “is generally spread throughout the body” and attributes this view (which, as he notes, the polyp might seem to support, but in fact does not) to unwise use of “obscure and meaningless” language.13 Thus Nietzsche’s use of La Mettrian polyp imagery reinforces the connection we have shown that Nietzsche draws between presumptions about the self and the possibility of knowledge based on language, and presumptions that are based on ignorance (willful or not) of biology. What emerges when we become aware of the workings of these presumptions and willing to question them is a better sense of the extent to which human animals are contingent: as a consequence of this contingent alimentation of the parts, the whole, the fully-grown polyp turns out to be a creature no less contingent [Zufälliges] than its maturation (D 119)

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In light of Nietzsche’s consistent emphasis on the importance of transience or contingency, notice that any “gardener” we might be tempted to read into this aphorism as the owner of the “hand” Nietzsche mentions is also, like us, “blind” and “devoid of knowledge” about the needs that organisms have with regard to their nourishment. Nietzsche notes that this theater of cruelty of chance and experience that constitutes the self would be more transparent to us if all of the drives wanted to take matters as seriously as does the drive for hunger (D 119). In the next part of Dawn 119, Nietzsche develops an insight onto our dreams and how they serve to compensate the drives for a contingent absence of nourishment during the day. One dream may be full of tenderness and tears, another on a different day playful and high-spirited, while other ones may be adventurous or full of melancholy. It is through invention in dreams — make-believe — that we discharge our drives and facilitate their free play. According to Nietzsche here, dreams are free and arbitrary interpretations of our nerve impulses during sleep, as well as of movements of blood and intestines, of the pressure of an arm or of the bedclothes, of the sounds from a bell tower, and so on. Given that this “text,” as Nietzsche calls it, remains pretty much the same from evening to evening, he wonders why it elicits different commentary. His answer is that the “make-­ believing faculty” of reason [die dichtende Vernunft] is imagining divergent causes for the same nerve impulse, in accordance with the fact that different drives seek to gratify themselves. One day a particular drive is at “high tide,” while on another day a different drive is resurgent. As Nietzsche points out, in contrast to dreaming, our waking lives do not enjoy the same “freedom of interpretation,” since it is less poetic and unbridled. Nevertheless, this should not serve to deceive us: when we are in a waking state our drives “do nothing but interpret nerve impulses” and “ascribe ‘causes’ to them” in accordance with the needs of our drives (D 119). Hence, Nietzsche contends that there is no “essential” difference between waking and dreaming states; this suggests the possibility that consciousness may be nothing more than a “fantastical commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, yet felt text” (D 119).14 Nietzsche concludes this aphorism by suggesting that to experience is to make believe or invent; however, we should not simply assume that we are the authors or agents of our own experiences, since we are subject to the play of drives (D 119). This point is underlined by the witticism contained in the next, short aphorism: To reassure the sceptic. — “I have no idea what I’m doing! I have no idea what I should do!” You are right, but make no mistake about it: you are being done! moment by every moment! Humanity has, through all ages, confused the active and the passive, it is its everlasting grammatical blunder (D 120)

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Nietzsche questions the deep-seated assumption that we are self-willed agents and with sufficient causally effective free will to control our own destiny; giving examples such as saying we want the sun to rise after it has risen, or that we want a wheel to roll when we cannot stop it from rolling, or that a person thrown down in a wrestling match claims they want to lie there, he notes that, while we laugh at such things, we are not acting differently when we use the construction “I want” (D 124). Hence, he thinks that if we pay proper attention to a phrase such as “I want,” it shows up another presumption on our part: that there is indeed always a causal connection between willing and action, as we tend to believe.15 Nietzsche explains that the presumptuous desire to be entirely our own author has its psychological roots in a basically narcissistic desire to experience oneself as all-powerful.16 He draws on the myth of Oedipus to make this point: You wish to take responsibility for everything! Only not for your dreams! What miserable frailty, what poverty in the courage of your convictions! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your work! Content, form, duration, actor, spectator  —  in these comedies you yourselves are everything! And this is just the place in yourselves you shun and are ashamed of, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, knew how to derive consolation from the idea that we cannot do anything about what it is we dream! I conclude from this: that the vast majority of human beings must be aware that they have abhorrent dreams. Were it otherwise: how greatly this nocturnal poeticizing would have been plundered to bolster human arrogance! — Do I have to add that wise Oedipus was right, that we really aren’t responsible for our dreams, but no more for our waking hours either, and that the doctrine of free will has as its mother and father human pride and the human feeling of power? (D 128) As Michael Ure has noted, Nietzsche is exposing the tragicomedy of existence that results from human pride and the need for the feeling of power [Machtgefühl]. In Dawn 128, Nietzsche conceives the dreamer on the model of the figure of Oedipus with the dream itself as analogous to a tragicomic work of art. According to Ure, Nietzsche’s remark is designed to reveal to the comedy of the Oedipal dreamer: in dreams, we disavow what is most our own, and in the case of Oedipus this is the dream of becoming his own father and enjoying the body of his mother. Of course, the twist Nietzsche adds to this story is that one is also not responsible for one’s waking state. The critical bite of the moral comes from Nietzsche’s attempt to expose the hubris involved in seeking to attribute to ourselves the power of autogenesis, “conceiving of ourselves as both mother and father to ourselves, so to speak, we engage in a comic, childish self-inflation designed to satisfy our Machtgefühl.”17 Here, the self imagines itself to be completely self-sufficient, free

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of fate, and conducting the dream of self-authorship. The dangers of leading such an existence are manifold and include what Ure calls a series of “intersubjective pathologies,” such as melancholia and revenge. We see in this two important features of Nietzsche’s understanding of the self at this time: (i) the psychological claim that the fantasy of auto-genesis is in fact symptomatic of a desire for narcissistic plenitude; and (ii) the idea that careful self-cultivation is the only therapeutic response that can work against the pathological affects borne of narcissistic loss.18 Ure rightly notes that for Nietzsche the failure to treat the loss, and to ­cultivate one’s drives and affects, is what generates a range of pathological ­phenomena and through which the ego or I consoles and compensates for its losses. Moreover: How one bears narcissistic loss … has profound implications for the dynamics and possibilities of social intercourse, and he identifies self-cultivation as a therapy that tempers these pathological excesses. He sees self-cultivation as a means of overcoming the pathological forms of intersubjectivity in which the self engages with others exclusively for the sake of alleviating itself of painful affects and narcissistic loss.19 Ure is also incisive in suggesting that Nietzsche does not conceive self-cultivation as some narrowly private and individualistic project but rather as a means of reworking and modulating the affects that shape the relationship of the self to its others.20 While Nietzsche unpacks a set of presumptions about subjectivity and the self in Dawn, he does seem to hold on to the view that humans can cultivate themselves. This raises a fundamental problem for the consistency of Nietzsche’s thinking about the self in this text. If we take Nietzsche’s engagement with presumptions about the self and about agency seriously, then it is not only unclear how we might explain how drives and intellect engage with one another in a subjectively productive way, or how such an interaction could be in any meaningful sense understood as self-guiding. Moreover, this problem is particularly pressing as it calls into question how Nietzsche’s arguments concerning a need for change in epistemological and ethical matters make sense. If he really did accept his critique of presumptions as the end of the story he wishes to tell us about the self in Dawn, then, plausibly, his account would make even less sense; a positive account of the subject is needed to ground Nietzsche’s thinking. Let us discuss Nietzsche’s thinking on cultivation in Dawn in greater detail, as a means of developing a response to these concerns. Cultivation has already been widely recognized as fundamentally important to Nietzsche’s middle writings, including Dawn. Many of Nietzsche’s letters in the period during which he was composing the text discuss the value of health-promoting activities such as

Nietzsche on Subjectivity

g­ ardening.21 Nietzsche’s original plan for a title was The Ploughshare: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, and as Duncan Large has pointed out, even as late as July–August of 1882 Nietzsche was still considering production of a two-volume edition of free-spirit writings collected under the title The Ploughshare: A Tool for Liberating the Spirit.22 Nietzsche’s discussion of cultivation in Dawn makes extensive use of the example of gardens and gardening. He engages in an analysis of human beings as if they were gardens, and considers better and worse approaches to the cultivation of these gardens, including self-cultivation.23 We note that four aphorisms are especially relevant to this dimension of the text. The first aphorism deals with a “contemporary moral fashion” in which the principle that “moral actions are actions generated by sympathy for others” is commonly accepted (D 174).24 Nietzsche’s objection to sympathy-based morality is about the negative and unhealthy effects of sympathy-based moral behavior: it tends to “grate off” the rough edges of humanity, to such an extent that “heralds of sympathetic affects” are, Nietzsche complains, “well on the way to turning humanity into sand”  —  “[t]iny, soft, round, endless grains of sand!” (D 174).25 Given this, Nietzsche asks whether a person: is more useful to another by immediately and constantly leaping to his side and helping him  —  which can, in any case, only transpire very superficially, provided the help doesn’t turn into a tyrannical encroachment and transformation — or by fashioning out of oneself something the other will behold with pleasure, a lovely, peaceful, self-enclosed garden, for instance, with high walls to protect against the dangers and dust of the roadway, but with a hospitable gate as well (D 174) We know from Nietzsche’s discussion of the neighbor impressing their boundaries on us that we perceive others through their effects on us (D 118). The negative effect of sympathy-based morality hence involves that a self problematically excludes or encroaches upon others, even in expressing sympathetic affects such as compassion to others.26 Nietzsche imagines an alternative ethics that is based on (aesthetically pleasing) self-fashioning or self-cultivation, in which such encroachment or exclusion is absent. While the aphorism presents us with a choice to make between morality based on sympathetic affect on the one hand, and an ethic of self-cultivation on the other, notice that Nietzsche doesn’t tell us the answer to his utility question in Dawn 174 directly. He indicates that the effects of sympathy-based moral behavior — superficial help at best, and tyrannical encroachment at worst — make such behavior questionable, so the peaceful garden-self alternative sounds attractive by comparison. Yet he leaves us to reflect on the merits of self-cultivation for ourselves; in so doing, our choosing to help others is by no means prohibited.

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Nietzsche next uses the metaphor of a garden to introduce how dissimulation [Verstellung] has been involved in sympathy-based moral behavior: Dissimulation as duty. — For the most part, goodness [die Güte] has been developed by extended dissimulation [lange Verstellung] that sought to appear as goodness: wherever great power has taken hold one has recognized the necessity of precisely this type of dissimulation — it exudes certainty and confidence and increases hundredfold the sum of real physical power ­[physischen Macht]. The lie is, if not the mother, then the wet nurse of goodness. Honesty [Ehrlichkeit] too has, for the most part, been reared to maturity on the requirement that one seem honest and upright: within the hereditary aristocracies. The long-standing practice of dissimulation turns into, at last, nature: in the end dissimulation cancels itself out, and organs and instincts are the hardly anticipated fruits in the garden of hypocrisy (D 248) In this hypocritical garden, cultivation of social behaviors that increase power is based on a pretense of honesty. But eventually, the organs and instincts for a “natural” honesty emerge. As Nietzsche puts it, what begins as dissimulation turns into “nature [Natur]”: what we initially pretend to be (being honest) is ultimately what we may become. The garden of Dawn 248 really is that of humans. Organs and instincts — including those for virtuous behavior — are open to cultivation and development, like plants. This leads on to a third aphorism in which Nietzsche also likens humans to gardens, and which involves a more specific analogy between gardening and thinking.27 Nietzsche describes how conclusions will spring forth even without cultivating the “earth” of the thinker: Gardener and garden. — Out of damp dreary days, solitude, and loveless words directed at us, conclusions spring up like mushrooms: one morning they are there, we know not where they came from, and stare at us, peevish and grey. Woe to the thinker [Denker] who is not the gardener but only the earth for the plants [Gewächse] that grow in him! (D 382)28 Nietzsche explicitly identifies thinking as a form of plant-like development, and warns against what happens if a thinker does not engage in cultivation: conclusions sprout regardless of whether the thinker wants them to or not. His fungal imagery recalls the imagery of the repulsive apostate of the free spirit, who has given up on free spiritedness and become “a ‘believer’” (D 56). He describes the apostate as repellent and diseased, because the apostate’s dishonesty represents something “fungal, edematous, overgrown, festering” (D 56). The conclusions that mushroom in Dawn 382 result from an overly extreme renunciation of the world,

Nietzsche on Subjectivity

which as Nietzsche warns elsewhere, leads to an “infertile” and “melancholic” solitude (D 440). Thinking is already a direct part of life and the world and is ­connected with the affects; our difficulty, Nietzsche thinks, lies with learning to appreciate these points. In the fourth garden aphorism, Dawn 560, Nietzsche connects his remarks on drives in earlier parts of Dawn (e.g. D 119, 132, 331, 422, 553) with the issue of freedom. He makes a claim about what we are free to do, which bears heavily upon how we might understand cultivation: What we are free to do. — One can handle one’s drives like a gardener [Man kann wie ein Gärtner mit seinen Trieben schalten] and, though few know it, cultivate the seeds [die Keime] of one’s anger, pity, musing, vanity as fruitfully and advantageously as beautiful fruit on espaliers [wie ein schönes Obst an Spalieren]; one can do so with a gardener’s good or bad taste and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese style; one can also let nature have her sway and only attend to a little decoration and cleaning up here and there; finally, one can, without giving them any thought whatsoever, let the plants, in keeping with the natural advantages and disadvantages of their habitat, grow up and fight it out amongst themselves — indeed, one can take pleasure in such wildness, and want to enjoy just this pleasure, even if one has one’s difficulties with it. We are free to do all this: but how many actually know they are free to do this? Don’t most people believe in themselves as completed, fully grown facts? Haven’t great philosophers, with their doctrine of immutability of character, pressed their seal of approval on this presumption [Vorurtheil]? (D 560)29 Nietzsche thinks we are free to engage in cultivating drives, and he suggests that the drives we are to cultivate are our own drives. He is also clear that knowing about our freedom to cultivate really does matter significantly to our being able to exercise drive cultivation freedom. The characterization of these drives as different “seeds [Keime]” in this aphorism helps to clarify that Nietzsche is thinking of subjectivity and freedom as developmental rather than as fixed, abstract concepts.30 Nietzsche’s disabling and eliding of a causally effective “gardener” whose hand is alluded to in Dawn 119 captures a problem of “self”-cultivation: it seems initially unlikely that we could talk meaningfully about cultivating ourselves, or even talk in a weaker sense about cultivation of de-individuated drives, especially if our self-knowledge is as limited as Nietzsche suggests is the case. It is important to note that self-cultivation is not incommensurate with the natural world: Nietzsche notes that we can take pleasure in different approaches towards cultivation of seed-drives — for example, we might pleasurably adopt a particular style of gardening such as the French or English or Dutch of Chinese style, we

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might engage in more minimal garden maintenance, or we might simply let the plants [die Pflanzen] run wild, growing or withering depending on the local conditions that obtain (D 560).31 These cultivation options also fit with the individualism that Nietzsche suggests we must nurture in order to counter customary morality and its explicitly de-individualizing effects (D 493). For instance, discussing consumption of one’s own philosophical fruit, Nietzsche says that in the past he had denigrated the fruit growing on his own tree, but now realizes he would be a fool not to consider consuming this fruit (D 493). Indeed, an organism meeting the ­conditions for minimally sufficient health and strength to undergo the process of becoming a more autonomous subject might very plausibly start to find their own “most delicious” fruit nourishing and start to benefit from this nourishment (D 493).32 Nietzsche’s call to nurture individualism here does not fit with his remarks on drives in Dawn 119 or Dawn 109, unless we treat him as envisaging more than one form of subjectivity (heteronomous and autonomous) in Dawn. Thinking of what Sachs terms “autonomous” subjectivity as distinctively developmental also helps us to see one way in which free-spirited ethical agents might continually develop toward the possibility of a new or “great health” that, as Nietzsche will go on to point out in The Gay Science, “does not merely have but acquires continually” (GS 382). Having examined how these four garden aphorisms provide evidence of Nietzsche’s commitment to the possibility of self-cultivation in Dawn, we can bolster this possibility even further by returning to consider the key aphorisms in which Nietzsche unpacks of our presumptions about the self. Nietzsche’s remarks on language, drives, and perception do not exclude a role for a self that is capable of meaningful intellectual engagement, action, and responsibility. First, because of the constraints they impose, perceptual experiences still remain utterly fundamental to the subject: while the constraint is experienced as problematic by an unfree spirit, it may be understood more positively from the perspective of a subject who has begun to become free. Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges that limits are not merely constraints, but are also conditions of possibility (D 117). This possibility is supported by a claim earlier in the text, where Nietzsche points out that it is an error to identify the means to knowledge as ends or goals in themselves (D  43). Instead, he suggests that, while estranging ourselves from sensory perception and pushing ourselves to abstraction used to be experienced as “exaltation,” these are today things of which “we can no longer get the full feel” (D 43). Instead, the exaltation at abstraction might now be replaced by multiple forces that “must now come together in the thinker” (D 43). Instead of reveling in “the palest images of words and things” or playing with “invisible, inaudible, intangible beings felt, from out of the depths of disdain for the physically palpable, misleading and evil earth” we might now “no longer be misled!” (D 43). Nietzsche does not suggest that we have a choice about the sensory perceptions we experience. As he acknowledges, we call something near and another thing

Nietzsche on Subjectivity

distant, or “this thing hard and that thing soft” by virtue of our specific location in the world and the functioning of our organs in that location (D 117). However, we do have some choice about how we understand and value sensory perception as a part of our pursuit of knowing. As Nietzsche points out, with the understanding that we “need” no longer “be misled” by “abstractions” comes a new feeling: “with that one leaped, as if upward” (D 43). This is an advance in understanding and at the same time an advance in the passion of knowledge. Recall that Nietzsche encourages us to keep the possibility of a “freedom of feeling” in mind as part of his affirmation of a passion for knowledge (D 207). This opens up a contrast between two feelings about knowing, only one of which is commensurate with Nietzsche’s project in Dawn. On the one hand, we may entertain a belief that the imperative to “[k]now oneself” involves our finally having absolute knowledge of all things, on the basis that “things are merely the boundaries of the human being” (D 48). On the other hand, however, Nietzsche explains a fundamental feeling that we can contrast with knowing oneself in such an absolute sense in the next aphorism, where he identifies it as a feeling of “permanent transitoriness” that is valuable because it avoids sentimental understanding of humans as either descended from the divine (a mistaken view that Darwin has challenged) or as progressing toward the divine, as if “some little species” living “on some little planet” could be excepted from their mortal status (D 49). Given these points, in addition to Nietzsche’s discussion of cultivating the self through his garden aphorisms, it remains unclear how we are to understand the coherence of Nietzsche’s account of the self in Dawn. Three previous scholarly assessments are of particular relevance in determining whether or not a clear and consistent account of the self is indeed available in this text. In a detailed account of subjectivity and freedom, Carl B. Sachs has framed the problem of subjectivity as it appears in this text by asking how a multiplicity of drives and affects could constitute a unified feeling and thinking subject.33 Christa Acampora has also raised the same issue, focusing on Nietzsche’s free spirit writings in addition to Dawn: she claims that (i) as drive nourishment is unknowable and the work of chance, therefore (ii) drive-orchestration would be the work of whichever drive happens to be dominant, not of a unified self.34 Beyond the specific context of Dawn, Paul Katsafanas has argued that Nietzschean unity of self is “unity between drives and other parts of the individual,” which parts he identifies as reason and sensibility.35 Katsafanas contends that on his account, Nietzschean unity merely requires that agents have conscious thoughts, engage in episodes of deliberation and choice, and possess drives and affects; conscious thoughts and the capacity for choice are pervasively and inescapably influenced by drives, yet are distinct from drives.36 Examining the problem of subjectivity in the specific context of the text of Dawn, Sachs contends that previous accounts have failed to appreciate that in indicating drives as the components of selves, we are never merely a bundle of

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drives and affects: we are interpreted and interpreting drives and affects.37 Here, note that in the important aphorism Dawn 119, Nietzsche explicitly does appeal to the concept of interpretation, and that examination of the aphorism in the original German also supports this: Nietzsche claims that we have greater “freedom of interpretation [Freiheit der Interpretation]” in dreams than in a waking state, and that when we are in a waking state, our drives “do nothing but interpret nerve impulses [die Nervenreize interpretiren]” (D 119). Sachs suggests that we can resolve the apparent inconsistency between talk of drives and talk of a self by differentiating between two forms of subjectivity operating in Dawn. The first of these is heteronomous subjectivity, where the subject is organized through procedures and techniques external to it such as authority and tradition, and the second of these is autonomous subjectivity, which refers to a self as a continual work in progress.38 Sachs suggests that the question of the consistency of Nietzsche’s account of subjectivity is therefore really a question about how problematically heteronomous subjects can engage in becoming autonomous; his response is that developing autonomy would require free spirits, which in Dawn Nietzsche anticipates as an emergent possibility, to engage in overcoming morality and pursuing an ethics of self-fashioning.39 Hence according to Sachs, appeal to the notion of self-cultivation in Dawn does not conflict with understanding drives as constituting selves, providing that we see drives and selves as both interpreting and interpreted. Acampora is more skeptical than Sachs about self-cultivation as a solution to the subjectivity problem in Dawn, because she thinks that it is unclear that Nietzsche provides us with a sufficiently robust account of unification for responsible self-cultivation, and because she doubts that Nietzsche presents a normative ideal for full personhood with which we can be satisfied.40 Instead, she favors an account of free spirits as freeing themselves from addictive attachments, including from any overwhelming sense of themselves as detached, to loosen the soul for attachments that have developmental value.41 As she notes, this process is experimental and risky for free spirits.42 Acampora is surely right to hold that experimentation plays an important role in free spirit subjectivity, that Nietzsche’s talk of the self can seem incoherent, and that free spirits work to free themselves from addictive attachments. Yet these points do not preclude that Nietzsche can meaningfully speak of self-cultivation, if we treat free spirits as heteronomous subjects that have the capacity to develop greater autonomy, and if we treat drives and selves as already always interpreting and interpreted. As we saw, the notion of interpretation is explicitly Nietzsche’s own term in Dawn 119. It is not that there is a self behind the self that we interpret, or a drive behind the drive that we interpret, which would raise the specter of a “two world” metaphysics that would trouble the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous selves that Sachs develops, but rather that what Nietzsche means by interpretation in this aphorism

Nietzsche on Subjectivity

already involves the deep connection between word and thing, physiology and experience, that the current dispassionate approach to knowing downplays. Moreover, in speaking of selves both as drive-based and as self-cultivating, Nietzsche is speaking from within the wider framework of his campaign against morality in Dawn. It is not that Nietzsche sets out to make a theory of self, but rather that his remarks on the self are a necessary component of his wider ethical project. The apparent conflict between unified self and self as a mere composite of drives is perhaps most evident within Dawn 560, where Nietzsche emphasizes that we have freedom to cultivate drives, and specifically our drives.43 These seeddrives, to which Nietzsche attends as a means of cultivation, include emotions such as anger, pity, and vanity, and they also include musing or thought [Nachgrübeln] (D 560).44 Notice that Nietzsche makes it explicit that the significant barrier to our freedom as self-cultivators is “presumption [Vorurtheil].” The subtitle of Dawn reinforces the connection between Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality of custom, his re-imagination of the ethical, and his thinking here on presumption as a barrier to cultivation of drives: “thoughts on the presumptions of morality [Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile].” He claims that one particularly insidious presumption is the mistaken belief that our characters are complete, fully grown, and immutable “facts” (D 560). As with Dawn 119, this claim initially seems to undermine Nietzsche’s claim for self-cultivation. However, Nietzsche further suggests that mistaken belief in character fixity has been further reinforced by the work of presumptuous, so-called “great,” philosophers, and that the presumption is problematic specifically because it prevents people from coming to know that they have the freedom to cultivate their drives. If we believe our characters are fixed, then we remain unaware of certain needs, of problems that may be blighting our lives, or even, if we do appreciate these things, that there is any real possibility of pursuing meaningful change and development. Attending to the reason why Nietzsche thinks not knowing is a problem is helpful in resolving the apparent confusion between Nietzsche’s remarks on the self in Dawn. Dawn 560 is not the first instance in the text where Nietzsche discusses not knowing as a problem for the self. In Dawn 83, discussing what seem to be two competing explanations for humanity (natural and supernatural), he writes: Poor humanity! — One drop of blood too much or two little in the brain can make our life unspeakably miserable and hard, such that we suffer more from this one drop of blood than Prometheus from his vulture. But the most horrible thing of all is not even knowing that this drop of blood is the cause. “The devil!” Or “sin!” instead.45 Nietzsche is making two important claims here: (i) physiological diversity provides a natural explanation for diverse responses to experience (in contrast to the

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supernatural/customary morality explanations Nietzsche argues against in Dawn); and (ii) our not knowing is not a problem because of our being unaware — it is a problem because not knowing reinforces supernatural/customary morality explanations that limit human development and flourishing. Again, Nietzsche does not provide an account of drives and self-knowledge in the absence of an agenda; his consistent concern is with tackling the negative impact on human flourishing of presumptions about morality. This needs to be included in explanations of his remarks on the self with regard to this text. If we now apply this insight to Nietzsche’s claim on self-cultivation in Dawn 560, notice that instead of treating subjects as victims of chance or some supernatural entity, we can consider subjects to be products of natural causality.46 On this basis, we can separate out two components of Nietzsche’s position more clearly: his account of drives as a multiplicity of which our self-knowledge is always incomplete, as described in his complains about presumptions concerning the self and self-knowledge in Dawn 119, and selfdriven cultivation of drives, as discussed in Dawn 560. This illustrates a process of cultivating healthier humans than customary morality typically allows, in contrast to affirming the existence of a unified, fixed, self that exists independently of nature and time and that could not thus be a candidate for cultivation. As mentioned earlier, Nietzsche mentions six specific methods of cultivating drives: (i) avoiding drive-gratification opportunities; (ii) planting regularity into the drive; (iii) generating supersatiation and disgust; (iv) using an association of an agonizing thought; (v) redirecting one’s energy resources to a distracting end; and (vi) general exhaustion (D 109). These methods may be applied to conscious thought and to feeling directly, in the manner of the gardener that Nietzsche imagines in Dawn 560. Yet they may also involve only the minimal gardener from Dawn 119, who cultivates blindly and unknowingly  —  a minimal gardener we could call “experiences.” Drives are natural, but may be cultivated in the same way that, for instance as Nietzsche discusses, apple trees may be cultivated on espaliers. Apple trees grow and produce apples regardless of whether or not there is anyone tending to them, but if we want to cultivate more fruitful, healthier, apple trees, then it may help to create what may seem like more challenging conditions but that actually result in better growth, namely, pruning each tree and tying it to a frame to control its growth and to promote greater fruit yield (D 560). The available scholarship has tended to take the view that Nietzsche is presenting us with a hard choice to make between ways of understanding the Nietzschean self (both in Dawn and in other texts): either as a “self”-less composite of drives or self as a unity of consciousness that is not reducible entirely to drives and other components such as affects. Instead of perpetuating the story of an incommensurable choice between multiplicity of subjectivities and unity of self, we think it may be more fruitful to follow the suggestion we have been developing in this discussion: namely, to attend to how, in Dawn, both such senses of the self are

Nietzsche on Subjectivity

present.47 This opens up the possibility that, in the case of Dawn, it is necessary, as well as coherent, for Nietzsche to speak of cultivating drives through nourishment and experience of thought and feeling, while also acknowledging that selves are worked on — “done” — without each self necessarily always being directly aware of this, or necessarily needing to be in control of it (D 120). In these respects our account of Nietzsche’s view of the self in Dawn is commensurate with Paul Katsafanas’s differentiation in Nietzsche’s thinking on mind between conscious states as states that have “conceptually articulated content” and unconscious states as states that have “nonconceptually articulated content,” and with his claim that conscious states falsify by rendering unconscious states only partially, and thus generating our partial perceptions of and interactions with the world.48 Moreover, our view fits with Nietzsche’s view of the self in his wider free spirit writings, such as Human, All Too Human, and The Gay Science. This point is supported by a recent account developed by Christine Daigle, who argues that in The Gay Science 354 Nietzsche locates thinking and willing, as well as drives and affects, in the unconscious; according to Daigle, this entails that we must be careful not to take the functioning of a Nietzschean self as too neatly divided between the conscious and the unconscious, or to think of a Nietzschean self as a fixed entity.49 Instead, she suggests that we should think of the Nietzschean self as continually becoming; just as the phenomenal realm becomes, she argues, so too does the self, which Nietzsche had already acknowledged in Human, All Too Human: “this painting — that which we humans call life and experience — has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of becoming” (HH 16).50 From what Daigle refers to as the “twofold bidirectional process of constitution” the Nietzschean subject emerges as an ambiguous multiplicity that is constantly fluctuating, a composite of its experiences, which Nietzsche himself makes clear in his example of the “polyparms of our being,” which he sees as nourished positively and negatively through experiences “with every moment of our lives” (D 119).51 According to Daigle, one characteristic of a free spirit is understanding that one is such a self.52 In a reading of Dawn, Gianni Vattimo has claimed that Nietzsche’s critique of morality is not conducted, “in the name of the free and responsible subject, for such a subject is likewise a product of neurosis, a thing formed in illness.”53 Vattimo contends that because there is an “inextricable connection” between internal or internalized conscience, including the “individual in revolt,” and social morality, the appeal to freedom in Nietzsche cannot be made in the name of “the sovereignty of the individual.”54 While he rightly notes that Nietzsche unmasks morality as a set of principles that are not intended for the utility or the good of the individual on whom they are imposed but for the preservation of society, even to the detriment of individuals, we suggest he wrongly infers from this that Nietzsche’s aim is not to defend the individual against the claims of the group. The reason, he argues, is not because, metaphysically speaking, it is necessary to prefer the claims of determinism over the belief in freedom — a

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position that we would suggest it is more plausible to claim Nietzsche upholds in volume one of Human, all too Human than in Dawn — “but simply because there is no subject of such actions. Not: the subject is not free, but simply: the subject is not.”55 Based on the available evidence in Dawn, as we have discussed here, it is difficult to make sense of Vattimo’s view. And, while as Lanier Anderson points out, in Dawn Nietzsche holds the subject or self to be an assemblage of materially and historically conditioned drives and affects, this does not prevent Nietzsche from outlining an aspiration — a new dawn, in effect — in which those selves with the capacity to do so may cultivate themselves, and potentially become more self-determining.56 For the purposes of Nietzsche’s project in Dawn, it is not necessary to claim that an autonomous self exists. It is enough to claim that the psychophysical conditions of will, drives, affects, bodies, and environment, along with Nietzsche’s questioning of presumptions about self, will, and causality, are sufficient for possible autonomous selves to emerge from out of heteronomous ones.57 Plausibly, then, the account of the self that Nietzsche presents in Dawn can count as an emerging product of the conditions of natural or material subjectivity, and explicitly as subjects that are constantly in flux.58 Before Nietzsche commences his free spirit writings, the subject is conceivable as only heteronomous, or unfree: cultivated by authority and tradition and cultivating themselves as heteronomous through thoughts and feelings derived from that tradition (though not necessarily always knowing that they do such work). With the free spirit writings, as Nietzsche’s remarks in Dawn indicate, it becomes conceivable that free-spirited subjects may acquire knowledge and use of self-cultivatory power, and may thus begin to develop as autonomous subjects. Such Nietzschean subjects ground the campaign against morality and the associated critical engagement with a possible new enlightenment that Nietzsche develops in Dawn, and make possible the alternative approach to the ethical, and to matters such as our attitude toward dying, that he explores in this text. The topic of death will be examined in chapter 8. Now we wish to further illuminate Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in Dawn, linking it up with the theme of self-care and his concerns about fanaticism.

Notes 1 Recently e.g. Tom Stern has claimed that even though Nietzsche’s remarks on drives might seem to add up to a view that differentiates between “drive and instinct as biological, quasi-rational, and perhaps, on Darwinian grounds, inherited through generations of natural selection; ‘inclinations’ as more general dispositions or tastes, not necessarily tied to biological needs; and ‘affects’ as brief, forceful inner stirrings,” this view is impossible for two reasons: (i) drive-based explanations of nonconscious behavior cannot be used to explain the behavior of conscious beings fully; and (ii) “the texts do not, as a whole, support the division” between biological

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drives and instincts, general dispositions that may move beyond biology, and inner feeling. We agree that claims made about the texts as a collective whole are difficult to sustain. See Tom Stern. 2015. “Against Nietzsche’s ‘Theory’ of the Drives.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1(01): 121–40, 125–26. 2 In addition to Stern, see e.g. Carl B. Sachs. 2008. “Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Toward a Naturalized Theory of Autonomy.” Epoché 13/1(Fall): 81–100; Paul Katsafanas 2011. “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 49(1): 87–113; Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2011. “Beyond Compassion: On Nietzsche’s Moral Therapy in Dawn.” Continental Philosophy Review 44(2): 179–204; Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Christa Davis Acampora. 2014 “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit.” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 13–33; Rebecca Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 85–109. See also Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in which Alfano argues that for Nietzsche, drives “differ from preferences and desires in being associated primarily with the processes of agency rather than with teleologically specified states of affairs” (5). Earlier versions of parts of this chapter appear in portions of Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” and Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn.” 3 Robert Guay has argued that Nietzsche’s remarks on subjectivity throughout his writings do not amount to a denial of a unified subject, and that Nietzsche “not only attributed a fundamental role to subjectivity in the explanation of belief and action, but even considered all events to be ultimately explicable by reference to subjectivity.” Guay’s account does refer to Dawn 43 and Dawn 124, but a detailed analysis of subjectivity in Dawn is beyond the scope of his essay, which attends to multiple texts by Nietzsche; we see our analysis as building on Guay’s discussion of these two aphorisms. See Robert Guay. 2006. “The ‘I’s Have It: Nietzsche on Subjectivity,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49(3): 218–41. 4 Guay, “The ‘I’s Have It”; Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak”; Katsafanas, “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller”; Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit.” 5 Sachs points this out in “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 81–100. 6 In On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, Nietzsche discusses the development of language in the context of the dissimulation of the intellect, which he claims operates as a means of self-preservation. He makes a similar claim about ­dissimulation here, and some of the language of nerve stimuli is also carried over from On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense to Dawn. However, and importantly for how we understand the concept of interpretation in Dawn, the idiom of “construction” that Nietzsche employs in On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense is replaced by the idiom of “cultivation” in Dawn.

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7 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche will prescribe as a method of becoming the “purification of our opinions and valuations,” which is to be carried out in terms of a “new limit” we place on ourselves (GS 335). 8 Katsafanas draws attention to this aphorism as Nietzsche’s initial exploration of the view that conscious thinking occurs in words, in The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25. 9 Here it is worth noting the similarity of Nietzsche’s point in this aphorism to Spinoza’s thinking on the limitation that perception places on human ­understanding of the world. Spinoza discusses this using his well-known example of the worm in the blood in a letter to Henry Oldenburg, in which Spinoza is primarily concerned with explaining the coherence of the parts of Nature and how this coherence may be known. In the letter, Spinoza likens humans to “a tiny worm living in the blood,” which is “capable of distinguishing by sight the particles of the blood — lymph, etc. — and of intelligently observing how each particle, on colliding with another, either rebounds or communicates some degree of its motion, and so forth.” As Spinoza points out, even while the worm may make intelligent observations of particle motion — just as humans may make intelligent observations of the interactions of things in the world — such a worm “would be living in the blood as we are living in our part of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle as a whole, not a part, and it would have no idea as to how all the parts are modified by the overall nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of the blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definite relation.” See Baruch Spinoza, Letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 20, 1665, in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 126–28. 10 Brian Domino, “Polyp Man,” in A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 43. On Friedrich Albert Lange and Nietzsche, see also George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1983), 138–40. As both Domino and Stack discuss, Lange provided extensive discussion of La Mettrie’s materialist philosophy — along with Abraham Tremblay’s famous and influential discovery of the self-regenerating polyp — in his History of Materialism, which Nietzsche read, upon which he commented favourably, and which is directly mentioned in D 119. Today, biologists refer to Tremblay’s “polyp,” discovered in 1741, as a “hydra.” Tremblay’s experiments were considered important, because they seemed to provide evidence opposing preformation and supporting epigenesis, the theory that life acquires form through some active organizing process unique to living

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11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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things. On the history of the hydra, see Ted Everson, The Gene: A Historical Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 23–24. Julien Offray De La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” in Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24. La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” 24. La Mettrie’s ambiguous image of the (non) crushing weight of atheism is strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s thought experiment concerning our experience of the “greatest” weight, namely the thought of eternal recurrence (GS 341). La Mettrie, “Machine Man,” 32. For a contemporary account of dreams that supports some (though not all) of Nietzsche’s insights concerning dreams, see Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). McGinn claims that one crucial difference between the dream state and the waking state is that in the former dreams are “modally exhaustive” or blind: “In waking c­ onsciousness I can be perceiving one thing and imagining something else: there is the perceived world and the imagined world. I ‘live’ in both worlds, the actual and the possible … But in the dream there is only the dream world and no envisaged alternative to it; so I feel condemned to that world, since I can picture no other.” McGinn Mindsight, 80. For a discussion of dreams in D 119, see also Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 95. See Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 138. Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 46. Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 46. On these points see Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 47. Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 47. Ure advances this interpretation partly as a response to the overly literary model of the self and self-becoming in Alexander Nehamas’s influential reading in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). For example, writing to his mother, Franziska Nietzsche on July 21, 1879, Nietzsche speculates on gardening as a helpful activity as part of his interest in pursuing a more simple and natural, and hence healthier, way of living. See Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House], 2012), 139–57. Duncan Large, “Nietzsche’s Helmbrecht. 1997. or How to Philosophize with a Ploughshare.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 13: 3–22. Reprinted in Studia Nietzscheana (2014): http://www.nietzschesource.org/SN/d-large-2014. Paul Franco describes Nietzsche’s conception of the self as “aesthetic” and as “horticultural” and discusses how this aesthetic self is presented in Dawn

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24 25

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27 28 29

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through the garden metaphor in D 560. See Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 77, 81–82. Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy, 202–03. Ansell-Pearson elsewhere claims that Nietzsche is promoting an ethic of self-fashioning in this aphorism, in response to concern about “market-driven atomization and de-individuation” as well as to the tyranny of a morality of sympathetic affect, Ansell-Pearson “Beyond Compassion,” 188–90. Abbey shows that Nietzsche’s critical engagement with pity is not absolute but nuanced, making allowances for differences of individual type and context in assessing whether or not pity is defensible or appropriate ethical behaviour. See Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, 71. Bamford discusses the significance of this analogy in D 382 for Nietzsche’s overall project in Dawn in greater depth in her essay “Daybreak.” Translation modified. Translation modified from “shoots” to “seeds.” Smith renders “die Keime” as “shoots” in his translation, which obscures the Stoic imagery here. Bamford thanks Stefan Heßbrüggen for pointing out this Stoic influence upon Dawn 560 to her. Graham Parkes has pointed out that seed imagery also occurs in Plato, e.g. in the Timaeus, and provides a detailed analysis connecting this aspect of Plato’s work to Nietzsche’s thinking on ethics and psychology in Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 186–93. See also Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn.” In “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” Bamford discusses two Stoic influences at work in Nietzsche’s use of the seed metaphor; following work by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, these may be summarized as follows: (i) Diogenes Laertius’ conception of “Nature as a force moving of itself” whereby nature gives rise to offspring produced and organized through Nature’s own seminal principles [spermatikoi logoi]; (ii) widespread Stoic use of the metaphor of seeds to account for knowledge and of virtue as developmental, for example by Seneca in his Epistles. See Horowitz. 1974. “The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural Law in Man: Four Themes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 35(1): 3–16. In an essay that focuses on BGE 12, Lanier Anderson has made a similar claim that the Nietzschean self is a task or achievement. See Anderson, “What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202–35, 208. On the aesthetic self as a horticultural self, see also Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 77, 81–82. And on Nietzsche’s artful naturalism and its relevance to Nietzsche’s account of the self, see Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). In a note from 1881, Nietzsche expresses his admiration of the Chinese for cultivating trees that bear roses on one side and pears on the other — an exotic

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32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40

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fruit that is the result of selective breeding indeed! (KSA 9 11 [276]) This theme continues in the later notes, such as one from 1887 where Nietzsche demands that individuals be allowed to freely work on themselves as artist-tyrants. He adds an important qualification: “Not merely a master-race, whose task would be limited to governing, but a race or people with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture (Cultur), manners to the highest peak of the spirit; an affirming race that may grant itself every great luxury … a hothouse for strange and exquisite plants” (KSA 12, 9 [153]; WP 898). The concept for this non-average type of human being is “the superhuman” (KSA 12, 10 [17]; WP 866). On minimal conditions see Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation, 152. Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 85. Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32. See also Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche. Katsafanas, “The Concept of Unified Agency,” 103. While his account is helpful, Katsafanas’ paper incorporates more substantial analysis from Nietzsche’s later writings; a detailed analysis of Dawn is beyond the scope of his project. Katsafanas, “The Concept of Unified Agency,” 113. Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 85. Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 94–95. Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 94–95. Mitcheson also points out that what is needed is fairly minimal: according to her, only latent health and strength are required to undertake the move from fettered to free (heteronomous to ­autonomous) spirit. See Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation, 152. Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 29. See also Peter Poellner, “Nietzschean Freedom,” in Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, ed. Ken Gemes and Simon May (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154. Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32. Acampora, “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit,” 27–32. On material conditions, see Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 82. As Parkes discusses, the cultivation options discussed in D 560 are a form of sublimation of drives. See Parkes, Composing the Soul, 169. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion”, 196. We do not claim here that Nietzsche differentiates between emotion and thought wholesale. George Stack has pointed out that, while discussing how temperament rests on a physiological basis that determines human character in Man-Machine, Julien Offray de La Mettrie observes something very close to this claim concerning the physiological basis for cognitive diversity: “A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, some trifling thing that the most subtle anatomy cannot discover, would have made two idiots out of Erasmus and Fontanelle” (Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, 140); La Mettrie, “Machine Man”, 10.

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46 Natural causality is termed “material conditions of subjectivity” by Sachs in “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 93. 47 Contrast e.g. Stern, “Against Nietzsche’s ‘Theory’ of the Drives,” with the account provided by Guay, “The ‘I’s Have It.” 48 Paul Katsafanas. 2005. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization.” European Journal of Philosophy 13(1): 1–31, 24. 49 Christine Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit in Human, All Too Human,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 33–48. It is important to note that, in his paper “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind,” Katsafanas acknowledges this and calls for more attention to be given to the relationship between conscious and unconscious states, a call to which Daigle’s essay responds. 50 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 37. On the concept of the Nietzschean self understood in light of Deleuze as compound becoming, see Alan D. Schrift, “Rethinking the Subject: or, How One Becomes-Other Than What One is,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Christa Davis Acampora, “Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 314–33. 51 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 37–38, 43. 52 Daigle, “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit,” 38, 43. 53 Gianni Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 164. This work by Vattimo was originally published in Italian in 1979. 54 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 162–63. 55 Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 161. 56 See Lanier Anderson, “What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202–35. 57 On the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous selves, see Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak.” 58 Sachs, “Nietzsche’s Daybreak,” 93. It has been argued that the Nietzschean self should best be conceived of as a task or achievement in R. Lainer Anderson, “What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 202–35. Daigle’s account in her essay “The Ethical Ideal of the Free Spirit” helpfully explains what that achievement might, in the context of the free spirit writings, consistently involve. On subject multiplicity as a pre-requisite for change, see Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation, 135.

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7 Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self1 One of Nietzsche’s key targets in Dawn is what he sees as the fundamental ­tendency of modern “commercial society” to attempt a “collectivity-building project that aims at disciplining bodies and selves and integrating them into a uniform whole.”2 In this context, Nietzsche’s use of “morality” denotes the means of adapting individuals to the needs of the whole, making them into useful members of society. This requires that every individual is made to feel, as a primary emotion, a connectedness or bondedness with the whole, with society and its customs and traditions, in which anything truly individual is regarded as prodigal, costly, inimical, extravagant, and so on. Nietzsche’s great worry in this regard is that any concern with self-fashioning will be sacrificed. This informs his second critical concern with the emphasis on sympathetic affects within modern talk of morality. For Nietzsche, it is necessary to contest the idea that there is a single moral-making morality, since every code of ethics that affirms itself in an exclusive manner “destroys too much valuable energy and costs humanity much too dearly” (D 164). By contrast, in the future, Nietzsche hopes that the inventive and fructifying person shall no longer be sacrificed and that “numerous novel experiments shall be made in ways of life and modes of society” (D 164). When this takes place, we will find that an enormous load of guilty conscience has been purged from the world. Guilty conscience is, hence, Nietzsche’s third key target in Dawn. Humanity has suffered for too long from teachers of morality who wanted too much all at once and sought to lay down precepts for everyone (D 194). In the future, care will need to be given to the most personal questions and create time for them (D 196). Small individual questions and experiments will no longer be viewed with contempt and impatience (D 547). In place of what he sees as the ruling ethic of pity, which he thinks can assume the form of a “tyrannical encroachment,” Nietzsche invites individuals to engage in individual projects of Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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self-fashioning, cultivating selves that others can look at with pleasure — yet that still gives vent to the expression, albeit in a subtle and delicate manner, of an altruistic drive: Moral fashion of a commercial society — Behind the fundamental principle of the contemporary moral fashion: “moral actions are generated by sympathy [Sympathie] for others”, I see the work of a collective drive toward timidity masquerading behind an intellectual front: this drive desires … that life be rid of all the dangers it once held and that each and every person should help toward this end with all one’s might: therefore only actions aimed at the common security and at society’s sense of security may be accorded the rating “good!”  —  How little pleasure people take in themselves these days, however, when such a tyranny of timidity dictates to them the uppermost moral law [Sittengesetz], when, without so much as a protest, they let themselves be commanded to ignore and look beyond themselves and yet have eagle-eyes for every distress and every suffering existing elsewhere! Are we not, with this prodigious intent to grate off all the rough and sharp edges from life, well on the way to turning humanity into sand? … In the meantime, the question itself remains open as to whether one is more useful to another by immediately and constantly leaping to his side and helping him — which can, in any case, only transpire very superficially, provided the help doesn’t turn into a tyrannical encroachment and transformation — or by fashioning out of oneself something the other will behold with pleasure, a lovely, peaceful, self-enclosed garden, for instance, with high walls to protect against the dangers and dust of the roadway, but with a hospitable gate as well (D 174) Nietzsche appears to have been exposed to the term “commercial society” from his reading of Taine’s history of English literature.3 As one commentator notes, those who favored commercial society, such as the French philosophes, including thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, held that by “establishing bonds among people and making life more comfortable, commerce softens and refines people’s manners and promotes humaneness and civility.”4 It is clear that, in the aphorism we have just cited, Nietzsche is expressing an anxiety that other nineteenth-­century social analysts, such as Tocqueville, have, namely, that market-driven atomization and de-individuation can readily lead to a form of communitarian tyranny.5 Nietzsche’s concern is not simply with the emergence of such tyranny, but with its effects on humanity as a whole. Nietzsche’s critical engagement with modern morality’s heavy-handed emphasis on sympathetic affects, on the effects of commercial society, and guilty conscience, thus leads him to an additional, fourth, key point of critical engagement: the modern

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emphasis on security. Unknown to ourselves, Nietzsche claims, we live within the effect of general opinions about “the human being,” which is a “bloodless abstraction” and “fiction” (D 105). Even the modern glorification of work and talk of its blessings can be interpreted as a fear of everything individual. The subjection to hard industriousness from early until late serves as “the best policeman” since it keeps everyone in bounds and hinders the development of reason, desire, and the craving for independence. It uses vast amounts of nervous energy that could be given over to reflection, brooding, dreaming, loving and hating, and working through our experiences: “a society in which there is continuous hard work will have more security [Sicherheit]: and security is currently worshipped as the supreme divinity” (D 173). We are today creating a society of “universal security” but the price being paid for it is, Nietzsche thinks, much too high: “the maddest thing is that what is being effected is the very opposite of universal security” (D 179). In our age of great uncertainty, Nietzsche suggests, there are emerging individuals who no longer consider themselves to be bound by existing mores and laws, and are thus making the first attempts to organize and create for themselves a new way of being ethical. Hitherto such individuals have lived their lives under the jurisdiction of a guilty conscience, being decried as criminals, freethinkers, and immoralists (D 164). Although this development will make the coming century a precarious one (it may mean, Nietzsche notes, that a rifle hangs on each and every shoulder), it is one that Nietzsche thinks we should find fitting and good since it at least ensures the presence of an oppositional power that will admonish that there is any such thing as a single moral-making morality. Nietzsche’s skepticism about a drive for security is directly relevant to our present-day reality. In a recent “critique” of security, Mark Neocleous has claimed that today our entire political language and culture is saturated by “security”; indeed, everywhere we look we see being articulated the so-called need for security.6 Moreover, there is a prevailing assumption that such security is a good thing, something fundamentally necessary in spite of all interrogations of it. The common assumption today is that only security is able to guarantee our freedom and the good society, and the main issue on the contemporary political agenda is how to improve the power of the state so that it can secure us better. With this in mind, we need to ask some critical questions. As Neocleous puts it, what if at the heart of the logic of security there lays not a vision of emancipation, but rather “a means of modelling the whole of human society around a particular vision of human order? What if security is little more than a semantic and semiotic black hole allowing authority to inscribe itself deeply into human experience?”7 The critique of security that is suggested by Neocleous’ analysis would see security not as a universal or transcendental value, but rather as an exercise in political technology that shapes and orders individuals, groups, and classes, as well as capital. It would contest the “necessity” of security that appears obvious

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and natural, and that aims to close off all opposition, so remaining “unquestioned, unanalysed and undialectically presupposed, rather like the order which it is expected to secure.”8 Neocleous speaks of resisting the course of a world that continues to hold a gun to the heads of human beings. Although Nietzsche responds to the crisis of security as he saw it in his own time by appealing to the need for everyone to carry their own gun, his point is one largely made in jest. More seriously, Nietzsche recognizes the fundamental bio-political tendencies of modernity and the way they will impact on individuals, leading ultimately to a political technology of control and discipline and expressed in the name of our welfare and “security.”9 Nietzsche’s campaign against morality refers to certain ways and habits of thinking, including the morality that is part of our modern self-image of ourselves (as moral agents). More specifically, we can now see that the initial question about morality that Nietzsche identifies, concerns how we can respond to the issue that our ways and habits of thinking about morality lack intellectual conscience and integrity. Morality as we moderns conceive it gives our attempts at self-mastery a bad conscience, and infuses our behavior with guilt. For Nietzsche, four main presumptions about morality guide this way of thinking: i)  It is supposed that morality must have a universally binding character in which there is a single morality valid for all in all circumstances and for all occasions. Morality expects a person to be dutiful, obedient, self-sacrificing in their core and at all times: this demands ascetic self-denial and is a form of refined cruelty. ii)  Ethicists such as Kant and Schopenhauer suppose that it provides us with insight into the true, metaphysical character of the world and existence. For example, in Schopenhauer virtue is “practical mysticism,” which is said to spring from the same knowledge that constitutes the essence of all mysticism. For Schopenhauer therefore, metaphysics is virtue translated into action and proceeds from the immediate and intuitive knowledge of the identity of all beings. iii)  It is supposed that we already have an adequate understanding of moral agency, for example, that we have properly identified moral motives and located the sources of moral agency. The opposite for Nietzsche is, in fact, the case: we almost entirely lack knowledge in moral matters. iv)  It is supposed we can make a clear separation between good virtues and evil vices, but for Nietzsche the two are reciprocally conditioning: all good things have arisen out of dark roots through sublimation and spiritualization, and they continue to feed off such roots. It is important we appreciate that Nietzsche is not, in Dawn, advocating the overcoming of all possible forms of morality: a role for the ethical is retained.10

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His concern is that “morality” in the forms it has assumed in the greater part of human history, right up to Kant’s moral law, has opened up an abundance of sources of displeasure and to the point that one can say that with every “refinement in morality” [Sittlichkeit] human beings have grown “more and more dissatisfied with themselves, their neighbour, and their lot” (D 106). The individual in search of happiness, and who wishes to become their own law-giver, cannot be treated with prescriptions to the path to happiness simply because individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws  —  external prescriptions only serve to obstruct and hinder the pursuit of individual happiness: “The so-called ‘moral’ precepts are, in truth, directed against individuals and are in no way aimed at promoting their happiness” (D 108). Indeed, Nietzsche himself does not intend to lay down precepts for everyone. As he writes: “One should seek out limited circles and seek and promote the morality appropriate to them” (D 194). Similarly, he points out in another text that where morality centers on “continually exercised self-mastery and self-overcoming in both large and the smallest of things,” it is to be championed (WS 45).

­Self-care Nietzsche proposes one substantial, though incomplete, answer to his initial question of morality: we need to come to a better understanding of how we have developed a bad conscience toward a morality centered on self-care. We currently regard self-renunciation as the basis of morality. We are the inheritors of a secular tradition that sees in external law the basis for morality, and this morality is one of asceticism or denial of the self. As Nietzsche astutely points out, if we examine what is often taken to be the summit of the moral in philosophy — the mastery of the affects — we even find that there is pleasure to be taken in this mastery. For instance, we can impress ourselves by what we can deny, defer, resist, and so on. It is through this mastery that we grow and develop. And yet morality, as we moderns have come to understand it, would nonetheless have to give this ethical selfmastery a bad conscience. If we take self-sacrificing resolution and self-denial as our criterion of the moral, then we would have to say — if being honest — that such acts are not performed strictly for the sake of others. One’s own fulfillment and pride are at work in such acts: the other provides the self with an opportunity to relieve itself through self-denial. With this in mind, we can begin to see how Nietzsche’s initial question of morality raises a further, pressing question about how to care for the self. According to Michel Foucault, among the Greeks practices of self-cultivation took the form of a precept, “to take care of self.” This precept was a principal rule for social and personal conduct and for the art of life. This is not what we

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­ rdinarily think when we think of the ancient Greeks: we imagine that they were o ruled by the precept, “Know thyself” [gnothi seauton]. Nietzsche’s question of morality hence raises the question: Why have we moderns forgotten the original precept of take care of the self and why has it been obscured by the Delphic injunction? In modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl, knowledge of the self, or the thinking subject, takes an on an ever-increasing importance as the first key step in the theory of knowledge. Foucault thinks we moderns have thus inverted what was the hierarchy in the two main principles of antiquity: for the Greeks knowledge was subordinated to ethics (centered on self-care) whereas for us knowledge is what is primary. But even the Delphic principle was not an abstract one concerning life; rather, it was technical advice meaning something like, “do not suppose yourself to be a god,” or “be aware of what you really ask when you come to consult the oracle.” Two key points about Foucault’s analysis are worth noting here. First, Foucault insists that taking care of one’s self does not simply mean being interested in oneself or having an attachment to or fascination with the self. Rather, “it describes a sort of work, an activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique.”11 Second, regarding the taking care aspect, Foucault stresses that the Greek word epimeleisthai designates not simply a mental attitude, a certain form of attention, or a way of not forgetting something. He points out that its etymology refers to a series of words such as meletan and melete, and meletan, for example, means to practice and train (often coupled with the verb gumnazein). So, the meletai are exercises, such as gymnastic and military ones. Thus, the Greek “taking care” refers to a form of vigilant, continuous, and applied activity more than it does to a mental attitude. Foucault contends that Greek ethics incorporates a focus on moral conduct, on relations to oneself and others, rather than a focus on religious problems such as what our fate after death is, or what the gods are and whether they intervene in life or not. For the Greeks, Foucault argues, these were not significant problems, and were not directly related to conduct. Instead, the Greeks were concerned with constituting an approach to the ethical as an “aesthetics of existence.” Foucault thinks we may be in a similar situation to the Greek one today “since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion.”12 For him the general Greek problem was not the tekhne of the self but that of life, “tekhne tou biou, or how to live. It is quite clear from Socrates to Seneca or Pliny, for instance, that they didn’t worry about the afterlife, what happened after death, or whether God exists or not. That was not really a great problem for them; the problem was: Which tekhne do I have to use in order to live well as I ought to live?”13 More and more, he thinks, over time this tekhne tou biou became one of the self, so whereas a Greek citizen of say the fifth century would have felt his or her tekhne of life was to take care of the city and his or her companions, by the time of Seneca the problem is to

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

primarily take care of him or herself. This taking care of the self for its own sake is something that starts with the Epicureans. Attending to these remarks by Foucault highlights a remarkable similarity to the way in which Nietzsche presents the question of self-care and, more broadly, the question of how to understand the ethical in the free-spirit writings. Nietzsche suggests we need to cultivate an attitude of indifference with respect to the first and last things. He explicitly appeals to Epicurus and Epictetus as thinkers who present a model of ethics that is quite different to what we have inherited through Christianity and modern secularism. What particularly appeals to Nietzsche about Epicurus’ philosophy is the teaching on mortality and the general attempt to liberate the mind from unjustified fears and anxieties. If, as Pierre Hadot has suggested, philosophical therapeutics is centered on a concern with the healing of our own lives so as to return us to the joy of existing, then in the texts of his freespirit writings, Nietzsche can be seen to be an heir to this ancient tradition.14 Indeed, if there is one crucial component to Nietzsche’s philosophical therapeutics in these texts that he keeps returning to again and again, it is the need for spiritual joyfulness and the task of cultivating in ourselves, after centuries of training by morality and religion, the joy in existing. In the final aphorism of The Wanderer and his Shadow Nietzsche writes, for example: Only to the ennobled human being may the freedom of spirit be given; to him alone does alleviation of life draw nigh and salve his wounds; he is the first who may say that he lives for the sake of joyfulness [Freudigkeit] and for the sake of no further goal (WS 350) In the free spirit writings, then, Epicurus is an attractive figure for Nietzsche because of the attempt to establish philosophy on the basis of cool, scientific reasoning, such as the attempt to understand nature free of arbitrary principles, as well as free of myth and human fantasy. The task is to make human beings modest and self-sufficient.15 Nietzsche wants free spirits to take pleasure in existence, involving taking pleasure in themselves and in friendship. He is keen to encourage human beings to cultivate an attitude toward existence in which they accept their mortality and attain serenity about their dwelling on the earth, to conquer unjustified fears, and to reinstitute the role played by chance and chance events in the world and in human existence. Nietzsche wishes to see restored our insight into the “pure contingency of events,” and in this way we restore “innocence” to the world and rid it of notions of punishment (D 13; see also D 33, 36).16 At this point in the trajectory of his wider philosophy, Nietzsche’s engagement with the question of morality means that he is committed to a philosophical therapeutics in which the chief aim is to temper emotional and mental excess. There is an Epicurean inspiration informing Nietzsche’s actual philosophical practice at

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this time. According to one commentator, Epicurean arguments “have a clear therapeutic intent: by removing false beliefs concerning the universe and the ways in which the gods might be involved in its workings, they eliminate a major source of mental trouble and lead us towards a correct and beneficial conception of these matters.”17 In part, Nietzsche conceived the art of the maxim in therapeutic terms. Epicurus’s practice of philosophy may have served as one source of inspiration for Nietzsche, along with his esteem of such geniuses of meditation as Seneca and Plutarch (two of Montaigne’s favourite ancient authors also). Nietzsche thinks that the modern age has forgotten the art of reflection, and although it is necessary for us to confront the “thorniest” stretches of our lives, through practising the art of the maxim we give ourselves a lift and a tonic, and can even return to life revivified rather than depressed from our encounter with thorny problems (HH 38). Modern spirits for Nietzsche can learn a great deal about their relation to life, including how to live it well and wisely, by learning how to derive pleasure from the art of the maxim, including both its construction and its tasting. This art of the maxim is for him to be combined with the scientific spirit so as to give rise to a new sobriety in which a program of general therapeutic practice of reflection and observation would serve to aid the cause of tempering a human mind prone to neurosis. Nietzsche sees free spirits playing an exemplary role here, being “steady and moderate”, and while around them everything is catching fire they are keen “to grasp all available means for quenching and cooling…” (HH 38). In directing our attention to natural causes science liberates the human mind from the realm of fantasy, and the maxim provides us with the means of reflecting on our lives in a sober and calm manner. The illnesses and neuroses we encounter in humanity require that “ice-packs” be placed on them (HH 38). Nietzsche speaks of the “over-excitation” of our “nervous and thinking powers” reaching a dangerous critical point in our present and notes that “the cultivated classes of Europe have in fact become thoroughly neurotic” (HH 244). This concern with a cooling down of the human mind continues in Dawn where Nietzsche makes even more explicit his concern with the spread of fanaticism in moral and religious thinking (see D 50). In Dawn, Nietzsche is addressing what he calls “our current, stressed, power-thirsty society [machtdürstigen Gesellschaft] in Europe and America” (D 271), and seeks to draw attention to the different ways in which the “feeling of power” is gratified through both individual and collective forms of agency (see D 184). At this stage in his thinking, this is what he means by “grand politics” [grossen Politik], in which the “mightiest tide” driving forward individuals, masses, and nations is “the need for the feeling of power” [Machtgefühls] (D 189). Sometimes this assumes the form of the “pathos-ridden language of virtue,” and although Nietzsche has a concern over the fanatical elements of a politics of virtue, his main concern at this time is that such behavior gives rise to the unleashing of “a plethora of squandering, sacrificing, hoping … over-audacious, fantastical instincts” that are then utilized by ambitious princes to start up wars

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

(D 179). As one commentator points out, Nietzsche first introduces his infamous notion of power into his writings not as a metaphysical truth or as a normative principle, but as a hypothesis of psychology that seeks to explain the origins and development of the various cultural forms that human beings have fashioned in order to deal with their vulnerability or lack of power.18 For instance, Nietzsche remarks that the development of human history the feeling of powerlessness has been extensive and is responsible for the creation of both superstitious rituals as well as cultural forms such as religion and metaphysics (D 23). The feeling of fear and powerlessness has been in a state of “perpetual excitation” for so long a time that the actual feeling of power has developed to incredibly subtle degrees and levels and has, in fact, become our “strongest inclination” (D 23). We can safely say, he thinks, that the methods discovered to create this feeling constitute the history of culture [Cultur]. Today, Nietzsche notes, although the means of the appetite for power have altered the same volcano still burns: what was formerly done for the sake of God is now done for the sake of money, “for the sake of that which now imparts to the highest degree the feeling of power and a good conscience” (D 204). Nietzsche therefore attacks the upper classes for giving themselves over to “sanctioned fraud” and that has “the stock exchange and all forms of speculation on its conscience” (D 204). What troubles him about this terrible craving for and love of accumulated money is that it once again gives rise, albeit in a new form, to “that fanaticism [Fanatismus] of the appetite for power [Machtgelüstes] that formerly was ignited by the conviction of being in possession of the truth” (D 204). Through his psychological probing of the “fantastical instincts” and of the need for the feeling of power Nietzsche is led to cultivate skepticism about politics in Dawn and to favor instead a program of therapeutic self-cultivation. He affirms, for example, the cultivation of “personal wisdom” over any allegiances one might have to party politics (D 183). Moreover, as he says at one point in the book, we need to be honest with ourselves and know ourselves extremely well if we are to practice toward others “that philanthropic dissimulation that goes by the name of love and kindness” (D 335). Nietzsche pursues a project of freeminded social transformation in which small groups of free spirits will practice experimental lives, sacrifice themselves for the superior health of future generations, endeavor to get beyond their compassion, promote “universal interests,” and seek to “strengthen and elevate the general feeling of human power” (D 146). Although it is impossible to avoid generating suffering in the promotion of these new universal interests through experimental free-minded modes of living, the means to be practiced for the sublimated attainment of human power are primarily “ethical,” involving persuasion and temptation and requiring the setting up of new forms of pedagogy.

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­Fanaticism It is important to Nietzsche that his words are not treated as those of a “fanatic,” that there is no “preaching,” and with no “faith” being demanded; rather, he is keen to write and philosophize less dogmatically, in terms of what he calls a “delicate slowness” (EH Foreword; see also D Preface 5). In Ecce Homo he prides himself on his non-fanatical nature: “you will not find a trace of fanaticism in my being” (EH “Why I am so clever,” 10). And he adds to amplify his point: “There is not one moment in my life where you will find any evidence of a presumptuous or histrionic attitude” (EH “Why I am so clever,” 10). This “non-fanatical” Nietzsche emerges, or comes to the fore, in the free-spirit texts. We live in fanatical times according to Nietzsche, and fanaticism is to be understood as not purely political but as something that ranges across religion, morality, and philosophy.19 Our attachment to “fanatical” ideas includes the idea that there is a single moral-making morality; the idea that true life is to be found in self-abandonment; and the idea that there are definitive, final truths. Nietzsche situates himself as a critic of all three ideas throughout his middle writings, which in this respect form part of his envisioned enlightenment project, and aims to work against all expressions of fanaticism, especially religious and moral and political, and in an effort to temper emotional and mental excess. That fanaticism is a major concern of Nietzsche’s project in Dawn is made explicit in the 1886 Preface, where he also writes as a teacher of slow reading and a friend of lento. In it, Nietzsche exposes the seductions of morality, claiming that morality knows how to “inspire” or “enthuse” [begeistern] us. As Nietzsche goes on to point out, with his attempt to render the ground for “majestic moral edifices” level and suitable for construction, Kant set himself a “rapturous” or “enthusiastic goal” (schwärmerischen Absicht), one that makes him a true son of his century — a century that more than any other, Nietzsche stresses, can fairly be called “the century of “rapturous enthusiasm” or, indeed, “fanaticism” [Schwärmerei] (D Preface 3). Although Kant sought to keep enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus] and fanaticism [Schwärmerei] separate, Nietzsche is claiming that there is in his moral philosophy what Alberto Toscano has called a “ruse of transcendence,” or the return of universally binding abstract precepts and authorities that are beyond the domain of human and natural relations.20 Nietzsche’s critical point is that Kant betrayed the cause of reason by positing a “moral realm” that cannot be assailed by reason. Indeed, Nietzsche holds that Kant was bitten by the “tarantula of morality Rousseau,” and so “he too held in the very depths of his soul the idea of moral fanaticism [moralischen Fanatismus] whose executor yet another disciple of Rousseau’s, namely, Robespierre, felt and confessed himself to be” (D Preface 3). Although he partakes of this “Frenchified fanaticism” (Franzosen-Fanatismus) Kant remains decidedly German for Nietzsche — he is said to be “thorough” and

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

“profound” — in his positing of a “logical ‘Beyond’,” a “non-demonstrable world,” so as to create a space for the “moral realm.”21 The morality that humanity has cultivated and dedicated itself to is one of “enthusiastic devotion” and “self-sacrifice” in which it looks down from sublime heights upon the sober morality of self-control (which is regarded as egotistical). Nietzsche suggests that the reason why morality has been developed in this way is owing to the enjoyment of the state of intoxication that has stemmed from the thought that the person is at one with the powerful being to whom it consecrates itself; in this way the feeling of power is enjoyed and is confirmed by a sacrifice of the self. For Nietzsche, of course, such an overcoming of the human self is impossible: “In truth you only seem to sacrifice yourselves; instead, in your thoughts you transform yourselves into gods and take pleasure in yourselves as such” (D 215). Activities of self-sacrifice serve to intensify the feeling of power as one of the key needs of human life and are not to be taken at face value; this means that the sacrifice of the self is an appearance in which the value of the act resides in the pleasure one derives from it. In his consideration of intoxication, visions, trance, and so on, Nietzsche is, then, dealing with the problem of fanaticism that preoccupies him throughout his middle and late writings (D 57–58, 68, 204, 298; see also AOM 15; BGE 10; GS 347; AC 11, 54). The original aphorisms of Dawn are also explicitly concerned with this same problem of fanaticism. As he notes, such “enthusiasts” or fanatics (Schwärmer) will seek to implant the faith in intoxication as “as being that which is actually living in life: a dreadful faith!” (D 50). Such is the extent of Nietzsche’s anxiety that he wonders whether humanity as a whole will one day perish by its “spiritual fire-waters” and those who keep alive the desire for them. The “strange madness of moral judgements” is bound up with states of exaltation [Erhebung] and “the most exalted language” (D 189). Nietzsche is advising us to be on our guard, to be vigilant as philosophers against, “the half-mad, the fantastic, the fanatical [fanatischer],” including so-called human beings of genius who claim to have “visions” and to have seen things others do not see. We are to be cautious, not credulous, when confronted with the claims of visions, that is to say he adds, “of a profound mental disturbance” (D 66). In criticizing fanaticism, Nietzsche largely has in mind the Christian religion (though we might well suspect that he has Wagner in mind when he critically addresses genius). Although it does not admit this to itself Christianity has sought to liberate humanity from “the burden of the demands of morality by pointing out a shorter way to perfection” (D 59). Now, however, the old habits of Christian security strike us as “stale,” “exhausted,” and “arbitrarily fanatical” (D 57). Just as there is no royal road to truth, so there is no easy path to perfection. Nietzsche holds that in wanting to return to the affects “in their utmost grandeur and strength” — for example, as love of God, fear of God, fanatical faith in God, and

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so on  —  Christianity represents a popular protest against philosophy and he appeals to the ancient sages against it since they advocated the triumph of reason over the affects (D 58). Nietzsche’s stance contra revolution and on moral fanaticism — which he singles out for attack in the 1886 Preface to Dawn — is part of an established tradition in German thought dating back to the 1780s and 1790s.22 Although Nietzsche especially criticizes Kant in the Preface to the text, he fails to consider in any serious or fair-minded way Kant’s position on morality and revolution, and he has nothing to say on Kant’s own critical position on the issue of fanaticism. In the Preface to Dawn Nietzsche accuses Kant of fanaticism and claims that he was bitten by Rousseau, that “tarantula of morality” (D Preface 3).23 However, although he criticizes the Kantian legacy in moral philosophy he is, in fact, rather close to Kant on several points. We can note the following: for Kant, (i) the task of the Enlightenment is to be perpetual24; and (ii) revolution cannot produce a genuine reform in our modes of thinking but only result in new prejudices.25 Where Nietzsche thinks Kant is inconsistent is with respect to Kant’s ambition of imposing the demands of a universalist morality upon humanity. For Nietzsche this is unworkable because we simply lack enough knowledge to morally legislate for individuals, let alone for humanity as a whole. Nietzsche contends, first, that the moral precepts directed at individuals are not, in fact, aimed at promoting their happiness; second, that such precepts are also not, in fact, concerned with the “happiness and welfare of humanity.” His concern on this point is that we simply have words to which it is virtually impossible to attach definite concepts, “let alone to utilize them as a guiding star on the dark ocean of moral aspirations” (D 108). We cannot even appeal to evolution since, as he puts it, “Evolution does not desire happiness; it wants evolution and nothing more” (D 108). Mankind lacks a universally recognized goal, so it is thus both irrational and frivolous to inflict upon humanity the demands of morality. Nietzsche does not rule out the possibility of recommending a goal that lies in humanity’s discretion, but this is something that for him lies in the distant future. There is much critical working through and enlightenment undermining to be done first. A simple definition would treat fanaticism as “excessive enthusiasm,” especially in religious matters. Enthusiasm is to be understood as “rapturous intensity of a feeling on behalf of a cause or a person.”26 Attention to such feeling is part of Nietzsche’s understanding of fanaticism and informs his critique of it. As such, Nietzsche is perhaps overall closer to the likes of Locke and Hume than he is to Kant. Where Locke and Hume both offer sustained critiques of enthusiasm, identifying it with what we would today call fanaticism, Kant is careful in some of his writings to distinguish between enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus] and fanaticism [Schwärmerei]: where enthusiasm functions as a sign of a moral tendency in humanity, the pious fanatic has otherworldly intuitions.27 Kant thus locates

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

fanaticism [Schwärmerei] in the “raving of reason” and “the delusion of wanting to SEE something beyond all bounds of sensibility.”28 Kant is looking for evidence of a “historical sign,” such as resides in an event (e.g. the French Revolution), which might indicate that humans have the power of being the cause or author of their own improvement.29 However, Kant is acutely aware of not being dogmatic here, that is, we cannot have too high an expectation of human beings in their progressive improvements less our aspirations turn into “the fantasies of an overheated mind.”30 Of course, this does not save Kant completely from the charge of “moral fanaticism,”31 but it does serve to indicate something of the complexity of his position, to which Nietzsche does not properly attend. Ultimately, Nietzsche and Kant diverge on the issue of fanaticism owing to the fact that they each have a different conception of what makes for signs of human “moral maturity.” For Kant this resides not simply in our being “civilized” or ­“cultivated” and other semblances of morality but in our “cosmopolitan” achievement and sense of moral purposiveness. For Nietzsche, by contrast, we stand in need of liberation from the “fanatical” presumptions of morality. Nietzsche perceives a need to recognize our ethical complexity, for example, that it is naïve to posit a strict separation of egoistic and altruistic drives and actions, and that it is equally naïve to assume a unitary self that is completely transparent to itself. So, what, in Nietzsche’s eyes, makes for moral maturity? It is a question and task of modesty — and for Nietzsche, as he makes clear in the Preface to Dawn, his attack on “morality” is based on a struggle for “more modest words [bescheidenere Worte]” (D Preface 4). According to Nietzsche, we lack the knowledge into moral matters that talk of “morality” typically presumes, and for him this necessitates bringing experimentalism into the domain of our ethical life. For example, he thinks it is necessary to contest the idea that there is a single moral-making morality since this deprives humanity of the capacity to attain ethical maturity in which changes in customs are appreciated as a sign of a healthy culture, allowing for diversity in attitudes and ways of living. This concern explains why Nietzsche is so interested in “the inventive and fructifying person” and favours the implementation of “novel experiments” with respect to both ways of living and modes of society (D 164). The aim is to expunge guilty conscience from the lives of individuals. Contra the fanaticism of “morality,” then, Nietzsche suggests that we ourselves should instead become experiments, and that we should want to become such: we are to build anew the laws of life and of behavior by taking from the sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology, and solitude the foundation-stones for new ideals, if not our new ideals themselves (D 453).32 We have seen how in the free-spirit writings, Epicurus is one of Nietzsche’s chief inspirations in his effort to liberate himself from the metaphysical need, to find serenity within his own existence, and to aid humanity in its need to now cure its neuroses. Epicureanism, along with science in general, serves to make us

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“colder and more sceptical,” helping to cool down “the fiery stream of belief in ultimate definitive truths,” a stream that has grown so turbulent through Christianity (HH 244). The task, Nietzsche says, is to live in terms of “a constant spiritual joyfulness [Freudigkeit]” (HH 292) and to prize “the three good things”: grandeur, repose or peace, and sunlight, in which these things answer to thoughts that elevate, thoughts that quieten, thoughts that enlighten, and, finally, “to thoughts that share in all three of these qualities, in which everything earthly comes to be transfigured: that is the realm where the great trinity of joy rules [Freude]” (WS 332). Nietzsche’s search for a non-fanatical [nicht fanatisch] mode of living in response to the question of morality and its implications also leads him to an engagement with the Stoic Epictetus. Although this ancient thinker was a slave, the exemplar he invokes is without class and is possible in every class. He serves as a counterweight to modern idealists who are greedy for expansion. Epictetus’s ideal human being, lacking all fear of God and believing rigorously in reason, “is not a preacher of penitence” (D 546). He has a pride in himself that does not wish to trouble and encroach on others: “he admits a certain mild rapprochement and does not wish to spoil anyone’s good mood — Yes, he can smile! There is a great deal of ancient humanity in this ideal!” (D 546). The Epictetean is selfsufficient, “defends himself against the outside world” and “lives in a state of highest valor” (D 546). Nietzsche offers this portrait of the Epictetean as a point of contrast to the Christian. The Christian lives in hope (and in the consolation of “unspeakable glories” to come) and allows themself to be given gifts, expecting the best of life not to come from him or herself and their own resources but from divine love and grace. By contrast Epictetus “does not hope and does allow his best to be given him — he possesses it, he holds it valiantly in his hand, and he would take on the whole world if it tries to rob him of it” (D 546). This portrait of Epictetus contra the Christian provides us with a set of invaluable insights into how Nietzsche conceives the difference between fanatical and nonfanatical modes of living: one way of life is self-sufficient and finds its pride in this, renouncing hope and living in the present; the other devotes itself to living through and for others, its attention is focused on the future (as that which is promised to come), and it lacks the quiet and calm dignity of self-sufficiency that is the Epictetean ideal. Nietzsche also admires Epictetus on account of his dedication to his own ego and for resisting the glorification of thinking and living for others (D 131). Of course, this is a partial and selective appropriation of Epictetus on Nietzsche’s part. Although his chief concerns are with integrity and self-command, Epictetus is also known for his Stoic cosmopolitanism in which individuals have an obligation to care for their fellow human beings. Nietzsche is silent about this aspect of Stoic teaching. Nevertheless, it is true that the ethical outlook of Epictetus does

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

invite people “to value their individual selves over everything else.”33 For Nietzsche, he serves as a useful contrast to Christian thinkers such as Pascal, who considered the ego to be something hateful: If, as Pascal and Christianity claim, our ego [Ich] is always hateful, how might we possibly ever allow or assume that someone else could love it — be it God or a human being! It would go against all decency to let ­oneself be loved knowing full well that one only deserves hate — not to mention other feelings of repulsion. — “But this is precisely the kingdom of mercy”. — So is your love-thy-neighbour mercy? Your compassion mercy? Well, if these things are possible for you, go still one step further: love yourselves out of mercy  —  then you won’t need your God any more at all, and the whole drama of original sin and redemption will play itself out to the end in you yourselves (D 79) Nietzsche wishes to replace morality, including the morality of compassion, with a care of self. We go wrong when we fail to attend to the needs of the “ego” and flee from it. We can stick to the idea that benevolence and beneficence are what constitute a good person, but such a person must first be benevolently and beneficently disposed toward themselves. A “bad” person is one that runs from themself and hates themself, causing injury to themself. Such a person is rescuing themself from themself in others, and this running from the ego [ego] living in others, for others “has, heretofore, been called, just as unreflectedly as assuredly, ‘unegotistical’ and consequently ‘good’!” (D 516). Such passages clearly indicate that Nietzsche has what we are crediting him with in Dawn, namely, an intimate concern with the care of self as a key part of experimenting with what the ethical, freed from the constraints of fanaticism, might mean. As we have considered in the previous chapter, Nietzsche’s attention to drives as the ­foundation of psychological functioning (in e.g. D 119) raise a concern about the coherence of his advocacy of an ethic of self-care in this text. It is also important to note that Nietzsche does not advocate (as Foucault also does not) an ahistorical return to the ancients. In the case of Dawn, Nietzsche highlights the teaching of Epictetus, for example, as a way of indicating that what we take to be morality today — where it is taken to be coextensive with the sympathetic affects — is not a paradigm of some universal and metahistorical truth. If we look at history, we find that there have been different ways of being ethical: this in itself is sufficient, Nietzsche thinks, to derail the idea that there is a single moral-making morality. A key component of Nietzsche’s positive project, then, as a response to the question of morality that he raises in Dawn, is to work against the construction of moral necessities out of historical contingencies, and against fanatical belief in such constructed moral necessities.

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­Nietzsche on Love and Friendship We wish here to return to the theme of self-care in Nietzsche and focus on his thoughts about love and friendship, which are centered on the issue of how best to cultivate healthy relations between the self and its others. In his middle writings, including Dawn, Nietzsche develops a powerful set of criticisms of love in its idealized romantic form, but he is not so skeptical about love as to not want to provide an alternative conception of our need and desire for love. He is suspicious about cases of romantic love that assume an obsessional form simply because it makes fools of us as we become so prone to self-deceit and world-deceit: Love turns us into inveterate felons against truth and into people who habitually thieve and habitually receive stolen goods, who permit more to be true than seems true to us (D 479) The language of love often and typically speaks of “forgetting oneself in love” and of our “dissolving” our self in the other person. Here, though, Nietzsche astutely observes, we are simply “smashing the mirror,” projecting ourselves “imaginatively upon a person whom we admire”; we then come to relish this new image of our self even though we call it by the name of the other person: “— and this entire process is supposed not to involve self-deceit, not to involve egoism, you amazing people!” (AOM 37). He writes further in this aphorism: I think that those who conceal some of themselves from themselves and those who conceal themselves completely from themselves are alike in that they commit a robbery from the treasury of knowledge: from which it follows what crime the saying, “Know thyself!” warns us against (AOM 37) When he is not being skeptical about the claims made for idealized love, Nietzsche makes it clear that he favors a mode of love where the two lovers do not become one but remain two; in these cases, a duality is respected and allowed to be cultivated and encouraged to flourish: Love and duality.- What then is love besides understanding and rejoicing in the fact that someone else lives, acts, and feels in a different and opposite way than we do? If love is to use joy to bridge over oppositions, it must not suspend or deny them.- Even love of self assumes an unalloyable duality (or multiplicity) within a single person as its precondition (AOM 75) For Nietzsche, sexual love “betrays itself as a lust for possession,” in which the lover desires “unconditional and sole possession” of the person they long for,

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self

including power over the soul and the body of the beloved. In such a condition of possessive love, in which the lover seeks to become “the dragon guarding his golden hoard as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all ‘conquerors’ and exploiters,” and to whom the rest of the world appears as something “indifferent, pale, and worthless,” the self is prepared to make any sacrifice so as to disturb any order and subordinate all other interests. Recognition of this, Nietzsche thinks, should make us reflect on whether the “wild avarice and injustice of sexual love” merits being glorified to the extent that it has been in all ages, with this love furnishing “the concept of love as the opposite of egoism while it actually may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism” (GS 14). Nietzsche thus holds to the view that human beings need to be discouraged from making important decisions while in a condition of romantic love, observing how too much of life is so easily squandered with the chanciness of marriages rendering any great advance of reason and humanity impossible (D 150). He is suspicious of philosophies of universal love and compassion and he values friendship over idealized romantic love. He notes that the best ­marriage — one that will endure — will be one based on friendship (HH 378). In Dawn 503, Nietzsche observes that while the ancients were profoundly concerned with friendship, we moderns offer to the world idealized sexual and romantic love. As he goes on to note, in antiquity the feeling of friendship was considered the highest feeling, “even higher than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient sage” (GS 61). Although Nietzsche is an enemy of Mitleid, friendship is one arena where, as Ruth Abbey has noted, there can be genuine knowledge and sympathy for another and the overcoming of a narrow-centered egoism. Nietzsche will generalize between higher and lower forms of friendship in his writings, but, as Abbey again notes, he is sensitive to particularity: “Nietzsche never adopts a wholly formulaic approach to this relationship, but recognizes that responsiveness to difference and particularity are among its central characteristics.”34 Although Nietzsche acknowledges that there can be poor or inadequate friendships — friendships lacking in trust, confidence, and genuine concern for the other — he sees it, at its best, as an effort at “fellow rejoicing” rather than “fellow suffering” (HH 499); it is the ability to “imagine the joy of others and rejoicing at it,” which he thinks is a very rare human quality (AOM 62). The ethical work Nietzsche wants each of us to carry out of ourselves does not have to be work undergone and performed in isolation; instead, “friendship can be a spur to greatness.”35 It’s not for Nietzsche so much a question of self-knowledge being a precondition for the realization of friendship and realistic friendships; it is rather that honest friends can become a prerequisite of self-knowledge:36 it is through the observations of others that a more incisive view of ourselves can be attained; friends, then, can pierce our ignorance about the self.37

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Notes 1 This chapter makes use of material that was first published in Keith AnsellPearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), and Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Enlightenment and Fanaticism: on the Middle Writings,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas (London: Routledge, 2018), 11–27. 2 Michael Ure. 2006. “The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche Contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32: 68–92. 3 Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature volume IV, trans. H. Van Laun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), 191. 4 Dennis C. Rasmussen, Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008), 18. 5 See Ure, “The Irony of Pity,” 82. 6 Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 3. 7 Neocleous, Critique of Security, 4. 8 Neocleous, Critique of Security, 7. 9 By “bio-political” we are referring to Michel Foucault’s insights into modern political realities. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 10 Simon Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110. 11 Michel Foucault, Ethics: The Essential Works 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997), 269. 12 Foucault, Ethics, 255. 13 Foucault, Ethics, 260. 14 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 87. 15 See Epicurus, ‘Letter to Pythocles’, in The Essential Epicurus, trans. Eugene O’ Connor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), 44–5. 16 See also Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 87, 223, 252. 17 Voula Tsouna, “Epicurean Therapeutic Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), 249–66. 18 Michael Ure. 2009. “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38: 60–8. 19 In an article on fanaticism and philosophy, John Passmore has written that “philosophical, as distinct from psychological or historical, works which

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20 21

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announce that they are directed against fanaticism are exceedingly rare” (John Passmore. 2003. “Fanaticism, Toleration, and Philosophy.” Journal of Political Philosophy 11(2), 211–22). One might reasonably contend that Nietzsche’s Dawn is one such work. Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), 120–01. Nietzsche does not come to this insight into Kant and fanaticism until the 1886 Preface to Dawn; he also criticises him for making a sacrifice to the “Moloch of abstraction” in The Anti-Christ (AC 11). In Dawn itself, he actually praises Kant for standing outside the modern movement of ethics with its emphasis on the sympathetic affects (D 132). The problem with Kant’s ethics is that it can only show duty to be always a burden and never how it can become habit and custom, and in this there is a “remnant of ascetic cruelty” (D 339). For insight see Anthony J. La Vopa, “The Philosopher and the Schwärmer: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant,” in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1998), 85–117. Nietzsche locates in the French Revolution’s “histrionicism,” a “bestial cruelty,” as well as a “sentimentality” and “self-intoxication,” and holds Rousseau responsible for being its intellectual inspiration and for setting the Enlightenment on “its fanatical [fanatische] head” and with “perfidious ­enthusiasm [Begeisterung]” (WS 221). However, as one commentator observes, Rousseau was terrified at the prospect of revolution — see Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 207. His intention was not to foment revolt and he was of the view that in our postlapsarian state insurrections could only intensify the enslavement they are so keen to remedy — Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 127. See Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57: “One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible to extend and correct its knowledge … or to make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment.” Compare Kant, Political Writings, 55: “A revolution may well put an end to an autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead new prejudices, like the ones replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.” See Passmore, “Fanaticism, Toleration, and Philosophy,” 212. For example, see David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 38–43. For Kant on “genuine enthusiasm” see the essay, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race constantly progressing?” in Kant, On History, trans. Robert E. Anchor, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 137–54.

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28 Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 135. As Toscano rightly points out, for Kant fanaticism is immanent to human rationality: “Vigilance against unreason is no longer simply a matter of proper political arrangements or social therapies, of establishing secularism or policing madness: it is intrinsic to reason’s own operations and capacities, requiring reason’s immanent, legitimate uses to be separated from its transcendent or illegitimate ones.” Toscano, Fanaticism, 121. 29 Kant, Political Writings, 181. 30 Kant, Political Writings, 188. 31 La Vopa, “The Philosopher and the Schwärmer,” 105–06, 108–09. 32 On experimentalism, see Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Enquiry: Nietzsche on Exoerience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. 33 A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Socratic and Stoic Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 3. 34 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 73. 35 Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, 81. See also Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, fourth edition), 365: “self-perfection is perhaps best sought not in seclusion, nor through exclusive preoccupation with oneself, but in community with others. This is exactly what Nietzsche himself proposed.” 36 Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, 77. 37 It may well be that aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking on friendship were inspired by Emerson’s essay on the topic. For Emerson the friend affords valuable opportunities for me to learn about myself and for me to become the one that I am: “A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblances of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature” — Emerson, Essential Writings (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 208. Emerson anticipates Nietzsche in wanting the friend-relation not to one based on complacency, as when he writes: “Let him be to thee forever a beautiful enemy, untameable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.”

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8 Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurus, which is most prominent in the earlier texts of his middle writings, is, on the face of it, curious: Why should Nietzsche be concerned with a philosopher of antiquity who was an egalitarian, offered what Cicero called a “plebeian” philosophy, and espoused a simple-minded hedonic theory of value?1 All of these positions seem to run counter to what we already know about Nietzsche’s thinking on the ethical. And yet, Nietzsche is full of praise for the figure of Epicurus in his early middle writings, particularly in the texts from what we now think of as Human, All Too Human II — Assorted Opinions and Maxims, and The Wanderer and His Shadow, which immediately precede his writing of Dawn. We will examine Nietzsche’s remarks on Epicurus in the earlier middle writings in what follows, in order to provide an interpretative framework through which to clarify Nietzsche’s thinking on death in Dawn. We will also consider some points of continuity between Nietzsche’s account of death in Dawn and in his later texts. Nietzsche was aware that Epicurean doctrine has been greatly maligned and often misunderstood in the history of thought.2 One commentator on Epicurus’ philosophy speaks of the “slanders and fallacies of a long and unfriendly tradition” and invites us to reflect on Epicurus as at one and the same time the most revered and most reviled of all founders of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world.3 Since the time of the negative assessment by Cicero and the early Church Fathers, “Epicureanism has been used as a smear word—– a rather general label indicating atheism, selfishness, and debauchery.”4 As Nietzsche observes in The Wanderer and His Shadow: Epicurus has been alive in all ages and lives now, unknown to those who have called and call themselves Epicureans, and enjoying no reputation among philosophers. He has, moreover, himself forgotten his own name: it was the heaviest burden he ever cast off (WS 227) Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Two aphorisms from Assorted Opinions and Maxims further attest to the importance Epicurus holds for Nietzsche at this point. In the first, Nietzsche confesses to having dwelled like Odysseus in the underworld and says that he will often be found there again (AOM 408). As a “sacrificer” who sacrifices in order to talk to the dead, Nietzsche states that there are four pairs of thinkers from whom he will accept judgment, and Epicurus and Montaigne make up the first pair he mentions (AOM 408). In the second aphorism, Epicurus, along with the Stoic Epictetus, is revered as a thinker in whom wisdom assumes bodily form (AOM 224). Epicurus has been celebrated for his teachings on mortality and the cultivation of modest pleasures. For Nietzsche in The Wanderer and His Shadow, the particular value of Epicurus’ teaching is that it can show us how to quieten our being and so help to temper human minds that are prone to neurosis. Nietzsche is also attracted to the Epicurean emphasis on the possible modesty of human existence. He admires Epicurus for cultivating a modest existence in two respects: first, in having “spiritual-emotional joyfulness [Freudigkeit] in place of frequent individual pleasures,” as well as “equilibrium of all movements and pleasure in this harmony in place of excitement and intoxication” (HH II; KSA 8, 41 [48]); and, second, in withdrawing from social ambition and living publicly in the marketplace by adopting instead the more private way of life found in the garden.5 Nietzsche points out that for Epicurus, a “tiny garden, figs, a bit of cheese, and three or four friends besides  —  this was luxuriance” (WS 192).6 In so doing, Nietzsche is indicating his appreciation for what one commentator has called the “refined asceticism” found in Epicurus, in which the enjoyment of even small pleasures and the disposal of a diverse and delicate range of sensations is given particular importance.7 Even sensations and experiences that seem insignificant can, Nietzsche recognizes, be importantly transformative over time, for individuals and for humanity more broadly.8 To further clarify Nietzsche’s Epicurean interests here, it is Epicurus the ethicist — that is, the philosopher who teaches humans a new way of life by remaining true to the earth, embracing the fact of human mortality, and denying any cosmic exceptionalism on the part of the human — and not Epicurus the atomist, upon whom Nietzsche focuses his attention in The Wanderer and His Shadow.9 There, Nietzsche describes Epicurus as “the soul-soother [SeelenBeschwichtiger] of later antiquity” who had the “wonderful insight” that to quieten our being it is not necessary to have resolved the ultimate and outermost theoretical questions (WS 7). To those who are tormented by the fear of the gods, one points out that, if the gods exist, they do not concern themselves with us and that it is unnecessary to engage in “fruitless disputation” over the ultimate question as to whether they exist or not. Furthermore, in response to the consideration of a hypothesis, half belonging to physics and half to ethics, and that may

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cast gloom over our spirits, it is wise to refrain from refuting the hypothesis and instead offer a rival hypothesis, even a multiplicity of hypotheses. To someone who wishes to offer consolation — for example, to the unfortunate, to ill-doers, to hypochondriacs, and so on — one can call to mind two pacifying formulae of Epicurus that are capable of being applied to many questions: “firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise” (WS 7). Nietzsche champions Epicurus as a figure who has sought to show mankind how it can conquer its fears of death. As James Warren has pointed out, in identifying the goal of a good life with the removal of mental and physical pain, Epicureans place “the eradication of the fears of death at the very heart of their ethical project.”10 As a “therapy of anguish” Epicureanism is a philosophy that aims to procure peace of mind, and an essential task in so doing is to liberate the mind from its irrational fear of death. It seeks to do this by showing that the soul does not survive the body and that death is not and cannot be an event within life. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche remarks that Epicurus is the inventor of what he calls “heroic-idyllic philosophizing” (WS 295): it is heroic because conquering the fear of death is involved and the human being has the potential to walk on the earth as a god, living a blessed life, and idyllic obviously because Epicurus philosophized, calmly and serenely, and away from the crowd, in a garden. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes of a “refined heroism,” “which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses … and goes silently through the world and out of the world” (HH 291). This is deeply Epicurean in inspiration: as noted, Epicurus taught that one should die as if one had never lived. As one commentator puts it, Epicurus “distilled the major theses of his ethical teaching into a simple fourfold remedy” known as the tetrapharmakos: (i) God should not concern us; (ii) death is not to be feared; (iii) what is good is easy to obtain; and (iv) what is bad is easily avoided.11 We can secure the goal or telos of a human life by incorporating these four views and altering our view of the world accordingly. And removing “the fear of death … is an essential step towards the goal.”12 For Epicureans it is vitally important we think about death correctly, or adequately, since this is an integral part of what it is to live a good life: “Our conceptions of the value of life and the nature of death are inseparable. In that case, we learn not to stop focusing on death, but to stop thinking about it in the wrong way.”13 Implicit in this conception is the idea that one can stop fearing death by thinking clearly and adequately. For Epicurus, the fear of death emanates from false opinions and false value judgments, and the therapeutic task of improvement is an intellectualist one. According to Pierre Hadot, overcoming our fear of death is also a “spiritual exercise.”14

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For Epicurus the study of nature should make human beings modest and selfsufficient, taking pride in the good that lies in themselves, not in their estate, and as opposed to the display of learning coveted by the rabble.15 Epicurus is an attractive figure for Nietzsche at this point in his thinking, because of the emphasis on a modest lifestyle, the attention given to the care of self, and also because he conceives philosophy not as a theoretical discourse but one that, first and foremost, is a kind of practical activity aimed at the attainment of a healthier, flourishing, life.16 One flourishes when one has freed the mind from fear and superstition. Epicurean thinking is a helpful resource for Nietzsche, because Nietzsche wants free spirits to take pleasure in human existence, and doing so involves them taking pleasure in themselves, in friendship, and in simple, modest living.17 As Hadot has pointed out, for an Epicurean sage the world is the product of chance, rather than of divine intervention; coming to this understanding brings with it pleasure and peace of mind, freeing the sage from an unreasonable fear of the gods, and making it possible to consider each moment as an unexpected miracle and to greet each moment of existence with immense gratitude.18 Such is a key feature of the project that we also find under way in Dawn. In this text, Nietzsche is keen to encourage human beings to cultivate a fresh attitude toward existence, as part of his critique of customary morality. His motivation for this is tied to his analysis of the current, and quite literally dread-filled existence, of humanity. As he remarks, our current attitude toward existence has been heavily conditioned and reinforced through our being punished for certain behaviors, to the point where we understand even natural causes and effects in terms of punishment and where we “experience existence itself as a punishment” (D 13). The new attitude that Nietzsche hopes to foster as an alternative to such a punitive view of existence will be characterized by humans accepting their mortality, attaining a new serenity about their dwelling on the earth, and conquering their unjustified fears of supernatural punishment (D 33).19 To arrive at this alternative, humans must learn to separate out their understanding of natural causes and effects from imagined supernatural ones (D 33) and to institute a positive understanding of the role that is played by chance, the “benevolent inspirer,” in the world and in human existence (D 36).20 Even our feelings must be treated with suspicion during this revisionary process, according to Nietzsche; this is because, as he contends, moral feelings are transmitted through family observation  —  through our early socialization, in other words — from parent to child (D 34). People consider it “a matter of decency” to provide a “justifying foundation” for their inclinations, and thus, he suggests, we can see a distinction between the history of moral feelings and the history of moral concepts: the former are powerful prior to an action, the latter are powerful following an action “in view of the compulsion to pronounce on it” (D 34). Moreover, Nietzsche claims that moral feelings are not our own original ones, but already contain judgments and valuations buried within them (D 35). Hence, on

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his account, the common notion of trusting one’s feelings is itself problematic: it amounts to “obeying your grandfather and your grandmother and their grandparents” rather than expressing our own values — which Nietzsche terms “the gods in us: our reason and our experience” (D 35). The inherited dimension of moral feelings and the punitive view of human existence to which Nietzsche draws our attention in aphorisms 33, 34, 35, and 36 of Dawn is particularly important to understanding why he discusses death at all in this text. These aphorisms suggest that our understanding of death is developed from what we might call an outsider’s perspective. We have (as far as we know) not already died ourselves; while we may have observed the deaths of family members and friends, or had experiences of serious illness or injury that have brought us close to death, and while we may have gained substantial understanding of the bodily and behavioral dimensions of dying from such experiences, we have still not experienced death itself directly from within our own subject perspectives. Our ­outsider’s perspective on death seems to present a particular challenge to our engagement in the project of overcoming our understanding of human existence as a punishment (D 34). The lack of first-person experience, combined with the framework of punishment, means that for us death as the end of existence may well seem to be the most fearsome and worst of all possible punishments; only salvation from death in the form of an afterlife (ideally one in which we are not also punished) appears to present a way to solve this problem. This fear of punishment is holding us back, and therefore, this particular fear must be tackled. We contend that Nietzsche uses Epicurean thinking as a strategy to do this work in Dawn, picking up the Epicurean doctrine on death and putting it to critical effect. For Nietzsche, our religions and customary moralities do not wed us to the earth as a site of dwelling and thinking; rather, they prompt us to consider ourselves “too good and too significant for the earth,” as if we were paying it only a passing visit (D 425). The “proud sufferer” has thus become in the course of human development the highest type of human being that is revered (D 425). Nietzsche clearly wishes to see much if not all of this overturned, in order to begin to counter our punishment-based fear of death. Several aphorisms in Dawn identify humanity’s dream of an immortal existence as misguided, and aim to wake us from the dream of immortality. Dawn 211 is an especially witty aphorism in which Nietzsche considers the impertinence of the immortality dream. Here, he notes that the actual existence of a single immortal human being would be enough to drive everyone else on earth into a “universal rampage of death and suicide out of being sick and tired of him!” (D 211). To this deflation of the standing of an immortal human, he adds: And you earth inhabitants with your mini-notions of a few thousand miniminutes of time want to be an eternal nuisance to eternal, universal existence! Is there anything more impertinent! (D 211)

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The wiser strategy is for us to take more seriously the creature that lives typically for seventy years, to give it back the actual time it has hitherto denied itself, and to value this. In so doing, Nietzsche suggests, we would replace the misguided dream of immortality with a new, yet healthy, sobriety toward the mortality that characterizes human existence. The relief and impetus toward a positive new future that mortality can provide is also made evident in Dawn 501. This aphorism, entitled “Mortal souls,” offers an important clarification of Nietzsche’s deployment of Epicurean thinking toward death in Dawn. In the aphorism, Nietzsche suggests that dealing with the yearning for immortality is a question of relearning both knowledge and the human, including recharacterizing human time as mortal time: With regard to knowledge [Erkenntniss] the most useful accomplishment is perhaps: that the belief in the immortality of the soul has been abandoned. Now humanity is allowed to wait; now it no longer needs to rush headlong into things and choke down half-examined ideas as formerly it was forced to do. For in those days the salvation of poor ”eternal souls” depended on the extent of their knowledge acquired during a short lifetime; they had to make a decision overnight  —  “knowledge” took on a dreadful importance” (D 501) Nietzsche argues that, if we were to abandon the dream of immortality, we would find ourselves in a new situation with regard to knowledge: as mortal souls, we could renew our courage for the passion of knowledge by making mistakes, by experimenting with ourselves, and by accepting things provisionally. Without the sanction of the old moralities and religions, he claims, individuals and entire generations “can now fix their eyes on tasks of a grandeur that would to earlier ages have seemed madness” (D 501). The shift away from dreams of immortality and toward lucid acceptance of mortality here is important, because it prepares the way for the new enlightenment, characterized by the passion of knowledge, that Nietzsche envisages. Nietzsche writes of this “passion of knowledge” in Dawn 429, nothing that, “Knowledge has been transformed into a passion in us that does not shrink from any sacrifice and, at bottom, fears nothing but its own extinction.” The remark on sacrifice is important because it connects Nietzsche’s thinking on knowing to his critical engagement with the presumptions of morality in Dawn: fear of supernatural retribution and fear of censure by the community for actions that might be perceived to bring such retribution stifle our thinking.21 Even if humanity were ultimately to be destroyed by this “passion of knowledge [Leidenschaft der Erkenntniss],”22 Nietzsche continues, this thought would “hold no sway over us” (D 429). Nietzsche, then, is encouraging us to explore the notion of giving up on the desire for an immortal existence and to embrace our mortality

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for the sake of the skeptical “freedom of feeling” that is necessary for both his epistemological and ethical projects in Dawn. Appealing to remarks in The Wanderer and His Shadow can help to further clarify the two main points on death that Nietzsche develops in these aphorisms in Dawn. The first point is for the certain prospect of death to introduce into every life a precious and sweet-smelling drop of levity, as opposed to an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes all life appear repulsive (WS 322). As Nietzsche suggests in Dawn, some of our thinking on the possibility of immortality is “shameless,” not merely impertinent (D 211). If we were to stop to think of ourselves not as potential immortals, but rather as “earth inhabitants” working in terms of “mininotions of a few thousand mini-minutes of time” who are proposing to be eternal “nuisances,” then we can and should laugh at the rather ridiculous aspect of ourselves that chases after immortality; and having laughed, we could then embrace our mortality with better humor (D 211). Involving humor in this way also has the practical effect of lessening our fear of death and dying. The second helpful point from The Wanderer and His Shadow concerns what Nietzsche calls the “wise regulation and disposal of death,” something that belongs to the morality of the future, a morality that at present is ungraspable and immoral sounding, but that can provide humanity with a new dawn — on which, he writes, “it must be an indescribable joy to gaze” (WS 185). As Nietzsche indicates in Dawn, part of this morality of the future is “good courage” both to make mistakes and experiment and to pursue tasks of “grandeur” that would previously, in the context of human existence understood in fundamentally punitive terms, have seemed “a toying with heaven and hell” of a terrifying kind because of the threat that such attitude and actions would pose to “one’s eternal salvation” (D 501). Nietzsche does, however, appreciate that there will be times when we need to think about death, including when we need to make preparation for our own deaths. This aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking continues into his later writings. Our task is to die proudly where one can no longer live proudly, as Nietzsche provocatively claims later on in Twilight of the Idols (TI IX 36). To understand how Nietzsche addresses our need to consider death within Dawn, we need first to understand that Nietzsche treats the goal of a life and the end of a life as being distinct from one another, in contrast to conceptions of existence that connect the end of life with the possibility of eternal salvation. In an important aphorism, Nietzsche works to supply reasons why the goal of a life, and the end of life  —  namely, death  —  are not the same (D 72). This distinction involves appeal to the toxic effects of Christianity and Christian morality.23 Nietzsche suggests that, by promoting the doctrine of the eternally damned and reinforcing fear, Christianity has discouraged the kind of experimentation that is necessary to advance the project of campaigning against customary morality (D 72). He contends that Christianity brought the “belief in subterranean terrors” under its protection, winning over

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what he calls “the ranks of the timorous” (D 72). It did so by first contrasting the prospect of “final, irrevocable death” with the prospect of immortality, and by then contrasting immortality for those who are redeemed with immortality in hell for sinners and the unredeemed (D 72). “The doctrine of the eternally damned” is therefore what, according to Nietzsche, became more powerful than the thought of final and irrevocable death among those humans for whom the “drive for life” was weaker (D 72). Nietzsche therefore suggests that science has had to recapture the thought of final and irrevocable death for us by “conjointly rejecting any other representation of death and any life beyond” (D 72).24 If the “after-death” no longer concerns us, Nietzsche remarks here, then this is “an unspeakable blessing,” which is “yet still too recent to be experienced far and wide” (D 72). Nietzsche’s mention of science in Dawn 72 also opens up the claim that acceptance of our mortality also brings with it a relief from a pressing problem concerning the pursuit of knowledge. Nietzsche expands further on this point when he claims that, in the past, “the salvation of poor ‘eternal souls’ depended on the extent of their knowledge during a short lifetime” (D 501). This meant, as Nietzsche points out, that “knowledge” not only took on a “dreadful importance” but often involved choking down knowledge that amounted to no more than halftruths at best (D 501). Hence the “unspeakable blessing” of no longer being so concerned with death and what follows it has epistemic as well as ethical and existential advantages. A key part of Nietzsche’s approach to death and dying in Dawn is to acknowledge the significance of power and power-relationships within social contexts to our understanding of death. While, as we have suggested, Nietzsche uses Epicureanism as a strategy in his thinking about death and dying in Dawn, this attention to power-relationships marks out his own innovation from the influence of Epicurean philosophy. Nietzsche writes that we should distinguish clearly between a person who wants to gain power, who “resorts to any means and eschews nothing that will nourish it,” and a person who already has power, and who has grown “very particular and refined in his taste: rarely does something satisfy him” (D 348). Nietzsche had claimed earlier in Dawn that the human feeling of power has already become the strongest human inclination (D 23). He links power to the concept of self-possession, which he describes as the privilege to punish, pardon, or be compassionate toward oneself as an integral part of attaining mastery over oneself (D 437). Following directly on from his drawing of a distinction between the behaviors that characterize crude power gain and those that characterize refined power expression (D 348), Nietzsche makes an important claim about death and morality, by which latter term he means customary morality (D 349).25 The effect that customary morality, influenced by Christian thinking, continues to have on us with regard to our attitude toward death is significant, according to Nietzsche:

Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death

Not all that important. — When one witnesses a death, a thought regularly arises, which one, out of a false sense of decency, immediately represses in oneself: that the act of dying is not as significant as the universal awe of it would have us believe, and that the dying person has probably lost more important things in life that he is now about to lose. Here is the end, ­certainly not the goal (D 349) Attending to two particular features of this aphorism is worthwhile, in order to understand Nietzsche’s thinking on death in Dawn.26 First, Nietzsche is pointing out a false sense of decency, which, he claims, is informing his (and our) ways of approaching death. Second, Nietzsche is hinting at an explanation for this “falseness” in the final remark, which distinguishes between the end of a life (the person’s death) and the goal of a life (the “spirit and virtue” of the life).27 If we separate out these two concepts, and stop viewing the end of life and the goal of life as being equally tied to eternal salvation, then space is created for a new appreciation and affirmation of human existence — as something to be celebrated, and as something in which joy is to be found, rather than as the highest form of punishment. As Rebecca Bamford has pointed out in previous work, there is a noteworthy continuation of, and elaboration on, this point by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which lends greater support to our reading of this aspect of Dawn.28 In his work on Nietzsche’s understanding of suicide and its ethical implications in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which incorporates detailed attention to Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1:21, entitled “On Free Death,” Paul S. Loeb has shown that Nietzsche does not accept that we need to think it is necessarily problematic or tragic for a person to die, or morally wrong for a person to seek to end their own life, if they do so according to the terms and values of the life that they have lived.29 At the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1:21), Nietzsche makes a similar claim to the distinction that he had developed between the end of life and the goal of life in Dawn 349; he writes, “Verily, Zarathustra had a goal, he threw his ball: now you friends and heirs of my goal, to you I throw the golden ball.” Nietzsche is very careful here to establish that re-working our characterization of death, and rethinking what virtue might mean as part of critical engagement with the presumptions of morality, needs to incorporate respect for humans as connected to the earth, as well as their being embodied: Free for death and free in death, a sacred Nay-sayer when it is no longer time for Yea: thus is his understanding of death and life. That your dying be no blasphemy against humans and earth, my friends: that is what I ask from the honey of your souls.

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In your dying shall your spirit and your virtue still glow, like a sunset around the earth: or else your dying will have turned out badly. Thus I would myself die, that you friends might love the earth more for my sake; and into earth will I turn again, that I might rest in her who bore me. (TSZ 1:21) As Loeb has shown in discussion of these remarks, understanding death as a consummation of life would, as Nietzsche suggests here, encourage us to liberate ourselves and to pursue our own virtues as an important constituent part of affirming our lives, and to sustain us in so doing.30 Zarathustra’s analysis of our liberation through adoption of this new account of death toward the end of this section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeals to the history and long-term effect of Christian values and to the possibility of our overcoming these, very similarly to Nietzsche’s earlier claims in Dawn.31 Moreover, as Gary Shapiro has pointed out, Nietzsche urges us to take seriously our connection to the earth as part of understanding death when he expresses horror at the tattooing of the earth through Christianity’s attitude to death. As Shapiro discusses, according to Nietzsche, Christianity has made a wretched place “of the earth, merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere, thereby branding the earth as the place ‘where the righteous are tortured to death’!” (D 77).32 The Christian religion, Nietzsche claims, has put its torments to use to an unprecedented and shocking degree. Christianity has succeeded in making of the earth a wretched place, merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere, thereby branding the earth as the place “where the righteous are tortured to death!” (D 78). It is Christianity that has turned the deathbed into a bed of torment. Against this, Nietzsche had already espoused the virtue of the rational or free death as early as The Wanderer and His Shadow: “Natural death,” he writes, “is the suicide of nature, that is to say the annihilation of the rational being by the irrational to which it is tied” (WS 185). Nietzsche does not leave this point on the celebration of mortality behind in his later writings; he later elaborates on it in Twilight of the Idols, where he remarks that it is for “love of life” that one should want death to be “different, free, conscious, no accident, no ambush” (TI IX 36). Here one elects to die “brightly and joyfully,” and, moreover, “among children and witnesses: so that a true leave-­taking is still possible, when the one who is taking his leave is still there” (TI IX 36). Here there can take place a true assessment of life’s achievements and aspirations, offering “a summation of life.” All this can take place, Nietzsche holds, “in contrast to the pitiful and ghastly comedy which Christianity has made of the hour of death” (TI IX 36). Nietzsche notes that while today we have a new sensibility with respect to torments of the body — for instance, we cry with indignation and rage whenever something inflicts torment on another’s body, be the other a person or an animal — we have not yet extended such a sensibility to torments of the soul.

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Nietzsche’s fundamental aim in writing about death, within the wider context of his project in Dawn, is to counter our socially conditioned yearning for immortality. He writes that we are in the process of renouncing our concern with the “after-death” (D 72), and that therefore the most useful accomplishment not only with regard to the advancement of knowledge but also with regard to human development resides in the giving up of the belief in the immortality of the soul (D 501). He does not present his case against immortality solely in terms of philosophical argument. As with almost all the topics he addresses, he confronts us with “opinions” on things (where opinion might best be understood in the sense of “mixed opinions and maxims”), and he uses wit, along with a range of affectgenerating language, to support those viewpoints and opinions and also to encourage us to consider some ways in which they may be beneficial to us, or at least to make more apparent some of the ways in which they might affect us. Here we might raise one concern with Nietzsche’s thinking on death as part of his campaign against customary morality in Dawn: understanding and affirming the logical reasoning behind Epicurus’ well-known claim from his letter to Menoeceus that “death is nothing to us” might overcome the problem of our excessively negative and fearful attitude toward death, far more simply and straightforwardly than Nietzsche seems to consider. Epicurus famously asserts that death is nothing to us: most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.33 We might consider, then, why Nietzsche does not simply present logical reasoning about death — especially given that, as we have discussed, he sees Epicurus as a strategic resource for his work in Dawn. Nietzsche understood that logical understanding alone is ultimately insufficient to address the problem of our negative and fearful attitude toward death. First, logic alone cannot entirely overturn the effect of inherited feelings that incorporate hidden value judgments (D 35). More broadly, it cannot easily overcome the fearinducing effects of customary and Christian morality. We might see logically that death is nothing to us, but this does not mean we can immediately and easily feel that death is nothing to us. This is especially the case given that, as Epicurus’ own discussion indicates, we cannot experience death from the position of our current lived subject perspective  —  we can’t easily counteract the feeling of fear with another experience of the concern at hand, because the relevant counteractive experience is not available to us. Hence, Nietzsche cannot try to reason us out of our fear using logic alone, and expect to succeed. Rather, he must address the

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problem by illustrating a possible way in which, by challenging our fear as inherited from our family and society, and by challenging any associated value judgments, we might ourselves come to shift our own feelings about, and understanding of, death — from the paradigm of punishment to a new, non-punitive, paradigm. In doing so, we would then be in a position to adopt a new, more affirmative, attitude toward human existence, which would, Nietzsche thinks, be healthier for us. Notice that a careful reading of Epicurus also supports Nietzsche’s approach and further attests to the significance of Epicureanism as a strategy informing Nietzsche’s thinking on death in Dawn. A little earlier in the same section of his letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus remarks: Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect.34 Epicurus here is concerned with a change in feelings  —  specifically with the quashing of fear — because such fear is unnecessary and unfounded, and because such fear “pains in the prospect” or causes us unnecessary psychophysical disquiet. In aiming to mitigate against such worry on our part, Epicurus is not proposing that we simply forget about death, but rather describing how we might pursue peace of mind as a part of pursuing a healthier and more flourishing life.35 To elaborate on this latter point: in the letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus seeks to identify what the study of philosophy can do for the health of the soul, working from the premise that, “pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”36 Epicurus stresses that he does not mean the pleasures of the profligate or of consumption; rather, the task is to become accustomed to simple, non-extravagant ways of living. The key goal for Epicurus is to liberate the body from pain and remove disturbances from the soul. Central to his counsel is the thought that we need to accustom ourselves to removing our longing for immortality because “there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life.”37 What appears to be the most frightening of bad things should be nothing to us, “since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.”38 The wise human being “neither rejects life nor fears death. For living does not offend him, nor does he believe not living to be something bad.”39 If, as Epicurus supposes, everything good and bad consists in sense-experience, then death is simply the absence of sense-experience. The goal

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of philosophical training from an Epicurean standpoint, then, is that freedom from disturbance and anxiety in which we reach a state of ataraxia. According to Martha Nussbaum, Epicurus’ teaching amounts to an inversion of Plato, on the basis that for Epicurus truth is in the body; this view is in stark contrast to that of Plato, for whom the body is the main source of delusion and bewitchment and for whom our task is to purify ourselves of our bodily attachments through proper mathematical and dialectical training.40 This contrast was well understood and appreciated by Nietzsche, which is why, in Dawn, Nietzsche is careful to highlight the dangers of teaching pure spirituality. This is evident, for example, where Nietzsche criticizes the doctrine of pure spirituality for producing “melancholy, anxious, oppressed souls” who blame all of their misery on the body (D 39). It is also demonstrated in his criticism of the Christian interpretation of the body, through which the “whole contingent nature of the machine” is turned, unnecessarily, into a moral and religious phenomenon (D 86). At this point a critical concern must be raised: Is Epicureanism indeed a philosophy of life-affirmation, or does it simply depict a universe of atoms and the void that is indifferent to life and in which freedom consists in little more than attaining a contemplative tranquility with respect to this fact? If the latter, then, Nietzsche’s appeal to and use of Epicurus would seem misguided and his efforts with regard to re-conceptualizing death in Dawn would thus seem less effective. D. H. Lawrence observes in an Epicurean moment that the universe has no why or wherefore but at all times simply is: indeed, we cannot even say what it is as it is “unto itself.”41 And James Porter raises the question that, if life has no intrinsic value for Epicurus, then does this mean that life is a matter of indifference for him?42 Porter suggests that, when viewed from a third-person point of view, that is, the cosmological one (of atoms and the void), life has no claim on us; rather, it discloses to us that “we are nothing more than physical entities, mere fortuitous combinations of matter which reduce to their elements upon disbanding.”43 From the viewpoint of nature, then, life is indifferent. The matter changes, Porter argues, when we view things from a first-person perspective on life, that is, the world of sensations, desires, and needs, or of nature in its human aspect. Here we find that life by definition is not indifferent but a meaningful source of value. As Porter puts it, the issue facing the Epicurean philosopher “is to decide just what this value is and where it lies.”44 The argument is that life is a source of human pleasure and thus of moral happiness, involving a strong attachment. Porter argues that once we connect pleasure to life it is possible to show that Epicurus has a philosophy of life, in addition to a philosophy of death, and that, in fact, it is this emphasis on life — and not death — that dominates his writings. Porter goes on to note that the “apparent pessimism” of the doctrine “clashes with the joy and even fascination with life” that are found in the Epicurean perception of the world.45 The task is to account for this disparity and the urgent question to focus

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on is that of what makes creatures cling to life and remain attached to it. We can rule out, he thinks, the fear of death since such a fear produces phantasms of life (such as ideas of the afterlife) and does not prolong or propagate life itself. He thinks that love of life, in the form of an attachment to life, precedes the fear of death, operating at a primitive level of psychic attachment, “and may even precede” what he takes to be the most primitive root fear present in the fear of death, that of the fear of the blank void or horror vacui. Furthermore, it cannot be supposed that what makes us cling to life is constant novelty since this seems to be a consequence of the love of life and not its cause. The Epicurean affirmation of life, the practice of its love, consists in attending to and enjoying the present feelings or sensations of life, that is, living in the here and now without desire and expectation and in a condition of gratitude. As Porter puts it, “To love life is to be in an unqualified state of affirmation about what lies most immediately to hand: it is the pleasure, the unalloyed passion, and even thrill, of living itself.”46 For Epicurus, then, a correct understanding of our mortality is one that should lead to the enjoyment of this mortal life. The Epicurean love of life “is a love of mortal life and not a love of life abstracted from death, much less of immortal life.”47 Moreover, this Epicurean love of life is not a longing for life, but “rather an immediate expression of what is dear about life, what is most life worthy in life,” and which makes it something fragile and easily ruptured.48 There are gaps, potentially significant ones, in Nietzsche’s appreciation of the Epicurean teaching with regard to death. For example, Nietzsche never subjects the effectiveness of Epicurus’ arguments to direct critical analysis, but simply assumes that the rediscovery of the certainty of death within modern science, along with the demise of the significance of the Christian conception of the afterlife, will prove sufficient to eliminate our knowledge of our inevitable deaths as a source of anguish to us. Moreover, the triumph of the Epicurean view that we are mortal and need not live in fear of an afterlife is not necessarily a triumph for the Epicurean view that we should not fear death: one can eliminate fear of the afterlife by exposing it as a myth, but this does not liberate us immediately or absolutely from the fear of extinction, or indeed from specific fears concerning modes of extinction. It is clear from much recent debate on physician assisted dying, for example, that many people have non-trivial fears about death and the process of dying that cannot easily be set aside. Our point here, however, is that an Epicurean approach to death and dying provides a helpful resource that Nietzsche was able to deploy in order to advance his critical project in Dawn. There are places in Dawn where Nietzsche clearly does appear to be offering new, post-religious consolations, such as the consolation we can gain from the recognition that as experimental free spirits, the sacrifices we make of our lives to knowledge may lead to a more enlightened humanity in the future: others may prosper where we have not been able to. The possibility of a new source of hope

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for the future of humanity is non-trivial. Nietzsche acknowledges this when he suggests a field maxim to soldiers of knowledge, who are grappling with the difficulty of pursuing the passion of knowledge through sacrifice: “‘We must take things more joyfully than they deserve; especially because for a long time we have taken them more seriously than they deserve (D 567). And, in light of Porter’s analysis, Nietzsche can plausibly be said to find in Epicurus, and to appeal successfully to, a victory over pessimism in which death becomes the last celebration of a life that is constantly embellished. This last of the Greek philosophers teaches the joy of living in the midst of a world in decay and where all moral doctrines preach suffering. As Richard Roos has claimed, Epicurus provides Nietzsche with the example that “a life filled with pain and renunciation prepares one to savour the little joys of the everyday better” and that upon relinquishing “Dionysian intoxication,” Nietzsche became “a student of this master of moderate pleasures and careful dosages.”49 In Epicurus, Nietzsche discovers what Roos calls an “irresistible power” and a rare strength of spirit, regarding which he quotes one of Nietzsche’s remarks from 1880: “I found strength in the very places one does not look for it, in simple, gentle and helpful men … powerful natures dominate, that is a necessity, even if those men do not move one finger. And they bury themselves, in their lifetime, in a pavilion in their garden” (KSA 9, 6 [206]).50 The garden is not a removal from the world, but rather a space in which human strength can be expressed in proper relation to the earth.51 Defending a dialectical reading in which he differentiates between Nietzsche qua author and Nietzsche qua free spirit, Matthew Meyer has recently pointed out that since Nietzsche “rejects post-Socratic philosophy as superficial for its eudaimonistic tendencies” in The Birth of Tragedy 15, and that he opposes his own “Dionysian pessimism” to Epicurus in The Gay Science 370, there is a case for skepticism toward Nietzsche’s commitment to Epicurus.52 To be clear: in our earlier discussion, we have not claimed that Nietzsche is fully an Epicurean in Dawn. Neither have we claimed that the way in which Nietzsche strategically deploys Epicurean philosophy in his analysis of death in Dawn always holds true to the same degree throughout his published and unpublished works, including the free-spirit writings taken together as a group. What we have claimed is that, for Nietzsche, Epicurus’ philosophy constitutes a resource that is of particular utility to furthering Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn. If humans could move past their socially conditioned fear of death as a form of punishment, understood as a fundamental expression of customary morality and its harmful effects on us, then, for Nietzsche, there is a greater likelihood of humans being able to loosen the grip that such fear has upon their minds, and to begin to free themselves from the customary moral thinking that inhibits them in unhealthy ways, and to become stronger and healthier.

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Notes 1 Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2014. “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing: Nietzsche and the Epicurean Tradition.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 74: 237–263. 2 Ansell-Pearson, “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing,” 238. 3 Norman Wentworth DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 3. 4 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 4. 5 The reference to HH II here is to a note from July 1879. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2012), 400. On Nietzsche’s admiration for Epicurus here, see Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 279. See also Keith AnsellPearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 41. 6 Young describes the asceticism advocated by Epicurus as a “eudaemonic asceticism,” which is clearly different to ascetic practices of world denial and self-denial in Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 279. See also Ansell-Pearson, “HeroicIdyllic Philosophizing,” 239. 7 Richard Roos, “Nietzsche et Épicure: l’idylle héroique,” in Lectures de Nietzsche, ed. Jean-François Balaudé and Patrick Wotling (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), 283–350. 8 On transformative experience in Nietzsche, see Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. 9 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 41–42. 10 James Warren, Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6. 11 Warren, Facing Death, 7. 12 Warren, Facing Death, 7. 13 Warren, Facing Death, 7. 14 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), 93–101. 15 Epicurus, “Vatican Sayings,” no. 45 in The Essential Epicurus, trans. Eugene O’Connor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), 81. 16 For further insight see Julian Young, Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 279–81. For insight into Nietzsche on happiness and in relation to both Aristotelian and Epicurean conceptions see Richard Bett. 2005. “Nietzsche, the Greeks, and Happiness (with special reference to Aristotle and Epicurus).” Philosophical Topics. 33(2): 45–70.

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17 See Martine Prange, Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 231. For Prange, one has to adopt an “Epicurean” lifestyle to become truly free. 18 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 252. 19 On Epicurus on fear and chance see Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 87, 223, 252. 20 Jessica N. Berry points out that knowledge of the natural world as a means to assuage the fear of death was a central theme in the work of Epicurus and other Greek atomists. See Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40. 21 Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76. 22 Translation modified: Smith renders this phrase as “passion for knowledge.” 23 See Ruth Abbey. 2015. “Swanton and Nietzsche on Self-Love.” Journal of Value Inquiry 49(3): 387–403. 24 As Morgan Rempel points out, Christianity delayed the victory of Epicureanism over beliefs concerning eternal punishment until the reinvigoration of science in modernity. See Morgan Rempel. 2012. “Daybreak 72: Nietzsche, Epicurus, and the after Death.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43(2): 342–354. 25 This argument is developed from earlier work on Nietzsche’s broader thinking on free death and assisted dying in Rebecca Bamford. 2015. “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue: The Case of Free Death.” Journal of Value Inquiry 49(3): 437–51. See also Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism,” 55–76. 26 See Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue.” 27 Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 446. 28 Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 440–43. 29 Paul S. Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption,” in Nietzsche on Time and History, ed. Manuel Dries (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 163–90; and Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 437–51. 30 Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption,” 163–90. See also Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. 31 Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption”; Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue.” 32 Gary Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 140. 33 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, in The Epicurus Reader, ed. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 28–31. Internet Classics Archive. Retrieved from 34 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus. 35 On Epicurus and ataraxia, see also Robert C. Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),

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36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

161–63. On descriptive accounts of tranquility in Greek theories of happiness vs. recipes for happiness, and the relevance of the former rather than the latter to Nietzsche’s philosophy, see also Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, 155. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 125. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 125. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 126. Ansell-Pearson. “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing,” 251. D. H. Lawrence, “The Reality of Peace,” in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 27. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2013. “Attachment to Life, Understanding Death: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence.” Parrhesia 18: 22–35. James L. Porter. 2003. “Epicurean Attachments: Life, Pleasure, Beauty, Friendship and Piety.” Cronache Ercolanesi 33: 205–27; Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life, Understanding Death.” Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 207; Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life, Understanding Death.” Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 207. Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 211; Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life, Understanding Death.” Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212. Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212. Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212. Roos “Nietzsche et Épicure,” 283–350. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life, Understanding Death”; and Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy. Roos, “Nietzsche et Épicure, 283–350; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 43. Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy. Prange, Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe. Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 46–7.

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9 Dawn and the Political Nietzsche’s wider political thinking has been widely recognized as therapeutic in orientation, as part of its connection to the history of psychology.1 Because this political aspect of Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy has on balance received less attention than its ethical aspect, Michael Ure has proposed that (i) Nietzsche develops a neo-Stoic political therapy in his middle writings, which opens up the possibility of individual freedom from emotional turmoil to all, and which (ii) changes to a “bio-political” approach that seeks only to heal higher types, informed by Nietzsche’s incorporation of evolutionary theory into his thought.2 As we have argued in previous chapters, Nietzsche places a strong emphasis on moving away from customary morality and toward development of a new horizon for the ethical in this text. In this chapter, we turn to a hitherto neglected topic: Nietzsche’s concern with the political in Dawn. We agree with Ure that, as with other texts of the middle writings, there is a politics in Dawn that is commensurate with Nietzsche’s broader therapeutic concerns in this text. However, where our approach differs from that of Ure is that it places more emphasis on Nietzsche’s attention to human species’ freedom as well as upon his attention to individual freedom. For this reason, in what follows, we shall examine Nietzsche’s engagement with the political in Dawn, and will ­consider how it raises some questions for the coherence of Nietzsche’s wider ­project of challenging morality in this text. We begin by explaining why Nietzsche is concerned with the effects of capital and industrial development upon Europeans. Next, we examine his remarks on migration as a therapeutic measure for the workers of Europe. Having done so, we consider some of the problematic claims involved in Nietzsche’s appeal to migration as a key part of his therapeutic approach, and discuss whether or not Nietzsche’s therapeutic politics in Dawn can be defended.

Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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As we have already seen, Nietzsche’s campaign against morality in Dawn is directly connected to his therapeutic interest in human health. In a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, written on July 18, 1880, Nietzsche describes his aphoristic exploration of connections between character, virtue, moral emotions, and health in Dawn as akin to digging in a moral mine, and assesses his progress in writing the book by drawing an analogy to the feeling of having found the main gallery of the mine.3 Nietzsche’s proposals concerning health-promoting interventions involve the physical as well as the psychological. For example, he claims that physical interventions such as changing the diet, or engaging in hard physical labor, can count as effective treatment for afflictions of the soul (D 269). He also suggests that we have a therapeutic task in calming “the invalid’s fantasy to the extent that he at least does not suffer more, as heretofore, from thinking about his disease than from the disease itself” (D 54). The therapeutic process that Nietzsche envisages primarily aims to help us imagine new possible virtues  —  a new ­ethics — for the future (D 551). Nietzsche is clear that each individual is expected to take responsibility for their own health; as he suggests, acting as our own physicians is likely to lead to improved health outcomes, as we are less likely to disregard our own prescriptions than those of some other individual (D 322). One of his key concerns in the text is that, as yet, we lack the physicians who can undertake that part of “the art and science of healing” that we currently call “practical morality” (D 202). This practical morality involves, as we will see, some political work. One of these consequences concerns the role of capital in society. In a set of aphorisms engaging directly with the health of society, and hence with the health of the individuals within it, Nietzsche points out the general and surprising absence of engagement with the connection between morality and health. He notes that cultivators of health are absent from churches, and that instruction in bodily health is absent from curriculums (D 202). Moreover, he claims, nobody has yet had the courage “to measure the health of a society and of the individual according to how many parasites they can support,” and no leader of a state has yet cultivated the land in an appropriately generous and mild spirit (D 202). Nietzsche elaborates on these points in the next aphorism through the example of bad diet, scorning the diet of “much too much” and “ever such variety” that governs the dining choices of scholars and bankers alike (D 203). Excess, he claims, leads to “pepper or contradiction and world-weariness” (D 203). His distaste at excess and its negative health effects is used to develop a political point; the purpose of such dinners, he remarks, is to represent capital: — They represent! What, in heaven’s name? Class? — No, money: one no longer belongs to a class! One is an “individual”! But money is power, fame, dignity, preeminence, influence; money, depending on how much of it one has, determines these days the extent of one’s moral presumption! No one wants to hide it under a bushel and no one would want to place it on the

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table; accordingly, money must have a representative that one can place on the table: see our dinners. (D 203) Nietzsche’s point in this aphorism is not simply that the individual and social effects of excessive eating, such as “dissoluteness” and “overexcitability” are themselves negative; rather, he is claiming that social attitudes toward, and social norms concerned with, capital are symptomatic of deeper problems. One of these problems is the increasingly strong social drive toward the rapid accumulation of wealth in the form of money; as Nigel Dodd has shown, this drive is coupled with unhealthy forms of mental agitation such as impatience.4 Work, in as far as it is tied to human psychological health, can be counted as another problem that stems from money, as Jeffrey T. Nealon has pointed out.5 In an assessment of “eulogizers” of work, Nietzsche contends that the “glorification” of work involves the same “ulterior motive” as “praise of impersonal actions that serve the public good”  —  namely, “the fear of everything individual” (D 173). Work, or “hard industriousness from dawn to dusk,” he argues, is the “best policeman,” because it keeps “everyone within bounds” and hence hinders “the development of reason, desire, and the craving for independence” (D 173). In so doing, he claims, work uses up “an extraordinary amount of nervous energy” that would otherwise be expended on reflection and on different forms of feeling, and thereby creates even greater security for society (D 173). Nietzsche further develops this point by noting that, “security is currently worshipped as the supreme divinity” (D 173). People fear that the “worker” has “turned dangerous” and that society is “teeming with ‘dangerous individuals’,” behind whom lurk “the danger of dangers  —  the individual” (D 173). A state that is focused on consistently increasing its security seeks control of any factor that might undermine its security. What is really so fearful about “the individual” is their potential for commanding, and thereby for undermining the security of the state, instead of merely following the social norms or customs that structure the “morality of customs [Sittlichkeit der Sitte]” (D 9). Nietzsche’s broader campaign against morality grounds a more specific, political, concern about severe and unhealthy constraint of individuals and of independent thought by means of obedience to customary morality. “Every individual action,” he notes, “every individual way of thinking provokes horror” — not simply because it is deviant, but because its deviance can only be perceived as a threat (D 9). From the perspective of customary morality, “any form of originality has acquired an evil conscience” (D 9). Nietzsche further develops this point connecting customary moral society with its political expression as follows: Moral fashion of a commercial society. — Behind the fundamental principle of the contemporary moral fashion: “moral actions are actions generated by sympathy for others,” I see the work of a collective drive toward timidity

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masquerading behind an intellectual front: this drive desires utmost, uppermost, and foremost that life be rid of all the dangers it once held and that each and every person should help towards this end with all one’s might: therefore only actions aimed at the common security and at society’s sense of security may be accorded the rating “good”! (D 174) Nietzsche’s identification of the “tyranny of timidity” operant within society carries some concerning political consequences. First, it means that people allow themselves to be commanded and told what the “uppermost moral law” is, instead of determining this for themselves through the exercise of independent judgment (D 174). And second, with all of the “rough and sharp edges” of life grated off through the constant push towards ever greater security for the state, it means that humans living within this state are in a process of becoming as deindividualized and as dehumanized as mere “grains of sand” (D 174). The source of the problem that Nietzsche has with money is therefore, according to Nealon, that capital “continues and completes that special kind of violence that characterizes the triumph of the weak”  —  in short, according to him, Nietzsche treats the capitalist as a new ascetic priest.6 For Nealon, money is a mode of power, in the same way that God for the ascetic priest is a mode of power.7 Nietzsche contends that money substitutes for truth, and that the same fanaticism that previously drove truth-seeking now drives people to the increasing, and increasingly rapid, acquisition of wealth (D 204). In both cases, what is at work is a function of power: if three-quarters of the upper class gives itself over to sanctioned fraud and has the stock exchange and all forms of speculation on its conscience: what is driving them? Not actual want, they are not doing any too poorly, perhaps they even eat and drink without worrying — but they are pressed and pressured day and night by a terrible and fearful impatience at the sluggish rate at which money is accumulating and by an equally terrible and fearful craving for, and love of, accumulated money. In this impatience and this love, however, there appears once again that fanaticism of the appetite for power that formerly was ignited by the conviction of being in possession of the truth and that went by so many beautiful names that, as a result, one could, with a good conscience, dare to be inhuman (to burn Jews, heretics, and good books and to eradicate highly developed cultures like those of Peru and Mexico). (D 204) Nietzsche argues, in light of this point on power, that while the means of power might have changed, what careful observation of capitalism shows is that “the same volcano still burns” — in short, that the psychological need for “that which

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now imparts to the highest degree the feeling of power and a good conscience” must be met (D 204). In the past, this need was met through gods, or truth. Today, it is met through money. We should also note that Nietzsche does not back away from presenting a corollary of his position on money and its psychological effects, which further supports the critique that he makes of capital in Dawn. Nietzsche points out that an aristocratic type of person has an advantage over other types, because “noble descent,” he claims, “allows one to bear poverty better” (D 200). This claim is problematic when considered from the perspective of customary morality; someone might well point out that the poor have little choice about the conditions in which they live, and little power through which to effect change, and that therefore it is unfair to simply affirm the advantage of the aristocrat. Before dismissing Nietzsche’s remark as classist, we should ask why Nietzsche might craft this aphorism, and what purpose it might serve in the wider critical development of his challenge to morality in this text. He is not claiming that poverty is intrinsically good, or that we should prefer aristocrats for their own sake. His point is rather to illustrate that particular psychological types — those who are more prepared to legislate and self-legislate — are better placed to flourish than those who are less prepared to do so. As he had already pointed out, the impulse toward compassion, or toward praise of serving the public good (D 173), actually hinders the goal of developing humans who are better prepared to command rather than to obey. Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality takes it that the capacity to command and legislate new values is key to a possible ethics that takes humanity beyond customs and mores. And as he will later remark in Beyond Good and Evil, the kind of “leveller” thinking that values “compassion for all suffering” and “the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’” for their own sake, is the thinking of a “narrow, trapped, enchained sort of spirit,” and that we might do better to affirm the precarious conditions required for struggle (BGE 44).8 Nietzsche’s concern with the inhibition of individuality and specifically, individual thoughts and feelings, extends to the condition of factory workers in the nineteenth century. He is clear that increasing mechanization and corporatization of production are of a part with his wider concerns about money and power. As he points out: — Poor, cheerful, and independent! — These things can exist side by side; poor, cheerful, and a slave! — these things can also exist — and I can think of no better news for the workers in today’s factory servitude: provided they don’t feel that it’s altogether a disgrace to be used and used up, in the way this happens, as a wheel in the machine and, as it were, a stopgap to plug the hole in human inventiveness! Phooey! (D 206)

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According to Nietzsche, these workers are being disempowered and ­dehumanized by industrial labor, because their role within the systems that order such labor turns the workers into mere human resources. It does not provide the factory workers with the chance to behave as individual human beings  —  and nor does it allow them to accumulate wealth quickly, as he had already claimed is the case for the upper class (D 204). Nietzsche proposes that the workers should leave, in order to free themselves and Europe from their “impersonal enslavement” through “factory servitude” (D 206). He suggests that the workers of Europe “ought in future to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility” and that they should travel to other lands in order to remedy their disempowerment and dehumanization. To this end, he claims that “everyone ought to think to oneself”: Better to emigrate, to seek in wild and fresh parts of the world to become master, and above all master of myself; to keep moving from place to place as long as any sign of slavery whatsoever still beckons to me (D 206) According to Nietzsche, the emigrant who seeks to become such a master should be prepared to engage in “adventure and war” — and should also be prepared to die, “if worst should come to worst” (D 206). As Rebecca Bamford has pointed out in a previous essay, one set of Nietzsche’s remarks in this part of Dawn 206 advocate emigration in pursuit of liberation, but do not directly claim that the workers should engage in colonial oppression in order to secure their own liberation; however, his remarks in the next part of the aphorism do entail a commitment to colonialism.9 In this second set of remarks, Nietzsche writes that within the “European beehive” ought to be precipitated “an age of grand swarming-out such has never been seen before” (D 206). Through what he calls “freedom of domicile in the grand style,” Nietzsche suggests, people will protest: against the machine, against capital, and against the choice currently threatening them of having to become either slave of the state or slave of a party of insurrection. May Europe be relieved of a quarter of its inhabitants! This will bring relief to it and to them! (D 206) The question of how relief will be brought is answered for Nietzsche by “faraway lands” in which “through the ventures of swarming migrations of colonists” we will come “to recognize just how much common sense and fairness” — along with just how much “healthy distrust” — “mother Europe has incorporated into her sons” (D 206). With her sons close to her, mother Europe, for Nietzsche, is a “stupefied old crone” and her sons are at risk of becoming as “grumpy, irritable, and addicted to pleasure” as she is (D 206). Away from mother Europe, however, Nietzsche claims

Dawn and the Political

that “Europe’s virtues will be journeying along with these workers,” with the ­health-promoting effect that “dangerous ill humor and criminal tendencies” close to the homeland will, when the sons of Europe move further afield, “take on a wild beautiful naturalness and will be called heroism” (D 206). In this aphorism, Nietzsche uses the disparaging image of the worker bee to underscore his criticisms of the mindlessness of factory work and of the harmful effect that it has upon workers, and also to establish a contrasting image to that of the worker bee. He deploys a Romantic image of the migrant as free and healthy: the migrant, compared with the worker bee, is free to explore wild and beautiful new lands, and to become healthy as a result of their freedom. Taken together with Nietzsche’s earlier claim on mastery, the contrasting images of worker bee and free migrant suggest encouragement on Nietzsche’s part for the workers to become colonial masters in “wild and fresh” parts of the world. Thus far, we have shown that, in his remarks on capital and on industrialization, Nietzsche is providing an analysis of how power functions in a state that is grounded in customary morality. As we have seen, in this state, money drives the state to promote control through creating fear and restlessness and generating a perceived need for ever greater security, including through the perceived security of work. The mastery to which workers who become migrants could aspire is “above all” mastery of themselves (and hence to the self-legislative capacity to which we referred earlier). And as the workers are far more disadvantaged than the upper class, it might seem logical to treat worker migration as a reasonable way of responding to the problematic effects of money as a replacement unit of value for truth in the customary moral state. Yet there are some concerns to note in Nietzsche’s remarks. His appeal to migration as a therapeutic measure does incorporate some racist views, along with his commitment to foreign territory acquisition, which displays a form of colonizing logic. As his complaints about wealth acquisition are directly tied to his concerns with customary morality and its negative health effects, this poses a potential problem of coherence for his account. His call for migration leaves the wild and fresh lands of which he speaks vulnerable to the effects of the capitalism that he is critiquing (and any inhabitants of these lands vulnerable to becoming human resources, just like the deindividualized and dehumanized European workers). Moreover, what we have thus far discussed of Nietzsche’s thinking on the political in Dawn has not fully explained how capitalism and its negative effects can be resisted in the context of the upper class, who, as we saw, are driven to satisfy a “terrible and fearful craving” through wealth acquisition (D 204). We will consider each of these concerns in turn in what follows. Let us first consider Nietzsche’s remarks on race. In a discussion of belief in intoxication, Nietzsche perpetuates the “firewater myth”: namely, the stereotype

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of the Native American who is more prone than Europeans to dependence on alcohol (D 50). Specifically, Nietzsche says that “[j]ust as the natives these days are quickly corrupted and destroyed by ‘firewater,’ so too has humanity as a whole been corrupted by the spiritual firewaters of intoxicating feelings and by those who keep alive the craving for such feelings” (D 50). We should note that Nietzsche uses the firewater myth uncritically in advancing his point in this aphorism, and that in so doing he perpetuates a racist stereotype about Native American people.10 Moreover, Nietzsche’s position in this aphorism incorporates an unchallenged opposition between the European and the “native” or indigenous person, in which the European is awarded a position of greater power than the indigenous person purely by virtue of being European (D 50). Nietzsche’s main concern in Dawn 50 is to direct our critical attention to psychological issues such as lack of control of nervous energy and hatred of the environment, the age, and the entire world, by people who live for “sublime and enraptured” moments in the belief that these moments are their “true self.” And he also aims to better promote the health of such individuals, as part of his wider concern with the negative political effects of customary morality. Not unlike Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, Nietzsche worries that intoxication, whether moral, religious, or spiritual, is harmful to health on individual and social levels (D 50). He contends that such intoxication is not health promoting, on the basis that it encourages intoxicated people to remain bound to a narrow and misguided view of the world and to their place within it, which makes it exceptionally difficult for them to pursue any other, more health-promoting, version of human species development. Yet in perpetuating the racist stereotype of the Native American as unusually vulnerable to “firewater” in Dawn 50, Nietzsche fails to properly include all facets of humanity, and thus unnecessarily limits the transformative scope of his argument against customary morality in Dawn. A similar problem of racism is also present in Dawn 206. Discussing the introduction of “Chinese” values into Europe, Nietzsche remarks that the Chinese “would bring along the ways of thinking and living that are suitable for diligent ants” and that “they could in general assist in transfusing into the blood of a restless and worn out Europe a little Asian calm and contemplation — and what is surely needed most — Asian perseverance” (D 206). As with Dawn 50, this claim also perpetuates a racist stereotype. Specifically, Nietzsche fallaciously uses a particular trait or set of traits to characterize a particular nationality or a racial/ethnic identity. Moreover, Nietzsche presents the Chinese as a people, and “Asian characteristics” as a set of resources to be used for the benefit of Europe. Again, this presents a problem for the coherence of Nietzsche’s wider concerns with challenging morality in Dawn. His claim about Chinese people in Dawn 206 does not fit well with his earlier point that the process of mechanization problematically deindividualizes the workers of Europe, by turning them into nothing more

Dawn and the Political

than a set of human resources. As Nietzsche had remarked, mechanization is a problem for European people, because it means that each European worker is treated as nothing more than a “wheel in the machine” and is not treated as a person.11 Yet in Dawn 206, Nietzsche makes the same move himself, by racially stereotyping the workers and emphasizing their value as deindividualized, racially stereotyped, resources, rather than recognizing them as individuals and as members of a species that has development potential. If one of the key problems with customary morality is that it functions by constraining human individuality and species development potential, then this kind of limiting commitment to racial stereotyping mars Nietzsche’s wider project in Dawn, and undermines its internal coherence. Another example of Nietzsche’s racism occurs in Dawn 272. In this aphorism, Nietzsche discusses racial purity and argues in defense of racial purification. He claims that while there is “in all likelihood no such thing as pure races” today, there are “races that have become pure and this only with extreme rarity” (D 272). More common, he suggests, are mixed races in which, “one inevitably finds, along with disharmony in physical forms (when, for example, eyes and mouth do not go together) disharmony in customs and value judgements. (Livingstone heard someone remark: ‘God created white and black people, the devil, however, created half-breeds.’)” (D 272). He continues the line of argument in this aphorism by claiming that mixed races are problematic because they are simultaneously always mixed cultures and mixed moralities, and are usually “more evil, cruel and restless” (D 272). In contrast, Nietzsche claims that a purer race is marked by how its strength is restricted to “particular selected functions” instead of having to deal with too many things that contradict one another. Nietzsche claims of pure races that: races that have become purified have always grown stronger and more beautiful as well. — The Greeks provide us with the model of a race and a culture that has become pure: and it is to be hoped one day Europe will also succeed in becoming a pure race and culture. (D 272) And he points out that if purification is successful, as he thinks it was on the Greek model, then the advantage it affords is that the strength previously expended on battling disharmonious qualities “is now at the disposal of the entire organism” (D 272). Sustained scholarly analysis of Nietzsche’s thinking on race has been developed in recent years, which we think it is important to attend to here.12 In her analysis of Nietzsche’s remarks on the Jews across many of his texts, Jacqueline Scott argues that while Nietzsche did not present a comprehensive theory of race, his remarks on race nonetheless help us to understand his thinking on cultures, including cultural evolution, cultural health, and treatments for unhealthy cultures.13 We follow Scott

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in the specific case of Dawn, and treat Nietzsche’s remarks as directly relevant to understanding his therapeutic engagement with the political as well as with the ­ethical. But this approach also raises a question: If Nietzsche does not have a comprehensive theory of race, as Scott points out, then treating Nietzsche’s remarks here as racist might meet with some resistance. For example, if Nietzsche’s remarks on race are best understood as referring to race in a historical or spiritual sense, rather than to race as biologically essentialist, then it might appear difficult to sustain the claim that Nietzsche’s commitments are racist.14 In response to this potential worry, Robert Bernasconi has recently pointed out that racism — understood as prejudice against a group of people on the basis of a set of characteristics attributed to them — is ­possible when race is treated as grounded in the historical or the spiritual, just as it is possible when race is treated as grounded in the biological.15 Nietzsche’s remarks in aphorisms 50, 206, and 272 of Dawn do involve such prejudice, as we have already discussed. It is also possible that someone might object that if Nietzsche’s remarks on race, however unfortunate and unjust, do not substantially detract from his wider philosophical project in Dawn, then pointing out that his remarks are racist may appear to add little to our understanding of Dawn  —  beyond, that is, the point that Nietzsche was a child of a racially unjust time, namely the late nineteenth century, and that this unfortunate fact emerges in his writing. However, the potential objection that acknowledging race adds little to our assessment of the text of Dawn would overlook an important point that is identified in Scott’s analysis, as we mentioned earlier: namely, that Nietzsche’s remarks on race can illuminate his thinking on cultures. In the specific case of Dawn, note that Nietzsche’s remarks form part of his approach to developing human beings who might again, as the Greeks did, self-legislate and create values. The problem for Nietzsche’s position in Dawn is that it is unnecessary to exclude particular types of human from therapeutic measures aimed at renewing human capacities, on the ground of racial prejudice. Now admittedly, Nietzsche does not claim that every individual or every group can benefit equally from such therapy. But the point is that the process of racial purification he discusses in Dawn 272 doesn’t require exclusion of particular races per se, whether we treat race as grounded in biology, in history, or in spirituality. In such a process, organisms could plausibly come to organize themselves in a more efficient way through compromising on and streamlining how they expend energy, including through assessing the values according to which they operate, without needing to exclude particular groups on racial grounds. And again, in light of Scott’s point that Nietzsche’s remarks on race are indicative of his thinking on culture but are not reducible to any one specific definition of race, it is unclear that Nietzsche can plausibly equate race with culture as he seems to do in Dawn 272.16 Nietzsche is concerned with racial breeding and with human development, but these two need not be treated as identical.

Dawn and the Political

With these remarks on race in mind, let us turn back to Nietzsche’s exhortation of the workers to engage in colonial mastery, and his assumption that the “wild and fresh” lands to where he directs European workers in their new guise as migrants are all empty (D 206). The remarks in this aphorism strike an especially odd note given that in Dawn 204, Nietzsche had, as already mentioned, treated the eradication of “highly developed cultures like those of Peru and Mexico” as a problem, while developing his critical engagement with capital. The question is whether Nietzsche really does endorse and advocate colonialism, and if so, whether this advocacy would be compatible with his wider therapeutic concerns. There has certainly been some resistance to characterizing Nietzsche’s remarks on migration in Dawn as colonialist.17 Adrian Del Caro has pointed out that we might see Nietzsche’s concerns here in terms of his broader view that if our immediate environment is not conducive to our health, we should try to free ourselves from it.18 Robert C. Holub acknowledges the colonizing logic present in Dawn 206, yet claims that, since Nietzsche’s main concern in this aphorism is with “the health of Europe,” the aphorism may be treated as fundamentally health promoting, rather than as essentially colonialist.19 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche lauds Napoleon’s reclamation of Renaissance ideas, and specifically the fact that, in the wake of Napoleon, “the man has again become master over the businessman and the philistine — and perhaps even over ‘woman’ who has been pampered by Christianity and the enthusiastic spirit of the eighteenth century, and even more by ‘modern ideas’” (GS 362). Holub draws on this aphorism to further distinguish between Nietzsche’s affinity to colonialism pre- and post-1884. As he claims, Nietzsche hoped that Napoleon’s Renaissance “granite” would master the national movement in Germany, and in so doing, render the possibility of a unified Europe accessible; hence, for him, only Nietzsche’s post-1884 writings, and in particular Nietzsche’s concept of the “Good European,” are tied to the logic of colonization and European domination.20 He treats the later Nietzsche, rather than the Nietzsche of the middle writings, including Dawn, as a colonialist; like Del Caro, Holub suggests that Nietzsche’s core concern in the middle writings, including in Dawn and in aphorism 206 in particular, is on health rather than colonization.21 Yet it is unclear that this is the right approach, even given Nietzsche’s concern for wrongful destruction of the higher cultures of Peru and Mexico (D 204); there is evidence of colonialist thinking in Dawn 206.22 Nietzsche’s thinking on colonialism has been acknowledged by several scholars. For example, Joseph Pugliese has drawn attention to the utility of Nietzsche’s philosophy for identifying and articulating the logic of colonial practices; he argues that Nietzsche’s comment on the way in which reason effaces its unreasonable origins in Dawn can be used to reveal that what the colonizer calls bringing “reason” to the colonized counts as violence.23 Robert Bernasconi argues that, in general, Nietzsche did defend colonialism, and points out that, in an 1887 notebook entry,

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Nietzsche specifically defended the use of cruelty to maintain European mastery over colonized Africans.24 Ofelia Schutte has examined Nietzsche’s relevance to projects of liberation, including liberation from colonialism and its continuing legacy worldwide, and liberation from androcentrism.25 Schutte claims that “Nietzsche can be very helpful, but Nietzsche alone is clearly insufficient to take us where we want to go politically,” yet also admits that given her own “experiences with Latin American and feminist liberation movements” she “would not want to take the journey without Nietzsche,” because of the risk that a liberation movement may become a “self-righteous moral and political force,” to counter which she recommends “a strong dose of Nietzschean undermining of absolutes.”26 The specific political consequences of Schutte’s reading of Nietzschean psychology include that, even when a person or a specific group is threatened by others, there is no obligation to think in binary oppositional hierarchical terms (where one part of the binary is treated as superior and the other part treated as inferior, as happens, for example, in the case of “Christians vs. infidels”).27 Schutte thinks that by rejecting binary oppositional thinking in the political context, as Nietzsche does, we can respond to danger pragmatically, without involving an ideology of danger as inextricably linked to evil, and of liberation from danger as linked to good.28 The advantages include supporting resistance to manipulation of the masses through rhetoric (as religious and political leaders often use binary oppositions such as “good vs. evil” to consolidate power and manipulate the masses), and also continuing refusal to allow our thinking in political matters to become automatic or unreflective. How, then, can we reconcile Nietzsche’s colonialist call for migration in Dawn 206, and his criticism of the elimination of the cultures of Mexico and Peru in Dawn 204? Schutte refers us to a distinction between monumental and critical history that Nietzsche draws in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, which is helpful in this regard. She explains the distinction as follows: the monumental historian identifies high moments or deeds in history that it is worth emulating in order to provide energy for future-oriented action, while the critical historian “annihilates” aspects of the past by examining them and condemning them, in order to overturn the past and make continuing life possible.29 She argues that colonialism is an excellent example of a case where monumental history cannot guide our political reasoning, because even though extension of a superpower’s dominion over other cultures and peoples may count as monumental, it cannot count as ethically justified.30 On the other hand, Nietzsche’s concept of critical history is helpful in guiding our reasoning: the critical historian has the necessary theoretical framework to enable adoption of a stance that authorizes the dissolution of the legacy of colonial oppression, and hence such critical history may provide the ethical justification that is missing from the monumental account.31 The dissonance between monumental and critical history may be resolved,

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Schutte thinks, by appeal to Nietzsche’s perspectival epistemology, which as Rebecca Bamford has pointed out, is commensurate with Schutte’s acknowledgment of Nietzsche’s pragmatism — even while Schutte herself does not spell out this dimension of her reading of Nietzsche.32 Rather than asking whether or not Nietzsche affirms colonialism, then, the question at hand should therefore really be more aptly phrased as follows: Why does Nietzsche use colonizing logic in any particular aphoristic context, and does such use undermine his wider project in Dawn? This might allow us to identify that Nietzsche does affirm colonialism in Dawn 206 yet does not affirm it or its effects in Dawn 204, without treating these two positions as problematically inconsistent for his wider project in Dawn, and while still acknowledging that his colonialist remarks in Dawn 206 are indefensible. Following Schutte’s view that binary thinking runs counter to Nietzsche’s philosophical-therapeutic aims, the point is that we need not apply a value hierarchy and a denial of Nietzsche’s position in each aphorism or text on a binary basis (e.g. “Nietzsche’s remark is colonialist and colonialism is bad; Nietzsche’s remark is anti-colonialist and anti-colonialism is good”). Instead, we can pay close critical attention to the reasons behind each claim in context. At the same time, this means that we do not ignore the substantive problems with any affirmation of colonialism on Nietzsche’s part, and the etiology of such claims is clearly accounted for. Worker migration — abandonment of the unhealthy factory environment in favor of a healthier and more natural environment  —  responds to the immediate problem of worker dehumanization, yet the colonizing logic producing the advocacy for workers to move to wild and fresh lands is not itself defensible.33 With this in mind, let us return to Nietzsche’s final remark on the Chinese in Dawn 206. It is not entirely clear to whom the “we” in this remark of his refers: it could refer to the workers, to the decadent denizens of old Europe, or to the progenitors of a revitalized version of Europe. Earlier in the aphorism, Nietzsche had explicitly criticized “socialist pied pipers” who, he claims, want to “inflame” the workers with “mad hopes” to be “prepared and nothing more” (D 206). This preceding remark suggests that the most plausible explanation for the ambiguous “we” at the end of the aphorism is that it refers to the progenitors of a new and healthy Europe. Such progenitors, Nietzsche contends elsewhere, will be characterized by their independent exercise of the power of the lawgiver (D 187). Yet Nietzsche also admits that many people will struggle to achieve genuine self-rule; some people — even and especially including philosophers — may ultimately falter in their efforts to achieve self-rule, and may seek instead to become institutions (D 542).34 As he writes, we risk becoming the “fools of piety and the damagers of knowledge” if we do not draw out the “physiological phenomenon behind moral judgments and moral presumptions,” which are of course core targets of Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn (D 542). The physiological phenomenon

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behind the illusion of an old man undergoing “great moral regeneration and rebirth” is, Nietzsche contends, not wisdom but “fatigue,” indicated by the development of a fervent belief in “one’s own genius” and in their having “an exceptional position and exceptional rights,” including the right to “decree more than to prove” — beliefs to which the “great” and the “semigreat” become most susceptible on “life’s borderline” (D 542). Nietzsche’s concern with critical engagement being turned into an institution that may not itself be critiqued through physiological phenomena reflects some concerns that Schutte raises with dualistic, binary, frameworks for critical assessment resulting in our thinking being placed on automatic pilot.35 As Rebecca Bamford points out in previous work, self-rule in the case of institutionalization of thinkers is not a matter of establishing a rule and then abandoning the effort of thinking through problems in favor of following this rule dogmatically.36 Rather, self-rule is the act of continuously questioning and reflecting as part of making decisions. If this process of questioning and reflecting were to cease, as Nietzsche points out, the thinker would set up a boundary marker in their own thinking (D 542). If the workers of Europe did engage in the great “swarming-out” that Nietzsche advocates in Dawn 206, then no matter the extent to which Nietzsche might romanticize the image of the heroic colonist, each worker would still have some independent thinking to do — and, importantly, would not be absolved from all responsibility for colonial occupation, particularly if the “wild and fresh” lands to which Nietzsche encourages them to migrate did turn out to be occupied. This is not to set aside concerns about Nietzsche’s racialized thinking. Note in this regard that Nietzsche’s claim concerning “Asian perseverance” in the aphorism treats perseverance as a virtue (D 206). Nietzsche develops a specific way of thinking about virtue that is based on a distinction between the ethical — which for Nietzsche is tied to health — and the customarily moral. Of this distinction, he would later write in The Anti-Christ: What is good? — All that heightens the feeling of power, power itself in man. What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases — that a resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virtù, virtue free of moralic acid). The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak — Christianity (AC 2)

Dawn and the Political

Virtue, in this passage from The Anti-Christ, is free from “moralic acid,” and is directly tied to the promotion of health. It is this same type of virtue — virtù — that Nietzsche is pointing us toward in his remark on the potential value of perseverance to Europe in Dawn 206.37 As he claims, behaviors that detract from the increasing collectivization and determination of the workers through capitalizing forces in old Europe are virtues in the “wild and fresh” lands — and these virtues are free from what he calls “moralic acid” in The Anti-Christ 2. Calm, contemplation, and perseverance are virtues likely to be involved in therapeutic self-analysis and self-cultivation. Acknowledging this point does not ignore the discriminatory dimension of this appeal to “Asian” virtue.38 As Bamford discusses in her earlier essay on Dawn 206, the focus on virtue recalls Nietzsche’s claim that his proposal to the workers has the capacity to invigorate Europe by returning a “pure air” to it.39 This might be read as a suggestion that those remaining in Europe will enter into some form of solidarity with the workers. However, this reading would involve a problematic misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s discussion in the text. Nietzsche rejects socialism as a solution to the problem of capital because he thinks socialism still involves a loss of inner value — or indeed of the possibility of such value being nurtured in and for the future — at the expense of outwardly valuable things such as money and prestige. He writes to the European workers that, if they accepted socialism, they would always have the “fife of the socialist pied pipers” ringing in their ears, because the socialists want to inflame them with “mad hopes” and to enjoin them “to be prepared and nothing more”: prepared at any moment such that you are waiting and waiting for something external, but otherwise you continue to live in every way the same as you had otherwise lived before — until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and finally the day of the bestia triumphans rises in all its glory (D 206) Nietzsche’s key point here is that socialism cannot provide the therapy that the sickening European workers require, because socialism is, in the end, just one more way in which the deindividualization and dehumanization of humanity — the turning of humanity into a set of resources — is being expressed in contemporary culture. For Nietzsche, socialism is not an exception to the ongoing prioritization of capital at the expense of inner, personal, value. As such, it cannot meaningfully provide the therapy that the workers require. The centrality of health and therapy to Nietzsche’s account suggests another reason as to why the workers of Europe, if conceived of as a class, would be justified in declaring their situation or condition to be impossible, even if their migration did end up involving a problematic colonial enterprise. Notice that the

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workers are tacitly encouraged, through the process of industrialization and associated relevant language use, to think of themselves as cogs in a corporate machine. Nietzsche writes to the workers that this is a disgrace, on the basis that it involves a set of false needs as well as false consciousness on their part: To let oneself be talked into believing that through a heightening of this impersonality within the mechanical workings of a new society the disgrace of slavery could be turned into a virtue! Phooey! To set a price for oneself whereby one becomes no longer a person but merely a cog! Are you co-conspirators in the current folly sweeping over nations, which, above all else, want to produce as much as possible and to be as rich as possible? Your concern ought to hold out to them a counter-reckoning: what vast sums of genuine inner value are being squandered on such a superficial external goal! (D 206) As we have seen, this process of deindividualization runs directly counter to Nietzsche’s promotion of an ethics of self-analysis and self-cultivation in pursuit of health, because it fails to sustain free or independent thinking. Given this concern, it seems more reasonable to accept that the purity in question in Dawn 206 concerns the capacity for what, in light of evidence from The AntiChrist 2 as discussed by Marinus Schoeman, we may call virtuous and healthy — moralic-acid-free — self-rule.40 Nietzsche makes it explicit that for Europeans, in the absence of the workers who heed his call to emigrate, his proposal will necessarily engage them in unlearning some of the needs that they have developed as an effect of the process of industrialization. This involves self-rule on the part of the Europeans left behind: once our workerdependent needs are no longer so easy to satisfy we will be prompted to pursue critical self-reflection and self-cultivation. In the subsequent aphorism, Nietzsche makes some remarks that help to further support this reading, when he claims that if a German “is forced to stand on his own and throw off his torpor, if it is no longer possible for him to disappear like a numeral within a sum … then he will discover his powers:” then he will turn dangerous, evil, profound, daring, and he brings to the light of day the hoard of sleeping energy he carries inside himself in which no one else (not even he himself) believed (D 207) Later in the same aphorism, Nietzsche reinforces his point by claiming that, if a German is placed in a position that facilitates him to achieve great things, he can and will achieve them — but for the moment, Germans remain in “the embryonic state of something higher” (D 207).41

Dawn and the Political

Nietzsche proposes that European workers engage in an act of colonization in order to accrue psychological health benefits for themselves. Their colonizing act would also benefit the rest of Europe. There is a tension between the needs of (possible) indigenous peoples and the workers-as-colonizers in the aphorism. If we accept this tension then another one arises, this time between the ethical and political aspects of the aphorism, and within the wider context of the therapeutic dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophy. On this reading, Nietzsche’s work in Dawn 206 has liberatory value — but only to Europeans. Their liberation is at the expense of an act of colonial imagination, and at the expense of (possible) indigenous peoples dwelling in the lands that he proposes that European workers should colonize. However, if we were to move beyond the specific context of this aphorism, then it remains possible that the therapeutic dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophy might have liberatory value beyond the European context, depending on how effectively the concept of resistance may draw upon — and inform — Nietzsche’s concept of pessimistic strength, and whether Nietzsche’s discussions of pessimistic strength can go beyond monumental history to critical history.42 If we prioritize the therapeutic context of Nietzsche’s remarks, then we can add a further point: neither his remarks on the upper class in Dawn 204 nor his remarks on the workers in Dawn 206 require a wider commitment to any particular political ideology. Nietzsche’s prescriptions must address the craving of the upper class that is currently satisfied by rapid wealth acquisition, and the systematic controlling, deindividualizing, and dehumanizing effects of capitalism on a lower class. It is possible that Nietzsche’s slow cure — the gradual turn toward a possible new ethics seeking healthier humanity — might also carry some beneficial political therapy for the customary moral state and capitalism’s role within it; however, it is not clear that this benefit will be felt soon, or indeed at all. The future under capital seems bleak, unless the campaign against morality in Dawn succeeds. To be consistent with his therapeutic aims, Nietzsche need only commit himself to advocacy of an ethics and politics of self-analysis and self-cultivation that he thinks may result in improved health. Having said that, Nietzsche’s ethical and political commitments may of course result in a range of consequences, some of which are not desirable or defensible. Nietzsche himself does not need to advocate any specific political action or ideology in order to make a therapy based on individual self-analysis available. Moreover, any of the resulting political consequences remain subject to the same pragmatic-therapeutic evaluation as prior decisions, whether in the case of upper class wealth acquisition or migration of the lower class. Nietzsche does not need to be worried about the issue of workers’ rights, because pursuit of this issue would take it for granted that workers do indeed exist as a deindividuated class comprising numerous individuals engaged to complete work tasks of a specific type. Pursuit of workers’ rights does nothing in particular to address the health of each individual or of the species as a whole,

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and does nothing to promote each individual’s, or humanity’s, therapeutic engagement in self-analysis and self-cultivation. Accordingly, instead of defending socialism, or encouraging some other form of collective action within the industrial context, Nietzsche suggests a form of political therapy that fits with his broader, and pressing, challenge to morality in Dawn.

Notes 1 See e.g. Robert Holub, “The Birth of Psychoanalysis from the Spirit of Enmity: Nietzsche, Rée, and Psychology in the Nineteenth Century,” in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 14970; and Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). 2 Ure, “Nietzsche’s Political Therapy,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 161–78. 3 KSB 6, 28–30. See Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul C. Bishop (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House], 2012), 140. 4 Nigel Dodd. 2012. “Nietzsche’s Money.” Journal of Classical Sociology. 13(1): 47–68. 5 Jeffrey T. Nealon. 2000. “Nietzsche’s Money!” JACOnline: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, & Politics 20(4): 825–37. 6 Nealon, “Nietzsche’s Money!” 828. 7 Nealon, “Nietzsche’s Money!” 828. 8 For a more developed discussion of this point on precarity and struggle, see Rebecca Bamford, “Nietzschean Perspectives on Multiculturalism,” in Philosophies of Multiculturalism, ed. Luís Cordeiro Rodrigues and Marko Simendic (London: Routledge, 2017), 43–61. 9 Rebecca Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination in Dawn §206,” in Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2014), 59–76. 10 Today, the firewater myth is commonly recognized as a racist stereotype. See Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.” 11 As Holub argues, if we substitute the word “Germany” for the word “Europe” in this part of the aphorism, the sentiments that Nietzsche is expressing mirror almost perfectly some of the sentiments expressed by his brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster, in his writings on his proposed colony — Nueva Germania — in Paraguay, and on nineteenth-century German colonial ambitions more generally. Holub, “The Birth of Psychoanalysis,” 42.

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12 For essays on an important range of issues concerning the broad topic of Nietzsche and race, see Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin, Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 13 Jacqueline Scott, “On the Use and Abuse of Race in Philosophy,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 60–61. 14 For instance, C. Heike Schotten has argued that while there are biological essentialist passages about race in Nietzsche’s wider writings, such as BGE 264 and GM I 5, Nietzsche tends more consistently to “define politico-cultural groupings in terms of shared social and historical experiences” including the “shared experience of the imposition of power,” and that as such, for him, a Volk is neither inscribed in nature nor in bodies, but is rather developed over time. See C. Heike Schotten, Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 53. See also Robert Bernasconi, “Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Racialized Breeding,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 54–64. 15 Bernasconi, “Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Racialized Breeding,” 55. 16 Scott, “On the Use and Abuse of Race in Philosophy.” See also Bernasconi, “Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Racialized Breeding”; and Bamford, “Nietzschean Perspectives on Multiculturalism.” 17 Bamford discussed these concerns in “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.” 18 Del Caro, Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric on Earth (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2004), 112. 19 Robert C. Holub, “Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germania, Good Europeanism, and Great Politics,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 42. Holub also points out that Dawn was — excepting its 1886 Preface — composed in Genoa between November 1880 and May 1881, prior to the beginning of the German colonial empire in 1884. He also claims that Nietzsche’s writings after 1884 suggest that his thoughts were focused less on health promotion and more on “European subjugation of the world” (Holub, “Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination,” 42). For information on the order of Dawn’s composition, see also William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77. 20 Holub, “Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination,” 44. 21 Holub directs our attention to Nietzsche’s consistent affirmation for his brotherin-law Bernhard Förster’s colonial ambitions in the available correspondence. Holub, “Nietzsche’s Colonialist Imagination,” 38, 49.

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22 Bamford, “Nietzschean Perspectives on Multiculturalism.” 23 See e.g. Joseph Pugliese. 1996. “Rationalized Violence and Legal Colonialism: Nietzsche ‘contra’ Nietzsche.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8(2): 277–93. 24 Bernasconi, “Nietzsche as a Philosopher of Racialized Breeding,” 60. 25 Schutte’s work has been described as a project of intellectual translation of Latin American philosophy into the Northern philosophical context. See Linda Martín Alcoff. 2004. “Schutte’s Nietzschean Postcolonial Politics.” Hypatia 19(3): 144–56. 26 Ofelia Schutte. 2004. “Response to Alcoff, Ferguson, and Bergoffen.” Hypatia 19(3): 182–202. 27 Schutte, “Response,” 185. 28 Schutte, “Response,” 185. 29 Ofelia Schutte. 2000. “Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects.” Philosophy Today 44(SPEP Supplement): 8–17. 30 Schutte, “Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects,” 12f. 31 Schutte, “Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects,” 13; Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.” 32 Schutte, “Response”; Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.” 33 Schutte, “Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects,” 13. 34 Keith Ansell-Pearson has drawn attention to this feature of the text in order to defend Nietzsche’s intellectual integrity. Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2009. “On the Sublime in Dawn.” The Agonist 2/1(March): 5–30. 35 Schutte, “Response,” 184. 36 Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination,” 69–70. 37 Marinus Schoeman. 2007. “Generosity as a Central Virtue in Nietzsche’s Ethics.” South African Journal of Philosophy 26(1): 17–30, draws attention to Nietzsche’s frequent use of the concept of virtù, which is referred to as “moraline-free” as it is to be distinguished from the type of virtue promoted by herd mentality. 38 Walter Kaufmann reads this claim concerning the addition of Chinese blood into Europe as proposing an advantage. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 293. See Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.” 39 Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination,” 71. 40 Schoeman, “Generosity as a Central Virtue in Nietzsche’s Ethics.” 41 Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination,” 72. 42 See Bamford, “The Liberatory Limits of Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination.”

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10 Aeronauts of the Spirit Dawn and Beyond As we have discussed in previous chapters, Nietzsche’s main project in Dawn is to mount a campaign against customary morality and its consequences. By means of abandoning customary morality and the climate of fear that it fosters among us, and by means of slow, open-ended, experimentation, Nietzsche encourages humanity to explore themselves and the world. In so doing, he hopes that humanity will develop a free and creative form of ethical imagination that is capable of developing fresh virtues (moral and epistemic), and that humanity can thereby pursue self-cultivation, both at individual and at species levels. Yet we have not yet given much consideration to the future orientation of humanity that Nietzsche’s discussion in this text opens up, nor to Nietzsche’s stance in relation to any possible philosophy addressing the future in Dawn. Neither have we yet examined how Nietzsche’s thinking on futurity in Dawn might carry through into his later writings. These are substantive omissions. As Matthew Meyer has pointed out, there is deep ongoing scholarly debate concerning whether or not Nietzsche considers himself to be a philosopher of the future, in Dawn or in other texts, and what such a philosophy might involve.1 And, as Paul S. Loeb has suggested, Nietzsche is exceptional among philosophers in his concern with the future; for instance, Loeb suggests that Nietzsche invented the character of Zarathustra because he was “preoccupied with the future” since “he wants to influence it.”2 We therefore aim to address our neglect of these issues in this final chapter. Nietzsche, as we know, divided the main task of his works between 1878 and 1888 into two main parts: first, an “affirmative” or “Yes-saying part,” and second, a “No-saying” part (EH “Books” BGE).3 We suggest here that key aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking about one possible kind of philosophy of the future are discernible in Dawn.4 First, we discuss how the final aphorism, 575, of Dawn, presents a positive vision of humanity as future-oriented and self-cultivating  —  a vision that might become possible, if humanity were to develop the capacity to free itself from the Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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constraints of customary morality. Nietzsche’s vision in this important aphorism, and the means by which he thinks this vision can be pursued is supported, we suggest, by preceding aphorisms in book five of the text. Second, we explore how Nietzsche’s vision of humanity as future-oriented and self-creating is taken up once again by him in his later, No-saying, writings. The fifth and final book of Dawn opens with an aphorism that carries the epigraph, “In the great silence” (D 423). This epigraph situates humanity within the natural world: as Nietzsche goes on to suggest, Nature, in contrast to the noise of the city, is silent.5 In the remainder of the aphorism, Nietzsche unpacks the complexity of humanity’s situation as conscious, yet embodied, and embedded within the natural world. In order to do so, Nietzsche develops a quasi-Cartesian meditation, the details of which we will unfold shortly, which prompts us to grapple with the problem that even while humanity is part of the natural world, our dependence on language and on reason — and on the differing perspectives that language and reason enable — makes our situation difficult for us to grasp fully. This difficulty, in turn, affects our comprehension of the future and of our relationship to it. The aphorism begins with the narrator of the aphorism leaving a city, and going down to the sea. We learn that by the sea “we can forget the city,” because here “all is silent!” According to the narrator, neither the sea, the sky, nor the “crags and ribbons of rock descending into the sea” can speak; faced with their collective silence, a “prodigious muteness” that is “beautiful and terrifying” suddenly overcomes us and “swells the heart.” Of their heart, which as a part of the body is hence more obviously and immediately a part of the natural world, the narrator tells us, “it’s growing stiller yet and my heart swells again: it is startled by a new truth; it too cannot speak.” The narrator contrasts the silence of Nature with the clamor of humanity, which is represented by the faint tolling of the Angelus bell in the city “at the crossroads of day and night” at which the meditation takes place. Similarly, the narrator juxtaposes the “mute beauty” and “bound tongue” of Nature with the speech and thought of humans. Initially, the narrator projects hypocrisy and malice onto Nature’s silence, which seems to them to “ridicule” humanity. But as they are drawn further into Nature’s silence during the course of this meditation, the narrator acknowledges that, “I am not ashamed to be the ridicule of such powers.” In acknowledging this, the narrator begins to reintegrate their individuality into the perspective of silent Nature. Their heart (rather than their reason) gradually adopts the perspective of Nature’s silence; as the narrator remarks, “it joins in the ridicule whenever a mouth cries out into this beauty” and “begins to enjoy its own sweet malice of silence.” Yet even so, the wisdom of Nature remains less accessible to the narrator’s consciousness, as they explain: “I come to hate speech, even thought: don’t I hear behind every word the laughter of error, wishful thinking, delusion? Mustn’t I ridicule my own compassion? Ridicule my ridicule?”

Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond

The meditation in Dawn 423 concludes in two ways. First, the narrator’s rational self complains at Nature — the sea and the evening — for being “terrible ­mentors” and for teaching “the human being to cease being human!” Second, the narrator poses a series of questions about what it is that Nature is trying to teach humanity, speaking of humanity’s relationship to Nature. As the narrator puts it, “Ought he to sacrifice himself to you? Ought he to become as you are now, pale, shimmering, mute, prodigious, reposing above oneself? Sublimely above oneself?” These questions are not answered, but are left for readers to engage with for themselves. Throughout the meditation in Dawn 423, Nietzsche contrasts the perspectives of the natural with those of reason and of embodied rationality, and he also plays with the tensions between them by means of language. Similarly, Nietzsche plays with perspectives: while we might tend to assume on an initial reading of the aphorism that it is Nietzsche who is speaking to us, it is not at all clear that this assumption is a safe one. If we consider the perspectives that Nietzsche identifies in Dawn 423, we notice that they include the perspectives of reason, the heart, and Nature (here comprised of sea, sky, and rocks) — in other words, both sub-self and extra-self-perspectives  —  as well as including the perspectives of an “I,” a “he,” and a “we.” The “I” is not necessarily being used to refer to Nietzsche himself, and neither is the “he.” And, when Nietzsche refers to “we” in the aphorism, there is a question about to whom he is referring, or from what perspective the first-person perspective in the aphorism is speaking: initially we might assume it refers to some specific group of humans here, now, but it also potentially refers to a possible future version of humanity. When a series of “Or?” questions are directed to silent Nature at the end of the aphorism, the first-person perspective incorporated within the aphorism emerges as clearly distinct from the narrator who commences the aphorism: the questions are whether “he” should sacrifice himself to Nature, and whether “he” should become as “you,” Nature, are now. It is important to notice that the questions in this part of the aphorism are not whether “I” should do so — such a distinct “I” having identified itself as willing to be an object of ridicule for Nature earlier in the aphorism. What seem to be obvious distinctions, or set of dualisms, at the start of the aphorism — city/beach, civilization/nature, reason/heart, self/other, land/sea, earth/sky, past/future  — are slowly undermined by the shifting perspectives that the reader moves through during their engagement with the text of the aphorism, and through this engagement, a possible future subject position is opened up. The reader finds their sense of subject positions to be already in a state of flux. This of course mirrors the drive psychological account of the subject that Nietzsche develops in Dawn, and which we discussed in greater depth in Chapter 6. The use of a meditation format in this aphorism is, we suggest, deliberate on Nietzsche’s part, and significant to the project of understanding the means by which Nietzsche’s vision of a future-oriented humanity might become possible.

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To understand this point, a comparison between Nietzsche’s approach to writing this meditation and that of Descartes is instructive. As Isabelle Wienand has pointed out, there is precedent for drawing attention to a similar pattern between Nietzsche’s writing and that of Descartes, particularly with respect to subjectivity, and particularly to subject positions or perspectives.6 According to Wienand, a sense of the self remains important to Nietzsche for the purpose of writing philosophy from the first-person perspective: as she puts it, the ich may involve “different and even contradicting identities” yet it nonetheless “exists as a constitutive instance” for Nietzsche.7 In comparing Nietzsche’s use of the first-person perspective in the 1886 Prefaces to Dawn and The Gay Science with that of Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, Wienand contends that, like Descartes, Nietzsche does not simply present autobiographical details; instead, he adapts an account of his solitary life to the emergence of his writing in these texts, as he discusses his own psychological process of tunneling into “the foundations” (D Preface 2).8 By repackaging some of his life events according to the key thematic concerns of texts such as Dawn in his Preface to the text, Wienand suggests, Nietzsche is drawing our attention to one way in which the act of engaging in philosophy can be transformative of human existence.9 While Wienand’s concern is with the Preface to Dawn rather than with Dawn 423, we think that her analysis of how Nietzsche uses the constitutive ich or self in his writing to facilitate transformative experience through philosophical engagement can be applied to Dawn 423, and that doing so illuminates how this aphorism is constructed to function as a transformative meditation. The aphorism is transformative in two senses. In the first sense of transformation, the switching of subject positions from one constituted subject position to another in the aphorism encourages the reader to adopt distinct subject positions, first a present subject position, and second, a future possible subject position. In the second sense of transformation, this readerly activity of subject position shifting has a real effect on readers as a group, not merely as individuals: through the act of shifting readerly perspectives from present to future, the conceptual possibility of an alternative future subject position is translated into actual being, which we incorporate into ourselves and thereby transform ourselves.10 Here, a concern might be raised that transformative experience cannot depend on something so small and seemingly impactless as the experience of reading an aphorism. We might tend to envisage transformative experiences as profound and significant and indeed many transformative experiences are so, such as a bereavement or a serious, life-changing injury. In recent work, L. A. Paul has defined a transformative experience as an experience that teaches you something new that you could not have known before having the experience, and that changes your “subjective value for what it is like to be you, and changes your core preference about what matters.”11 Reading an aphorism seems unlikely to result in similar

Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond

transformation. People are very unlikely to read philosophical writing that they do not understand or follow fully, and the dizzying shifts in perspective in Dawn 423 may simply bewilder many readers. Moreover, even if the aphorism is followed carefully and is grasped by its readers, it is not clear how this would result in any meaningful transformation, either of an individual or of a large group or species. However, we think it is important to notice that, in Dawn, Nietzsche allows that “small doses” of experience, including those that may seem almost insignificant to us, may ultimately prove to be importantly transformative over time (D 534).12 As Nietzsche puts it, “If you want to effect the most profound transformation ­possible, then administer the means in the smallest doses, but unremittingly and over long periods of time!” He warns against exchanging our values “head over heels” and instead supports a slower, more careful, and patient approach to transformation (D 534). He elaborates on the same theme in his discussion of learning in which he contrasts Michelangelo’s view of himself as naturally talented ­compared with Raphael, from Michelangelo’s perspective, as a mere learner; Nietzsche cautions us against the “envy and pride” that characterizes the “pedant” Michelangelo here, and points out that talent is a name for “an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, absorption” and that the person who learns “imparts talent to himself” (D 540). And in an earlier aphorism, he had prescribed “[s]low cures” for chronic diseases of the soul that arise not through “onetime gross offenses,” but “through countless unnoticed little acts of negligence” (D 462). As he suggests, the cure for such chronic diseases “cannot come about by any means other than to resolve, once again, on countless little offsetting exercises and to cultivate unwittingly different habits” (D 462). All these cures are slow and persnickety; also, anyone who wants to heal his soul should reflect on changing the smallest of his habits. Many a person has a cold, malicious word to say for his environment ten times a day and doesn’t think anything of it, especially because, after a few years, he has created for himself a law of habit that from now on compels him ten times every day to sour his environment. But he can also accustom himself to doing it a kindness ten times! (D 462) Hence, for Nietzsche, transformation is explicitly a slow process that is dependent on small actions rather than on gross ones. In constructing Dawn 423 as a meditation, Nietzsche creates an important space for his readers, in which diverse possible futures for humanity literally open up and are brought, potentially at least, into accessible being in and through us. Reading the meditation, readers have an opportunity to decide on our responses for ourselves. For instance, readers are presented with the opportunity to grapple with whether or not they would be willing to sacrifice themselves to Nature, with how they might respond

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to Nature’s silence, and with the question of whether they find the city or the sea more engaging and attractive. Nietzsche leaves it to readers to determine whether or not they should become as the sea and the evening — which the narrator describes as those “terrible mentors”  —  are now: “sublimely above oneself?” (D 423). The questions with which the aphorism concludes enable readers to decide whether or not they should inquire toward a possible future in which the “human being” has been taught by the sea and the evening “to cease being human!” (D 423). What would it mean, we might wonder, to cease being human? What would we then become? Independent readerly engagement with such philosophical questions can be — and critically, whether we like it or not or intend it or not — transformative. According to Nietzsche, transformative experiences based on small cures and slow doses are ones that lay down in us “a new nature” (D 534).13 Nietzschean transformative experiences need not be sudden or enormous: they are doses to which we can more easily become accustomed (D 534). As Ruth Abbey has pointed out, drawing on Nietzsche’s thinking in Dawn 553, quotidian minutiae — small daily acts of self-care — are undervalued, despite their importance to caring effectively for the self.14 In the aphorism upon which Abbey draws to develop this claim, Nietzsche questions whether his philosophy is anything more than a translation of a “constant concentrated drive” for particular things  —  specifically, “mild sunshine, cleaner and fresher air, southerly vegetation, sea air, quick repasts of meat, eggs, and fruit, hot water to drink, daylong silent wanderings, little speaking, infrequent and careful reading, solitary living, pure, simple, and almost soldierly habits” — into “reason” (D 553). While Abbey’s analysis rightly directs our attention to Nietzsche’s emphasis on quotidian minutiae and the transformative significance of these, we think it is helpful to add to her reading by emphasizing that Nietzsche is also focusing attention on the relationship between body, environment, and philosophy more generally in his analysis of transformation, beyond the case of a single individual. It is not only the single reader who can be transformed but also, eventually, humanity. Nietzsche points out in this aphorism that “loftier sublimities” of other philosophies may too be nothing more than “intellectual detours for these kinds of personal drives,” and grounds the aphorism in the question of where “this philosophy” is heading (D 553). His example of a butterfly’s “secret and solitary swarming” on the “rocky seashore,” like the beach of Dawn 423, is instructive with respect to the case of humanity as a whole. While we stand watching it, the butterfly is flying about, unaware that it “only has one day yet to live” and that “the night will be too cold for its winged fragility” (D 553). While we could imagine a philosophy for the butterfly, Nietzsche suggests, it will not be “mine” — and why not? Because the butterfly can already fly, unlike ourselves. To be like the butterfly and capable of a philosophy we could imagine for it, humanity would have to learn to fly — to adopt subject position(s) that go beyond its current position.

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With this point on the meditation format and the transformative potential of D 423 in mind, the set of questions directed toward Nature in the aphorism can therefore be drawn together by a single thread: futurity. To address humanity’s potential for becoming future-oriented, Nietzsche also employs the metaphor of flight — of soaring above humanity — in an earlier aphorism from book five of Dawn. Discussing how the increasing comprehensibility of the world makes it less solemn, Nietzsche considers how a change in perspective on humanity and its future might make a hint of future virtues accessible to us: Perhaps we view ourselves and the world more slightly because we started thinking more courageously about it and ourselves? Perhaps there will be a future in which this courage of thought has swelled so large that, as the absolute height of arrogance, it feels itself to be above people and things— in which the wise person, as the most courageous of persons, views himself and existence as the farthest beneath him? This species of courage, which is not far from being an excessive magnanimity, has been heretofore lacking in humanity. (D 551) One important point in this discussion is that courage, understood as a virtue tied to the future, allows us to soar above our current perspective on ourselves and human existence. Wisdom among a group that had passed beyond the constraints of customary morality involves forms of virtue that are not customarily moral, but that have ethical significance through how they orient us toward a possible new future. The challenge for us is to become capable of experiencing the relevant moral emotions, and thus becoming capable of practicing an ethic based upon such virtues. Nietzsche uses the example of poets to illustrate how this mode of self-creation would work, remarking that, “if only the poets longed to become what they once were supposed to have been: — seers, who recounted to us something of the possible! … If only they wanted to let us experience in advance something of the future virtues!” (D 551). He suggests that we might take control of access to future virtues “out of their hands” and create it for ourselves, by means of courage that would allow us to soar above ourselves, as the butterfly swarms (D 551, 553). Nietzsche’s position here responds to a problem of pseudo-egotism that he had identified in an earlier aphorism, in which a phantom ego and abstract misunderstanding of the human being are perpetuated among us all by a “fog of opinions and habituations” that is only altered by “individuals with power (like princes and philosophers)” (D 105). No individual member of the majority affected by this fog, Nietzsche claims, has access to “any self-established, genuine ego” that they could juxtapose with the “common, pallid fiction” of humanity “and thereby destroy” that fiction (D 105). Through virtues such as courage, and through taking on the transformative role played by the poet–seer for ourselves, such a self may become possible for us in the future (D 553).

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The final aphorism of book five, and of the text of Dawn as a whole, 575, returns us to book five’s opening meditation on the future relationship between humanity and nature (D 423). As with earlier aphorisms that first imagine our flying, and then suggest a mechanism by which we can fly, Nietzsche’s use of the symbolism of flight is significant. This final aphorism is entitled “We aeronauts of the spirit” (Wir Luft-Schifffahrer des Geistes). As Duncan Large has pointed out, the aeronauts in the aphorism are flying an “air-ship,” and their flying out over the sea indicates “how close is their kinship to their more earthbound, or at least ­sea-bound mariner-cousins.”15 The aphorism begins by noting that, even while all the brave birds that fly out into the farthest distance are unable to go on at a certain point, we cannot infer that an immense open space was not laid out before them (D 575). All that can be inferred is that these brave birds had flown as far as they could have flown. The same point on flying as far as one is able applies, Nietzsche holds in two earlier aphorisms, to all our great teachers and predecessors, who eventually come to a stop, and often with weariness. For example, Nietzsche uses the image of a horse and its rider to illustrate the shame associated with the weariness of an “exhausted thinker before his own philosophy” (D 487). While philosophy, the “beautiful steed,” is animated and paws the ground, because it “yearns for a ride and loves the one who rides it,” its rider — the philosopher — is too tired even to swing themselves into the saddle (D 487). It is not that there is no more space available to great teachers and philosophers in which they might pursue further inquiry, but rather that they have already traveled as far as was possible for them: philosophy, the beautiful steed champing at the bit, can be ridden further — but by someone else. And, as Nietzsche also points out in a detailed discussion of philosophy and old age, it becomes possible to tell when a thinker is “very tired, very near his sunset” when he “wants to turn himself into a binding institution for the future of humankind” (D 542). At such a point, the thinker “altogether cannot endure the terrible isolation in which every forward and forward-flying spirit lives” (D 542). Instead, the thinker seeks community; as we know from our earlier analysis of Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality, the community in question is a limiting one, because the thinker seeks now to “enjoin” humanity to “limit independent thinking” since “it tortures him not to be able to be the last” thinker (D 542). As he summarizes the situation of the thinker at the sunset of their philosophical life: By canonizing himself, he has also posted above him his own death certificate: from now on his spirit may not develop any further, its time is up, the clock hand falls (D 542). In his analysis of these aphorisms, particularly Dawn 542, Paul Franco has contrasted contemplation and action, and has suggested that, for Nietzsche, what is under discussion in these parts of Dawn are “threats to the contemplative life of the thinker and knower.”16 As Franco goes on to point out,

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this analysis is complicated by Nietzsche’s discussion of the practical, which ­identifies the dependence of practical people upon the thinker who determines or even sometimes decrees the “savoriness” of things. The influence of thinkers, as Nietzsche claims, is such that practical people “would scorn their practical life should we scorn it” (D 505).17 While Franco is certainly right to emphasize Nietzsche’s understanding of the power that philosophy has in the practical realm, we disagree with Franco’s suggestion that Nietzsche identifies a threat to the contemplative life. Rather, in light of Nietzsche’s thinking on transformation, we suggest that Nietzsche accepts that there are limits to the capacities of individual philosophers to pursue any particular philosophical inquiries (including ones commensurate with Nietzsche’s own project in Dawn) and that these individual limits need not necessarily inhibit the future of philosophy itself. As soon as the thinker can no longer tolerate any kind of transformation, their capacity for philosophizing is at an end. However, this does not mean that philosophy itself — or indeed humanity — ends with such a thinker. The connection between transformational capacity and humanity’s future is further clarified by Nietzsche in Dawn 575. It is perhaps a law of life, Nietzsche claims in this aphorism, that the tiredness and old age of the thinker will also come to be the case with us, “with you and me” (D 575). However, Nietzsche also contends that we can derive sustenance, and even consolation, from the fact that other birds and other spirits could, and in some cases will, fly further than we shall be able to fly ourselves. As he puts it: This our insight and assurance [Gläubigkeit] vies with them in flying up and away; it rises straightaway above our head and beyond its own inadequacy into the heights and looks out from there into the distance, sees the flocks of birds much more powerful than we are, who are striving to get to where we were striving toward and where everything is still sea, sea, sea! — And where, then, do we want to go? Do we want to go across the sea? Where is it tearing us toward, this powerful craving that means more to us than any other pleasure? Why precisely in this direction, toward precisely where heretofore all of humanity’s suns have set? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering toward the west, hoped to reach an India — that it was, however, our lot [Loos] to shipwreck upon infinity? Or, my brothers? Or? [Oder, meine Brüder? Oder?] (D 575)18 The point that Nietzsche is making with respect to the future here is not that we must reach a particular location, but that we may hope to fly. Like courage, hope emerges here as a future virtue that can help us adopt a different perspective with respect to ourselves and to humanity as a whole: with courage, we can fly above ourselves, and with hope, we may aim to fly as far as we are able to fly. Other birds

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may indeed be more powerful than us, and may fly further than we can: their flight does not mean that our own flight is not worthwhile. Were we to fly, then we might glimpse more of the possible futures that, though hope and courage, may yet become accessible to humanity. It is important to note that Nietzsche does not consider humanity’s future-orientedness to be singular: in an aphorism that imagines a possible future in which humans submit only to laws that they themselves have laid down and according to which they judge and sentence themselves, Nietzsche joyfully exclaims at there being “so many futures still to dawn” (D 187). Human future-orientedness is plural, and its possibilities multiple. The meaning of the “Or?” questions that Nietzsche poses at the end of this aphorism requires clarification, particularly with respect to Nietzsche’s thinking on futurity.19 As Matthew Meyer notes, the “Or” with which Dawn 575 ends is inconclusive.20 However, given what we have already seen of the hope and courage with which Nietzsche characterizes humanity’s potential future-directedness in book five of Dawn, this lack of conclusivity is both interesting and necessary to Nietzsche’s project in this text. Nietzsche’s own discussion in Ecce Homo points out that Dawn is the only book of his that concludes in this way: “This book ends with an ‘Or?’ — It is the only book that ends with an ‘Or?’” (EH “Books” Daybreak 1).21 The “transvaluation of all values,” where the author seeks “the new dawn,” is grounded in the “Or?” that is posed to us at the end of this text (EH “Books” Daybreak 1).22 In other words, inconclusivity is itself the conclusion that Nietzsche develops through Dawn: the future of humanity is not fixed, but is rather open to us. On this issue, Ernst Bertram has pointed out that: The moment of this extreme, unsettled inner “Or?” finds its classical expression perhaps in the last sentences of Dawn, which are also, simultaneously, a classic example of his mastery of the end…no matter from which direction we approach him, even Nietzsche’s mighty torso always rounds out his intellectual silhouette with a final “Or?” just as all of his works from the Birth to Ecce finish in the doubling of such an Or. Hardly any of them, however, do so with such calm pride, such regal surrender, such masterly confidence in the face of all “Beyonds” as Dawn.23 Bertram’s suggestion here is that the “Or?” questions at the end of Dawn 575 are necessary; this is partly because these questions are genuine ones for Nietzsche’s readers, and partly because his readers’ search for a response to these questions can admit of no resolution, at least not until humanity reaches a point of completed knowledge with all “suns” discovered and thoroughly explored. This possibility involves an infinitely long durée; and it is from this immense expanse of time that Nietzsche derives his confidence in humans’ capacity to reach ever toward a future that is comprised of what Bertram calls “Beyonds.”24 As in the

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case of the meditation in Dawn 423, Nietzsche’s orientation toward humanity’s future in Dawn 575 is positive, since the possible future that opens up there is filled with possibilities, and as such may be faced with hope and accessed through courage. Karl Löwith has also drawn attention to the enigmatic character of the reference to “India” at the end of Dawn 575.25 Löwith explores some of the interpretative questions that this reference raises: Is Buddhism not for Nietzsche, along with Christianity, a nihilistic religion? How do we square with Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo that Dawn is a great Yes-saying work, which contains no negative words (EH  “Books” D 1)? Moreover, why is the epigraph to the book  —  “there are so many dawns that have not yet broken” — referred to as Indian? The interpretation Löwith gives in response to these questions is highly speculative, and focuses on Nietzsche’s insistence on the need for the No as well as the Yes. In a reversal of the Christian meaning of the expression “By this sign (cross) you will conquer,” which heads Dawn 96, Nietzsche is suggesting that the conquest will take place under the sign that the redemptive God is dead. Buddha is a significant teacher, because his religion is one of self-redemption, and self-redemption is a valuable step along the way of ultimate redemption from reliance upon religion and from God. As Löwith points out, in his notebooks of the mid to late 1880s, Nietzsche takes Christianity to task for having devalued the value of nihilism as a great purifying movement in which nothing could be “more useful or more to be encouraged than a thoroughgoing practical nihilism [Nihilismus der That]” (NL 1888 14 [9]).26 The lie of the immortal private person and the hope of resurrection serve to deter the actual deed of nihilism, namely, suicide. This explains why in his “Lenzer Heide” notebook on European nihilism Nietzsche is keen to construe eternal recurrence as “the most extreme form of nihilism” and why he holds that “a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable.”27 The No-doing precedes the Yes-saying as its purifying precondition. Humanity must become more Greek again, “for what is Greek was the first great union … of everything Oriental and on just that account the inception of the European soul, the discovery of our ‘new world’.”28 As Löwith claims, “the continuation of the revived discovery of the old world is ‘the work of the new Columbus’.”29 Thus, at the end of Dawn, Nietzsche heads “west,” to where the sun sets, in order to reach an “India” in the east where the sun arises anew as eternal Being and life. The hopeful search with which the text of Dawn concludes in aphorism 575 was soon reopened by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. As Keith Ansell-Pearson has pointed out, the first three books of The Gay Science were initially envisaged by Nietzsche to be a direct continuation of his work in Dawn.30 These three books are particularly concerned with the incorporation of truth and knowledge; one prime example of this is Nietzsche’s posing of the following key question: “To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated? — that is the question; that is the experiment”

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(GS 110).31 Nietzsche returns to a vision of the future characterized in terms of infinite possibility, which he had initially developed in Dawn, as part of his engagement with the problem of incorporation of truth. In so doing, he uses the sea as a metaphor for a new infinite, offering readers both encouragement and warnings about the range of possibilities that it incorporates. For example, in discussing a new horizon of the infinite, Nietzsche writes: We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us — indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean — to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. (GS 124) In addition to his use of the sea as a metaphor for both the infinity of the future and humanity’s orientation toward this future, Nietzsche also draws upon the metaphor of flight to elaborate on this continuation of human development. He had deployed this metaphor in Dawn to similar effect using the example of flying by birds (D 575) and by a butterfly (D 553), as we discussed earlier. As Nietzsche continues, “Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom — and there is no longer any ‘land’” (GS 124). The infinity that the bird encounters when freed from factors such as land that constrain the limits of flight is not easy to imagine — the point of this example is to highlight our imaginative constraints and, like the poet who is a seer, prompt our imaginative engagement with such possibility. Nietzsche’s interest in an infinite future continues in the fourth book of The Gay Science. For example, the connection between his conception of the future as infinite, and as open to humanity, is evident in his fable of the madman who announces the death of God (GS 125). He makes similar use of sea exploration as a metaphor for the infinity of the future, and for humanity’s self-orientation toward it, in a discussion of preparatory human beings who are capable of self-legislation: there, Nietzsche calls on humanity to “live dangerously” by sending their ships “into uncharted seas” (GS 283). And Nietzsche calls for new philosophy, for philosophy that is for the “unhappy,” the “evil,” and also for the “exceptional human being”; he urges philosophers to “embark” in order to discover other worlds (GS 289). The fifth book of The Gay Science also attends to the future using a sea metaphor to capture the sense of the future as infinite, and of humanity as orienting itself toward this future. According to Nietzsche, “we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel as if a new dawn shone upon us” upon hearing the news that the old god is dead; the “horizon appears free to us again” and “at long last, our ships may venture our again.” (GS 343). As Nietzsche suggests, for the philosophers and free spirits, the death of God means that “all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted

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again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’” (GS 343). The “new ‘infinite’” that unfolds and is unfolded by humanity following the death of God, according to him, incorporates an infinite plurality of interpretations of an open “perspective character of existence” (GS 374). Dawn is also known to have influenced Nietzsche’s thinking with respect to his production of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Referring to a letter from Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck of April 7, 1884, Loeb has pointed out that Nietzsche privileges Thus Spoke Zarathustra over the works that precede it, including Dawn.32 In this letter to Overbeck, in referring to Dawn and to The Gay Science, Nietzsche remarks, “I have found that there is hardly a line in them that cannot serve as introduction, preparation and commentary to the above-mentioned Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is a fact, that I have composed the commentary before the text.”33 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche continues to use the sea as a metaphor for the new infinite that is opened up to us by increasing orientation toward an infinite future. In an important example from book two, Zarathustra declares: Behold, what fullness is about us! And from out of such overflow it is beautiful to look out upon distant seas. Once one said “God” when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: Superhuman. God is a supposition: but I would that your supposing might not reach farther than your creative will. Could you create a God? — Then do not speak to me of any Gods! But you could surely create the Superhuman. Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But into fathers and forefathers of the Superhuman you could re-create yourselves: and may this be your finest creating! (TSZ II “Upon the Isles of the Blest”)34 Here, as in the case of The Gay Science, Nietzsche uses the sea metaphor to indicate an infinite future, and, in his notion of humanity looking out onto distant seas, suggests that we can orient ourselves toward that future and creatively will toward it, from our current state of humanity and toward the Superhuman. Here, however, Zarathustra’s declaration clarifies that the “we” mentioned in The Gay Science 343, namely “philosophers and free spirits,” is not the “we” of a distant future. By positing humanity as “fathers and forefathers of the Superhuman,” Nietzsche points to a developmental trajectory for humanity, in which humanity’s travel toward an infinite future in which it will have overcome itself will be gradual and, by virtue of its intergenerational nature, slow.35 This is commensurate with Nietzsche’s thinking on transformation in Dawn, again as discussed earlier in this chapter.

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This same slow orientation of humanity toward an infinite future, along with a trajectory of development along which humanity might move, is also addressed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.36 There, Nietzsche is clear that humanity can move beyond free spirits. He distinguishes between free spirits and very free spirits or philosophers of the future (BGE 44). According to him, philosophers of the future “will not be free spirits merely, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, something that would not go unrecognized or misidentified” (BGE 44). As Amy Mullin has shown, Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future may be distinguished from free spirits by means of several key characteristics.37 According to Mullin, the philosophers of the future will have developed a taste for what is good for them, and this taste is what separates them out from free spirits; in addition, the philosophers of the future have the capacity to command and to legislate values, and to organize themselves and wider society (BGE 211). In the activity of knowing, Nietzsche suggests, the future philosophers are creative: “their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is law-giving, their will to truth is — will to power” (BGE 211).38 As Matthew Meyer has observed, the philosophers of the future are also described in Beyond Good and Evil 42 as “attempters,” notably similarly to Nietzsche’s description of future inquirers who have the courage to make attempts and to make mistakes (D 501).39 As Mullin also points out, the same distinction between free spirits and philosophers of the future is held to by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he suggests that philosophers of the future use “a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (GM III 12).40 Nietzsche’s claim that philosophers of the future develop commanding and law-giving capacity, which as we have seen is a consistent claim of his in Dawn, is also a core part of his analysis in On the Genealogy of Morals. In On the Genealogy of Morals II.2, the sole aphorism in which the figure of the sovereign individual appears, Nietzsche explicitly returns his readers’ attention to the view that he had developed in Dawn, namely that humans have made themselves uniform via customary morality. As he writes, the task of breeding a responsible animal  —  an animal with the prerogative to make promises — involves, “first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, a peer among peers, orderly and consequently predictable” (GM II 2). This has been accomplished, Nietzsche claims, by making use of customary morality: The immense amount of labour involved in what I have called the “morality of custom”, the actual labour of man on himself during the longest epoch of the human race, his whole prehistoric labour, is explained and justified on a grand scale, in spite of the hardness, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy it also contained, by this fact: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket, man was made truly predictable. (GM II 2)

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According to Nietzsche, society and customary morality are not an end in themselves: they are merely a means to cultivating the “sovereign individual,” a figure that Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals as an end to a process: the “ripest fruit on the tree” of the “actual labour of man on himself” during his “whole prehistoric labour” (GM II 2). In Dawn, Nietzsche describes humanity as being still engaged in the process of cultivating such individuals. For instance, he gives the example of substitute conscience, writing that, “One person is another person’s conscience: and this is particularly important if the other has none otherwise” (D 338). Similarly, Nietzsche points out that we do not often encounter “pangs of conscience” in prisons and penitentiaries, but rather “homesickness for the old, wicked, beloved, crime” (D 366). He sounds a warning note with respect to the feeling of gratitude, remarking that we suffer from one grain too much “of grateful sentiment and piety” like “a vice” and through it, fall prey to “an evil conscience” (D 293). And Nietzsche illustrates a tension between passion for knowledge on the one hand, and an evil conscience that “pricks and prods and incites you” against it on the other, which can lead to a state in which we choose enthusiasm over reason, saying to ourselves, “now I have conquered my good conscience” (D 543).41 Over time, this tension produces a dominant instinct. By virtue of being able to be responsible, this instinct dominates the sovereign individual as the culmination of humanity’s process of cultivation, as Nietzsche contends: The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny, has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct: — what will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? No doubt about the answer: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience (GM II.2) Humanity’s self-cultivation produces a sovereign individual that is ruled by a conscience; Nietzsche adds to his description of this figure by claiming it is “like only to itself,” that it has “freed itself from the morality of custom,” and that it is “an autonomous, supra-ethical [übersittliche] individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ [sittlich] are mutually exclusive)” (GM II 2). In his remarks on On the Genealogy of Morals in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche points out that conscience as discussed in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is not “the voice of God in man,” but that it is rather “the instinct of cruelty turned backwards after it can no longer discharge itself outwards,” and thus he claims it as “one of the oldest substrata of culture” (EH “Books” GM). The meaning and function of Nietzsche’s figure of the sovereign individual remains a point of contention in the available scholarly literature; however, we

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suggest it is worthwhile to consider this figure against the background of Nietzsche’s discussion of subjectivity and futurity in Dawn. First, a brief overview of the scholarly debate on the figure of the sovereign individual is warranted. Recently, Paul Katsafanas has argued that the sovereign individual is free from customary morality [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] under which, as Nietzsche had pointed out in Dawn, all human communities have lived up until the present (D 14).42 Katsafanas claims that, for Nietzsche, where unfree individuals need external commands to help them regulate their behavior, free individuals such as the sovereign individual from On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 can self-regulate without dependence on conventional morality, thus “employing [their] own standards in determining what’s worth doing.”43 In contrast, Brian Leiter has argued that in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 Nietzsche is essentially making a joke by giving the sovereign individual a particularly pompous name — given that its sole skill lies in promise-making and that the figure is parodic.44 Moreover, according to Leiter, even if the sovereign individual feels responsible, they are not responsible for epiphenomenalist reasons, since, according to him, consciousness takes no part in the production of action.45 Katsafanas challenges Leiter’s epiphenomenalist account of Nietzsche, and suggests that Leiter’s reading of the figure of the sovereign individual as parodic is under-supported by the textual evidence available in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2.46 An earlier line of critical engagement with the view that the sovereign individual is the culmination of Nietzsche’s approach to ethical agency is provided in work by Lawrence J. Hatab and by Christa Acampora. Hatab contends that the sovereign individual’s characteristic of autonomy is the legacy of moralization (or customary morality), not freedom from it.47 As part of this, Hatab observes that the sovereign individual’s conscience, in seeking to take responsibility for keeping promises, runs counter to one important end of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals: seeking to replace an ideal that prevents one from loving one’s fate. Acampora agrees with Hatab, and she also suggests some additional concerns, of which two are particularly significant for our purposes here. First, one does not find such an emphasis on promise-keeping anywhere else in Nietzsche’s work as we find to be presented in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 — a single aphorism. Acampora suggests that therefore treating the sovereign individual’s radical autonomy as Nietzsche’s culminating thought on ethical agency is under-supported by the available textual evidence. Second, Acampora points out that Nietzsche anticipates a future for humanity in On the Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which the overcoming of “the human” is anticipated, and that Nietzsche therefore does not call on us all to become sovereign individuals, as that is a human “fruit already borne.”48 Katsafanas treats Acampora’s view as being similar to Leiter’s view.49 However, this does not capture what Acampora is actually claiming — Acampora does not

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share Leiter’s epiphenomenalist commitment, as is indicated by her mention of the self as composite in the passage from her essay quoted by Katsafanas. As Acampora puts it, the “real problem of sovereignty draws us toward more deeply exploring how we might reconcile Nietzsche’s appeals to creative wilful activity with his critiques of subjectivity and the key ideas about identity and causality that are crucial for the conception of sovereign individuality.”50 Her view thus seems much more in line with Katsafanas’ own framing of the will and the self than Katsafanas himself allows. Acampora’s account also gets at something that Katsafanas also emphasizes  —  the idea of human selves as aspirational for Nietzsche.51 This is, as we discussed in earlier chapters, a position that is evident in Dawn. And, as we have shown in our discussion of futurity in book five of Dawn, evidence in the text of Dawn and in subsequent works turns out to support Acampora’s position with respect to the sovereign individual of On the Genealogy of Morals II 2. Nietzsche’s remarks on a “possible future lawgiving” in Dawn 187 is of particular relevance here. In this aphorism, Nietzsche contrasts the present, in which criminals cannot self-legislate and must be punished by laws established and reinforced socially, with “the criminal of a possible future” (D 187). Of this future criminal, who is able to turn themselves in and set their own sentence for their wrong-doing, Nietzsche writes: he is exercising power, the power of the lawgiver; he may have transgressed at some point but through his voluntary punishment he elevates himself above his transgression; through candor, greatness, and calmness he not only wipes out his transgression: he performs a public service as well (D 187) The future criminals, Nietzsche claims here, submit only to a law that they have made themselves. While we are not these future criminals, we may aspire to become the self-legislators that they are. Relatedly, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also finds much to praise about self-legislators, as Loeb has pointed out, for instance, in the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra I “On The Three Transformations” and Thus Spoke Zarathustra II “On Self-Overcoming.52 In the first, Nietzsche lauds the spirit-child who becomes a self-propelled wheel and is able to “will its own will,” whereby “the one who had lost the world attains its own world.” In the second, Nietzsche discusses the burden of command, identifies commanding in positive terms as “[a]n experiment and a risk,” and describes how the living puts itself at risk in order to become “judge and avenger and sacrificial victim” for the sake of its own law. To further substantiate our claim on self-legislators as initially grounded in Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn, recall Dawn 560, in which

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Nietzsche emphasizes that we have freedom to cultivate drives, explicitly our own, and human drives more generally.53 Notice that Nietzsche attends to humanity as a species in this aphorism, not only to humans as individual selves. Nietzsche’s concerns about how humans are affected by customary morality, and with improving humanity, is also an explicit concern of his in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. While in On the Genealogy of Morals II 2 Nietzsche grounds his discussion of the bad conscience in work on customarily morality from Dawn, in On the Genealogy of Morals II 19, he discusses bad conscience as an illness like pregnancy, claiming that it is an illness from which humans suffer, but there must at some point be an end to it: according to him, bad conscience is not a condition that can be permanent. Moreover, Nietzsche considers in On the Genealogy of Morals II 24 how a redemptive type of human that would perhaps be liberated from bad conscience might still be made possible. According to him, this type or spirit would be strong, and would be further strengthened by hardship, displaying a more robust, “great” health than current types of humans. As Acampora suggests, Nietzsche anticipates developmental points for humanity and for human selves that reach beyond the sovereign individual of On the Genealogy of Morals II 2; she points out that we might therefore productively reimagine the sovereign individual, even at its stage of development, as “realizing or manifesting its sovereignty as an on-going process.”54 An understanding of humanity as open to future development and self-overcoming is already evident in Dawn, as we have seen, both in Nietzsche’s account of the individual self and in his approach to humanity’s slow orientation toward an infinite future, and its own self-overcoming. Therefore, when set against the background of Nietzsche’s specific concerns in Dawn and with the development of those concerns across his later works, the preponderance of the textual evidence supports the side of the debate on how best to interpret the sovereign individual developed by Hatab and by Acampora. Nietzsche’s specific interest in the infinite future and humanity’s orientation toward such a future, the developmental trajectory that he envisages for free spirits who become very free philosophers of the future, and whose development is ongoing and intergenerational, is expanded on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra into a development toward the possibility of the Superhuman. As Hatab and Acampora have shown, the sovereign individual is thus best understood as a culmination of customary morality’s effects on humanity, not as the end point of agency for Nietzsche. The sovereign individual is free and self-determining, to be sure, but it is not the self-legislator that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra praises.55 As Loeb points out, in light of Acampora’s account and his own reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the sovereign individual is insufficiently responsible and autonomous compared with Zarathustra, or with “the Superhuman” in which humanity has overcome itself.56 In Dawn, as we have seen, Nietzsche consistently encourages us to engage imaginatively with customary morality, and to explore the consequences of doing so for ourselves and for humanity as a whole. This project entails engagement

Aeronauts of the Spirit: Dawn and Beyond

with a broad range of questions: what might human life involve, if it were to become free from the prejudices and fears that stem from customary morality? And what kinds of creatures could humanity become, if the campaign against morality were to succeed? As part of his campaign against morality in Dawn, Nietzsche prompts us to reach beyond the present to possible futures, and to engage in shaping possible futures in and through ourselves. In developing this project, Nietzsche encourages us to engage in transformation of ourselves, and through this, transformation of humanity as a whole. Nietzsche does not claim that this transformation should be sudden or violent; he clearly suggests that such transformation will be based upon small, though consistent, changes over a long period of time. He prods us to engage critically and creatively with the future, and to raise fresh questions about our future directedness. In discussing the philosophy of the future in Beyond Good and Evil, Loeb has pointed out that Nietzsche means to refer to both (i) the prospect of a philosophy about the future, and (ii) a new kind of philosophy that will arrive in the future.57 Another key part of this project, as Loeb acknowledges, involves Nietzsche in encouraging us to “expand our conception of what philosophy can be and should be.”58 Given the connections that we have traced out between Beyond Good and Evil and Dawn, another of the questions prompted by Nietzsche’s project in Dawn must involve what approach to philosophy is best to get humanity from where we are now to what humanity might become. While the pursuit of such radically new philosophy might be considered problematic and transgressive from the perspective of a discipline still affected by customary morality, from the perspective of the possible futures that Nietzsche seeks to open up, it is possible to concur with Loeb’s assessment that Nietzsche’s “futuristic visions” constitute his “most distinctive” contributions to philosophy and to metaphilosophy.59 As we have suggested, while Nietzsche continues to explore these questions — and to spark our engagement with them — in later texts, we suggest that it is important to appreciate that he proceeds with this work within the clearing created by the campaign against morality that he first sets into motion in Dawn.

Notes 1 Matthew Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 241. 2 Paul S. Loeb. 2018. “Nietzsche’s Futurism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49(2): 253–59. 3 Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche: An Introduction to his Thought, Life, and Work,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 15.

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4 Ansell-Pearson, “Friedrich Nietzsche.” In his recent book, reading Nietzsche’s free spirit works as a dialectical Bildungsroman, Matthew Meyer has made three distinct claims: (i) that the free spirit works form a unified whole; (ii) that significant connections can be drawn between the free spirit writings and Nietzsche’s later writings; and (iii) that Beyond Good and Evil foreshadows a philosophy of the future that may be found in the “Dionysian comedy” of Nietzsche’s 1888 works. See Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, 29, 241. 5 See also Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 81. 6 Isabelle Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective: Nietzsche’s Use of the Cartesian Model,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João Constâncio, Maria João Mayer Branco, and Bartholomew Ryan (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), 49–64. 7 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 61–62. 8 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 58. 9 Wienand, “Writing from a First-Person Perspective,” 58. 10 On Nietzsche as a philosopher of transformation, and particularly on incorporation of truth and on self-knowledge as core parts of Nietzschean transformation, see Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 24, 72, 167. 11 L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17. 12 Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. 13 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 25. 14 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 102. 15 Duncan Large. 1995. “Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus.” Nietzsche-Studien 24: 171. 16 Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 98–99. 17 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 98–99. 18 Translation modified. Cf. KSA 3, 331. 19 Franco rightly points these Or? questions out as significant, but does not explain the nature of their significance. Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 98–99. 20 Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, 154. 21 Translation modified. 22 Translation modified. 23 For further development of these points see Large, “Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus,” and also Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche. Attempt at a Mythology, trans. Robert E. Norton (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2009), 237. 24 Bertram, Nietzsche. Attempt at a Mythology, 237.

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25 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 113. 26 KSA 13 221; WP 247. 27 NL 1885, 35[9]; KSA 11 512; WP 132. See also NL 1885, 35[82]; KSA 11 547; WP 1055: “A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic nihilism, can under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher — as a mighty pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life, or to implant into that which is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end.” 28 NL 1885, 41[7]; KSA 11 682; WP 1051. 29 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1997), 115. 30 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 83. See also Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 100. 31 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 83. 32 Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 207. 33 KSB 6, 496; Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 207. 34 Translation modified. 35 Translation modified. On the overcoming of humanity see Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219. 36 See also Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32. 37 Amy Mullin 2000. “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 38(3): 383–405. 38 Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works, 245. 39 Bamford, “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting,” 23. 40 Amy Mullin, “Nietzsche’s Free Spirit,” 401–03. 41 Translation modified. On the passion for knowledge as a distinctive feature of Dawn, see Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 91. 42 Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171. 43 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 226–8, 230. 44 Brian Leiter, “Who Is Nietzsche’s ‘Sovereign Individual’?,” in Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy Of Morality: A Critical Guide, ed. Simon May (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 45 Leiter, “Who Is Nietzsche’s ‘Sovereign Individual’?” 46 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 222–24. 47 Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).

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48 Christa Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2,” in Critical Essays on the Classics: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Christa Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 151–56. 49 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 223. 50 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity.” 51 Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, 200. 52 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225. 53 Rebecca Bamford. “Health and Self-cultivation in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 85–109. 54 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” 155. 55 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225. On the sovereign individual, see also Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 265. 56 Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 219, 225. 57 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 257. 58 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 259. 59 Loeb, “Nietzsche’s Futurism,” 259.

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Appendix Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn Translated by Carol Diethe; edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford Nietzsche’s letters of 1881 afford a valuable glimpse into how he conceived the text Dawn, including the significance it had for him. We learn that he keeps changing his mind about the precise title of the work; that he is not flattered by becoming known at the time as the “German Montaigne, Pascal, and Diderot”; and that he advises his sister Elisabeth to read the book in a particular and personal way. The title Nietzsche settled on for the book is significant for several reasons and is clear in the meaning of the word “dawn,” notably the expectation of a new beginning; the first light of day or daybreak; the incipient appearance of something; a new reality that is beginning to become evident and understood, and so on. The German title of the work, Morgenröthe, specifies the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with color and before the red yields to the customary blue or gray. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration, and renewal, in which the freshness of the new day augurs a new way of life.

­February 9 to Gast Oh, what a surprise that was! To see the beauty and manly grace of this manuscript of yours — it is like feeling the way one does after a Roman–Turkish bath, not just washed thoroughly, but rejuvenated and improved. I read and went walking for a few hours, full of fond thoughts about you and nature. I find it a book rich in content: but it is difficult. In the early hours of this glorious February day, I made one more addition to avoid ambiguity — I think you will be happy with it. May I send this addition on? — I want to alter the title, too; you yourself put the idea into my head by taking as motto the verse from the hymn to Varuna you had written down by chance: shouldn’t the book be entitled: “A Dawn. Thoughts on Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Moral Prejudices etc.” There are so many bright and indeed red colors in it! Weigh it up! (I also recommend the title page to you, with simple, effective decoration, as being to your taste and way of thinking!) The most grateful, happy one.

­February to Gast Dear friend, is it true that you have confidence in the whole thing? Or did you just want to encourage me a bit? I am so wracked by continual pain that I can no longer give an opinion, I am wondering if I might finally be allowed to throw off the whole burden; my father died at the age I am now. — I should and would have replied at once to your last card but one — but I could not! It was imbued with a refined and friendly spirit, Madame de Sévigné would have complimented you on it. — Title! The second “A Dawn” is slightly too gushing, oriental and of less good taste: but that is compensated for by the advantage that people assume there to be a more cheerful tone in the book than with the other title, they read it in a different state of mind; it stands the book in good stead, which would be much too gloomy without that glimpse of the morning! — The other title also sounds presumptuous, oh dear, what does it matter! A little more presumption, a little less in such a book! — The orthography and grammatical correctness are once again your province, dead friend, I have no orthography apart from that of Köselitz. Occasionally I make mistakes, e.g. in constructing the subjunctive: correct me on every occasion, without further ado! Behind this book I hear the sound of the music of Manfred  —  imagine that! — What is friend Widemann up to? I have the most distressing news from Paul Rée, his father has died from the after-effects of an operation, his mother is gravely ill. Will you really still be in Venice this summer? Frau von Wöhrmann is staying, I hear.  —  And Herr Racowitz? [Translator’s note: should read “Rascowicz”] — Please thank my old comrade Gersdorff cordially for his greeting, we are still on the same footing. (If only he could free himself! But he is so stubborn, especially in regard to others, e.g. his relatives! Imagine, Gersdorff’s father shot himself, I learned this from a reliable source and it must not be repeated.) Now, my dear and one and only reader and scribe, we must bring what we have undertaken to a good finish, Herr Schmeitzner and Oschatz must also be prodded. In the meantime, there is nobody I think of with a more heartfelt and grateful frame of mind than yourself! Sincerely yours, F.N.

Appendix: Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn

­March 13 to Schmeitzner Honorable Sir, Here is the manuscript — at the cost of a bitter decision to let it go out of my possession. — It will have 16—18 sheets. After the title page there is a page entitled Book One. — There are 5 books. — I take the format of “Human, All Too Human as the norm” for spacing. Do not make the print too squashed together! It is already a failing of the book that the most important reflections follow one another too closely! But hurry now. Hurry, hurry! I want to leave Genoa as soon as I have finished the book and will be on pins up till then. Please help! Prod Herr Oschatz! Couldn’t he make a written promise that the book would be here in my hands at the end of April at the latest — finished and complete? At the same time send a proof copy to Herr Köselitz in Venice and myself in Genoa (poste restante). The pages of the manuscript, large and small, are numbered in red. The page overleaf is used on four or five occasions. My dear Herr Schmeitzner, we all want this to be done as well as possible this time. The content of my book is so important! It is a question of honor not to let it fall short in any way, so that it enters the world worthy and immaculate. — I beseech you to leave out any advertisement, for the sake of my name. Many other things will be clarified once you yourself have read the book. With warmest wishes (but heart a-flutter), Yours most truly, Dr. F.N.

­March 18 to Overbeck Dear, dear friend, just a word today! There is something you must be absolutely the first to know — work is in progress in Chemnitz on a new manuscript by me. This is the book that will probably be clamped to my name.  —  What a ­burden I have had on my shoulders! And what a burden I have just taken up! Now, forwards, looking neither backwards nor sideways! I am very moved and would like to grasp your loyal hand. My few real friends will from now on have still more to bear through life, I shall cause trouble for them and you, but there’s nothing for it! Your friend from the heart.

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­March 20 to Gast But, dear friend, the severity of your friendship will not be able to prevent me from paying a debt: I am thinking of the countless disbursements on postage for letters, proofs, parcels, and paper et hoc genus omne, and I shall seek to defray these today. The moment seems to be auspicious, for this missive provides me with the satisfaction of a little mischievousness, considering that I answer your last letter in this way. So, it pleases me to think that you will now stay a few weeks longer in Venice. Today I am in good spirits, since the headache that lasted from Sunday afternoon until last night has gone again. Please thank Gersdorff for the prospect he proposes. I like fixed dates: is it possible to regard 15 September as one such? — We shall give up the affair of the title page! It has its funny side! In fact: I  only wanted to satisfy you, since you expressed yourself so angrily on the subject of Herr Schmeitzner’s and Herr Oschatz’s deplorable taste last time — I myself was not so dissatisfied at all and quietly mused: “My friend Köselitz understands this better than I do”. I now think we should restrict ourselves to letting Herr Oschatz make up a few draft titles  —  and you can select the most bearable!  —  Furthermore: we do not want to load Herr Schmeitzner down with any more expenses, he will end up being ruined by my unsaleable books. I would love to know just what reception the book will have; I have a dreadful suspicion, if I, for example, make further assumptions after Rohde’s letter and think of the most unwilling reader — which in regard to the new book, everyone will be! On the other hand, of course, the publisher of Bismarck’s Era has dubbed me “the German Montaigne, Pascal and Diderot.” All at the same time! How little refinement there is in such praise, meaning: how little praise! — The book will at least not have a damaging effect — except that I myself will have to do penance for it! For I give not just the highly moral but also all those decent and plucky people an opportunity to enjoy their morality and pluck at my expense. I want to see how I get away with it; after all, I know better than everyone else can that everything is still to be done, and that I myself only have for days or hours the character necessary to think of yet another “deed” at all. Oh friend, I am not making sense because I am too immersed in these necessities of myself and feel overawed by just one word. Tell me that we are on good terms in spite of the mischief today — but do not write it down on a sheet of paper but on a postcard so it takes up as little time as possible. Cordially, faithfully yours, F.N.

Appendix: Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn

­March 30 to Gast But, dearest friend, that was a poisoning! Probably they gave you contaminated wine to drink; try to remember where you might have ingested it! — I have just been reading “Carnevale von Venedig” in your notebook, for the first time, indeed! Strange! My preconception that there was much of my thinking in it set me against it hitherto. Now I am taken by surprise in the most pleasant way: it is purus Köselitzius, nothing but pure, unadulterated wine from your vineyard! All this does me so much good; and I think there are very useful arguments expressed in this notebook, which will not just seem useful and beneficial to me! E.g. all those comments on A(dalbert) Stifter’s Nachsommer [Indian Summer]! That could be handy for many a writer, many a reader, and many a person who is as yet neither of these! I do wish you would break off from your work for a “holiday” to re-write this notebook in peace and quiet, and with no consideration of what is “mine” and what is “yours” between us both — which of course, according to Pythagorean ethics, does not exist between friends! And that is how it should be! Speaking in confidence and secrecy: for whom did I write the last book? For us: We must gather a treasure out of things that are our own, for our old age! Because memory is no good e.g. I have almost forgotten the content of my earlier writings, and find that very pleasant, at any rate much better than having all you have previously said present in your mind and having to grapple with it. If I do grapple with these things within myself, well, it goes on in the “unconscious”, like the digestive system in a healthy person! Enough: when I see my own works, I feel as though I am listening to old adventure tales I had forgotten. We must make sure we monumentalize our whole lives in this way for ourselves – I do not care at all and it is an empty echo in my ear if such a wish is dubbed “vanity.” Let us be vain for ourselves and as much as possible! The bad condition of my eyes is pronounced, now. For example, after this winter’s work I have to let pass many days, without reading or writing a word; and I can hardly grasp how I managed to finish this manuscript. Full of desire to learn something and knowing perfectly well where the precise thing I wanted to learn was lodged, I have to let my life drift — as demanded by my miserable organs, head and eyes! And there is no question of a recovery! Everything becomes more wretched, and the darkness grows! So, dear friend, write your Souvenir of Venice, publish it anonymously (or under a new name) and think how much a book with this content would have encouraged us if it had reached as far as to us, youths hidden away in our German corner, when we were twenty years old! Now another word on our miseries! Mr Otto Busse is causing his relatives and friends the greatest concern (— full of delusions of grandeur (with regard to himself

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and me!)) and they are now tuning to me! — believing that I had put something into his head! They want me to get rid of that! He sees himself as a reformer of the Germans and myself as “the authority on authorities” — in short, Mohammed and Allah! He claims that scholarly works by him are in my hands! For which the Germans are not yet ready! Etc. All this is divulged to you under seven seals! Then: Herr Schmeitzner is not nice in his dealings with me. 5 weeks ago he wrote a card to me (with the all-too-Saxon expression “Hey, naturally I shall publish your book!”) Since then, deep silence in spite of my sending 2 letters and two postcards! The fact that it is an honor for him to be allowed to publish this book — that does not enter his head. I now want to travel a bit to divert my brain and to go for a lot of walks. This is highly necessary so I am not consumed by my scruples! (Damned melancholy!) But proof pages! I almost feel like taking this whole printing affair out of Herr Schmeitzner’s hands: I am just waiting for him to give me a pretense. Perhaps I would do him a great service with that: for which publisher would willingly represent such a book! Frau von Wöhrmann has sent for her sons – so things must be bad! — — Charron  —  excellent idea! It is the old French nobility’s manual on education!  —  Long live our Stendhal! Yes, no intellectual order of rank exists yet!  —  P(rosper) Mérimée is now the most maligned Frenchman among the French of all parties! Their first great storywriter of this century! Let’s just proceed on our path! We shall encounter all sorts of good things in doing so! Hearty greetings, Your F.N.

­April 10 to Gast When I read your letter yesterday, “my heart leaped,” as the hymn goes, – impossible to impart two more pleasant things to me! (Today, I shall probably receive the book for which I have conceived no small an appetite!) So: all well and good! We two meet again on this promising ledge of life, looking forwards and backward together, while offering a hand to each other to show we have many, many good things in common, more than we can say in words. You can scarcely credit how refreshing the thought of this fellowship is to me — for somebody who is alone with his thoughts is viewed as a fool, often enough even by himself: in contrast, “wisdom,” trust, confidence and intellectual health begins with a twosome. — — — So, Recoaro! I am only renting my room till the end of the month, and planned at any rate to travel on the first of May: now, if it suits you, I shall travel to Vicenza on that day (from there, it is four hours’ journey — on the next day). See to it that

Appendix: Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn

you get details of room prices etc.; I have learned that knowledge as to prices is halfway to thrift itself. (Here I have needed, in all, 80 lire a month — — — one can only live as cheaply as that in large cities by the sea!) In reading your Venetian notebooks further, the desire I already expressed to you became increasingly strong. Really, the content of this notebook is not in my new book — but it is like a good neighbor to it. Two things occurred to me: one, you have had so many experiences, and secondly you, more than anyone else I know, have for years practiced expressing yourself clearly, well and precisely the words stream toward you now, the right words. You can place a little trust in me here — I have a good nose for such things and some knowledge myself. And just so you won’t think I want to praise you here, I shall immediately add: as a writer you have no truck with slurs and malice — and it is rather good to know that. There are people whose character always peaks at exactly the same time as their intellect does: it seems to me that you are one of these. There are also one or two minor limitations in this which, to repeat, one must know so as not to demand anything false of oneself. Yesterday, under the supervision of my landlady, I cooked a Genoese dish, the main ingredients of which were artichokes and eggs. I am so at home here that everyone I approach with regard to the necessities of my life has a friendly face and greeting for me. Yes, there are instances of a more than courteous, “unselfish” conduct toward me. By contrast, Herr Sch(meitzner) remains silent, which is neither friendly nor courteous: 7 weeks ago he promised a letter on his postcard — but the letter never came. 4 weeks ago I asked him to send me a few books — but the books never came. He now forces me to be silent as well. The title page looked ghastly! — I made a significant change — Dawn and not “A D[awn]”. A title must be quotable, above all — up to that point, it was not. In addition: there was something precious about that “A” as well. Farewell! Thank you so much! Your Friend, F.N.

­April 10 to Elisabeth My dear, dear Lisbeth, I must make a good reply to so good a letter. So: my great new book! For the last two months I have had nothing more to do with the manuscript, publication will take up a good part of the summer and necessitate a meeting with Herr Köselitz (but not in Venice!) This is a decisive book, I cannot think about it without being greatly moved. — And now something cheerful: yesterday

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I cooked a Genoese dish on my machine under the supervision of my landlady, and behold, it was excellent! Main ingredients are artichokes and eggs. (An artichoke costs 7–8 Pfennigs.) Farewell and think of me fondly! Weather and health molto variabile. F.N.

­June 23 to Gast My good friend, here we have news — good news of Dr. Rée. The day before yesterday, my sister wrote to me in connection with Herr Rascovicz about how cleverly and delicately she had sharpened Frau von W(öhrmann)’s memory on this point. [Editors’ note: Gersdorff had a studio in Venice and let the painter Rascovicz work there, he also put commissions his way. Frau von W was probably going to commission a painting from R but had to be reminded. She died in November 1881.] Neither she [Elisabeth] nor I have wasted a moment with regard to this affair — and yet it appears to have been too late. When you receive the copy of Dawn, please do me the honor: take it with you to the lido one day, read it as a whole and try to make it into a whole for yourself — in other words, a passionate state. If you don’t do that, nobody will. — Those hundred francs, my dear old forgetful one, have long ago been paid off in the form of countless expenditures on postage, paper and everything else necessary for my writings to come into being. Pardon me for reminding you! — It is still the Engadine — for of the many places tried in Switzerland (20–30), the Engadine is the only passably successful one. It is difficult for my nature to find the right thing in the heights and depths, basically one gropes, there are attendant factors that resist being firmly grasped (e.g. the electricity of the passing clouds and the effects of the winds: I am convinced that 80 times out of 100 I can blame my torments on these influences). Where is the land with plenty of shade, permanently clear sky, sea winds of constant strength from morning till night, without a change in the weather? “Hither, hither — I want — to travel!” [Editors’ note: this is a refrain from Mignon’s song in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1784.] Even if it were to be outside Europe! Recoaro is, in terms of landscape, one of my most pleasant experiences, I simply ran after its beauty and put a good deal of effort and enthusiasm into it. Like any other beauty, that of nature is jealous and wants a person to serve only her. But now and then your music intervened, like the best dream I have dreamed in ages. Faithfully your friend, F.N.

Appendix: Nietzsche’s Letters of 1881 — Concerning Dawn

­July 19 to Laban Your singing, honored Sir, touches me so closely and does me such good that I lose all right to praise it. Especially as I presume that you do the same as those older musicians who begin their cheerful symphony, sparkling with life, with a serious melancholy phrase, as with the dawn: — what rogues they were. And perhaps you just wanted to give us a prelude that would lead us a little astray? For in the end, dear Sir, we are probably both of the same opinion on this one point: that even now the bow of life should be strung so tight that the string of desire sings and whistles? That even now we can live so proudly, rising above things, like that magnificent Roman emperor whom we are of one mind in esteeming (please read my recently published “Dawn”  —  unfortunately I am not able to send it to you). Gratefully yours, F.N.

­Mid-July to Elisabeth My dear sister, You are so right about me in so many ways that I wish from the heart that you could always be right about yourself, and about deciding what is best for you. I think you must be beyond the error made by so many girls who think they can satisfy their trait for retreat and independence by the marriage route; the result is often quite contrary to expectation the opposite, apart from the rarest exceptions. I am very pleased at your life in Pforta. Just take a good look round you, where place, people and things to do (not to forget climate) all seem to be made just for you. For my part, I think like this too, even if I were to leave Europe over it. For everything we suffer bears down not only on us but the rest of humanity –let us therefore see to it that we suffer as little as possible. I will hardly be able to stop you reading my “Dawn”; therefore I have thought up a means to find the best outcome for you and me. So read the book, if you will pardon my saying so, from an angle I would counsel other readers against, from an entirely personal point of view (sisters also have privileges, after all). Seek out everything that you guess is what might be most useful for your brother and what he might need most, what he wants and does not want. In particular you should read the fifth book, where much is written between the lines. Where all my efforts lead cannot be said in a word — and if I had that word, I would not utter it. It is a question of favorable but quite arbitrary ­circumstances. My good friends (and Everyman) actually know nothing about

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me and have probably not thought about it; I myself have been very reticent about my main projects without appearing to be so. My dear Lama, please supply me with some quality notebooks and establish a workshop for this — I need at least 4 per year; the finest, thickest paper (white), about 100 leaves in every book. If you hear of anybody who would like to do me a favor – ask them to make notebooks. The conditions under which I live in this respect are disgraceful. Format enclosed. And no bigger! With fondest love, and with best wishes to our mother. The sausage is really good. Your brother.

257

Index a

Abbey, Ruth  1, 97, 117, 183, 230 Acampora, Christa Davis  1, 87, 155–156, 240–242 aesthetics of existence  172 afterlife  8, 30, 142, 172, 191, 200 Alexander the Great  6 Alfano, Mark  6, 43 n. 7, 111 n. 41,161 n. 2, 246 n. 55 alienation  39–41 alimentation  147; laws of 64, 146 Allah  252 America/American  174; Latin American 216, 224 n. 25; Native American 212 ancient Greece  128 ancient Rome  118 ancients, the  27, 122, 129, 181, 183 ancient world, the  75 Anderson, Lanier, R.  160, 164 n. 30, 166 n. 58 androcentrism  216 angels  80 Angelus bell, the  226 anger  153, 157

Ansell‐Pearson, Keith  1, 97–98, 135, 164 n. 25, 224 n. 34, 235 antiquity  32–3, 75, 80, 127, 172, 183, 187–188; Greek 81; the virtue of 116 Aphrodite  79 apostate, the  152 Aristotle  27–28, 129 art  17–18, 20, 23, 27, 29, 41, 107, 120, 123, 129, 149, 177; of the aphorism 21; conjurer’s, the 124; of falling for your own forgeries 35; of healing, 64, 206; of interpretation 81; of life 4, 171; of the maxim 22, 174; mimetic 107; of psychological observation 24; of reading badly 81. asceticism  19, 171, 188, 202 n. 6; Oriental 119 Asiatic  28, 72, 121 askēsis  132 ataraxia  199 atheism  163 n. 12, 187 atheist, the  36, 63, 84, 147 Augustine  33 auto‐genesis  149–150

Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Index

autonomy  70 n. 39, 115, 156, 240; and heteronomy 70 n. 39, 156 avarice  183

b

Badiou, Alain  87 Bamford, Rebecca  13 n. 21, 42 n. 1, 43 n. 19, 66 n. 1, 69 n. 36, 106–107, 110 n. 14, 112 n. 54, 113 n. 77, 164 n. 27, 195, 210, 217–219, 223 n. 17 barbarism  18, 88 beatitude  132 beauty  33, 83, 142, 165, 226, 247, 254 becoming  16, 18, 37, 60, 81, 86, 90 n. 4, 122, 135, 159, 166 n. 50 Benatar, Solomon  104 benevolence  24, 181 Berkowitz, P.  47 Bernasconi, Robert  214–215 Berry, Jessica. N.  32, 139 n. 31, 203 n. 20 Bertram, Ernst  234 Bible, the  84–6 biology  147, 161 n. 1, 214 bliss  82, 136 Brahmans, the  84 Brazil  32 Brobjer, Thomas  28 brotherhood of men, the  79 Brusotti, M.  42, 131 Buddha  84, 235 Buddhism  235 Burke, Edmund  105–106, 108 Busse, O.  251 Byron, Lord  6, 16

c

Caesar, Julius  6 capitalism  208, 211, 221 Carnivale von Venedig  251

Cartesianism  226 Cartwright, David  94, 96, 109 n. 5, 110 n. 24 Castoriadis, Cornelius  126–128 casuistry  16 categorical imperative, the  31, 116 causality  147, 160, 241; complex 124; natural 76, 158, 166 n. 46 Chamfort  117 cheerfulness  47, 131, 135 Chemnitz  249 Chinese, the  153, 164 n. 31, 212, 217, 224 Christ  76, 82, 85–9, 134 Christian church, the  79–80, 83, 88, 120, 126, 142 Christianity  4, 7, 16, 26, 28, 33, 71–2, 74–85, 88–90, 119, 121, 135, 142, 173, 177–178, 180–181, 193, 196, 203 n. 24, 215, 218, 235 Church Fathers, the  187 Cicero  187 Clark, Maudemarie  1, 12 n. 7, 45, 67 n. 10 Cohen, Jonathan R.  1 colonialism  210, 215–217 colonization  215, 221, 223 n. 19 Colossians, the  86 Columbus  235 commercial society  167–168, 207 compassion  2, 7–8, 30, 32, 57, 66, 68 n. 29, 89, 93–96, 98–103, 107, 111, 144, 151, 175, 181, 183, 194, 209, 226; divine 28, 72; see also empathy; see also Mitleid; see also pity conscience  5, 33–37, 47, 49–50, 53, 63, 75, 78–80, 88, 97, 120, 127, 159, 167–171, 175, 179, 208–209, 239–240, 242; evil 57, 207 conservatism  120–1; Burke’s social 108

Index

consolations  3, 17, 200 contemplation  4, 22, 122, 133, 212, 232 contempt  6, 25, 39, 73, 79, 94, 135, 167 contingency  148 Conway, Daniel  1, 69 n. 37 Cooper, David E.  111 n. 51 Corngold, Stanley  100 cosmic exceptionalism  188 cosmopolitanism  179–180 cosmos, the  18, 123 courage  18, 20, 53, 116, 127–128, 134, 149, 192, 206, 231, 233–235 cruelty  12 n. 10, 78, 94–95, 117, 148, 170, 185 n. 21, 185 n. 23, 216, 239 culture  7–8, 16–18, 21, 23, 26, 29, 34, 84, 88, 98, 115–116, 118–119, 123, 132, 165 n. 31, 169, 175, 208, 213–216, 219, 239 Curley, Edwin  132 cynicism  34

d

Daigle, Christine  67 n. 13, 159, 166 n. 49, n. 50, n. 58 damnation  78 Danto, Arthur C.  37 Darwin, Charles  120, 155 Darwinism  160 n. 1 Day of Judgment  75 death  4, 8–9, 30, 39, 76, 80–81, 86, 105, 135, 172, 187–204, 232 debauchery  187 decadence  47 Declaration of Helsinki, the  104 Del Caro, Adrian  215 Deleuze, Gilles  21, 45, 166 Delphic injunction, the  172 depression  107; see also melancholy

Descartes, René  20, 27, 129, 172, 228 destiny  17, 131, 144, 149, 239 deviance  63, 207 Devil, the  157, 213 dialectic, the  83, 124, 199 Diderot, Denis  34, 36, 247, 250 Diethe, Carol  10, 110 Diogenes Laertius  164 n. 30 Dionysian  244; intoxication 201 discipline  23, 170, 243; of spirit 88; of truth 35 disgust  6, 143, 158 dissimulation  61, 152, 161 n. 6, 175 Dodd, N.  207 dogmatism  128; philosophical 32; religious 115 domination  64, 70 n. 39, 73, 91 n. 12; European 215; lust for 86–7; of striving for 101 dominion  60–1, 216 Domino, Brian  147, 162–163 n. 10 dreams  26, 75, 116, 124, 148–149, 156, 163; of immortality 192; the thinker’s 2 drives  2, 38, 56, 59, 64, 77, 79, 93, 98, 100, 111 n. 39, 131, 139 n. 36, 141–142,144, 146–148, 150, 153, 155–158, 160–161 n. 1, 181, 242; and affects 155–156, 159; coarse 135; crude 146; cultivation of 157–159, 242; de‐individuated 153; egoistic and altruistic 179; function of 101; historically conditioned 160; and the intellect 143, 150; knowledge of 147; personal 230; play of, the 148; role of 93; seed‐ 153, 157; and self‐ understanding 38; subjective 139; sublimation of 165 n. 43; sum, the 147; uncontrolled gratification of 143; unegoistic 98

259

260

Index

Dudrick, David  1 duty  131, 185 n. 21

e

ecstasy  77–78 egoism  120, 182–183 egoist, the  73 ego, the  72, 98, 122, 132, 144, 150, 177, 179–181; genuine 231; phantom 231 egotism  108; pseudo 231 emancipation  78, 137 n. 5, 169, 177 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  186 n. 37 emotions, the  10, 41, 68 n. 33, 157; moral 95, 206, 231 empathy  32, 54, 67 n. 20, 101, 106–107, 120 emulation  6 Engadine  254 enlightenment  8, 25, 31, 33, 116–117, 120–125, 133, 135–137, 138 n. 13, 141, 160, 176, 178, 185 n. 24, 192; of the self 87 Enlightenment, the  34, 71, 80–85, 115–121, 131, 141, 178, 185 n. 23; French 19, 36; German 8, 137; Kant and 35 envy  79–80, 229 Epictetus  22–23, 33, 173, 180–181, 188 Epicureanism  8, 21, 173–174, 179, 187–192, 194, 198–201, 203 n. 17, 203 n. 24 Epicurus  22, 32, 90 n. 2, 111 n. 28, 115, 173, 179, 187–190, 197–201, 202 n. 6, 203 n. 19 epistemology  217 Erasmus  115, 121, 165 n. 45 Eris  80

Eros  79–80 eroticism  37, 95 eternal recurrence  2, 132, 163, 235 ethical agents  7, 59, 103, 154 ethics  3–4, 7, 24, 29–30, 33, 45, 47, 58, 63, 94–95, 97, 100, 104–105, 109, 151, 156, 164 n. 29, 167, 172–173, 179, 185 n. 21, 188, 206, 209, 220–221; Greek 172; Pythagorean 251; see also morality Europe/European  21, 23, 26, 34, 50, 83–84, 89, 105, 118, 121, 174, 205, 210–213, 215–224, 235, 254–255 evil  5, 17, 26, 52, 55, 57, 61, 65, 74, 79–80, 117, 132, 137, 143, 145, 154, 170, 197–198, 207, 213, 216, 220, 236, 239 evolution  16–18, 119–120, 126, 178, 205; cultural 213 exaltation  154; gestures of 118; states of 177 experimentalism  32–33, 43 n. 19, 108, 113 n. 81, 179, 186 n. 32

f

fairy‐tale, the  119 fanaticism  33–35, 42, 85, 115, 117, 128, 133, 174–179, 181, 184–185 n. 19, 185 n. 21, n. 23, 186 n. 28, 208; fatherland 50; moral 8, 34, 48, 176, 178–179 fantasy  17–18, 29, 39, 85, 124, 150, 206 fate  16, 76, 86, 150, 172, 240 father confessor  35, 61, 130 feminism  50 Ferney  28 Fichte, G.  20 folk‐language  119

Index

folk‐lore  119 Fontenelle  117 Förster, Bernhard  222 n. 11, 223 n. 21 Förster‐Nietzsche, Elisabeth  10, 247, 253–255 fortitude  97 Foucault, Michel  45, 132, 171–173, 181, 184 n. 9 Franco, Paul  1, 10, 12 n. 7, 58, 66 n. 10, 131, 139 n. 36, 163 n. 23, 232, 244 n. 19 freedom  9, 28, 38, 41, 76, 78, 87–89, 121–122, 148, 153, 155–157, 159– 160, 169, 173, 193, 199, 205, 210, 236, 239–240, 242; of feeling 89, 122, 155, 193 free spirit  1, 16, 18, 21, 23 freethinkers  61, 169 French moralistes  19, 21, 24–5 French revolution: see revolution Fuchs, C.  47 futurity  9–10, 225, 231, 234, 240–241

g

gardens and gardening  77, 151–153, 163 n. 21 Gast, Peter  10, 60, 68 n. 31, 247–248, 250–2, 254 Genoa  223 n. 19, 249 Germany  118, 215, 222 Gersdorff Carl von  248, 250, 254 Gibbon, Edward  34 God  30, 35, 50, 58, 72–3, 76, 78, 82, 84–88, 101, 116, 122, 128, 145, 147, 172, 175, 178, 180–181, 189, 208, 213, 235–237, 239; death of 128, 236–237; kingdom of 87; of mercy 82; pitying 101

gods, the  53, 76, 80, 84, 124, 172, 174, 177, 188, 190–191, 209 Goethe, J. W.  15, 90 n. 2, 119, 254 good and evil  26, 52, 55, 65, 74, 79, 117, 145, 170, 198; good vs. evil 216 Gooding‐Williams, Robert  1 grace  28, 33, 72–73, 82, 91 n. 10, 180, 247; kindness of 60 gratification  143, 158 gratitude  40–41, 77, 120, 129, 190, 200, 239 Greco‐Roman world, the  187 Greeks, the  79–80, 171–172, 213–214; Greek religion 81; Greek tragedy 81 Guay, Robert  161 n. 3 guilt  72, 79–81, 86–88, 97, 167–170, 179

h

Hadot, Pierre  173, 189–190 happiness  2, 24, 27, 64, 103, 124, 126, 129, 132, 136, 142, 171, 178, 199, 218 Hatab, Lawrence  1, 240, 242 health  9–10, 17, 26, 39–41, 53, 55, 64, 75, 77, 106, 147, 150–151, 154, 158, 163 n. 21, 165 n. 39, 175, 190, 192, 198, 201, 206–207, 211–213, 215, 217–221, 223 n. 19, 242, 251–252, 254 heathenism  79 Heaven  28, 72, 79, 193; Heavenly Father 85 Hegel, G. W. F.  20, 67 n. 13 Hell  39, 79, 193–194 Helsinki  104 Helvétius, Claude  118 heretics  208 heroism  211; of knowledge 126; refined 189; of the truthful 106

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Index

Hesiod  80 Higgins, Kathleen M.  1 holiness  74, 85 Holub, Robert C.  215, 222 n. 11 Holy spirit, the  85 homo natura  106 homo pamphagus  64 Horowitz, M. C.  164 n. 30 hubris  149 Hull, Robert C.  134 humanism  121 Hume, D.  34, 127, 138 n. 19, 178 humor  6, 193, 211 Husserl, Edmund  172 Hydra  162–3 n. 10 hypocrisy  226; garden of 152

i

idealism  50 ideal selfishness  63, 70 n. 39 idolization  83 immoralism  93 immortality  88, 134, 142, 191–194, 197–8 India  27, 72, 76, 84, 119, 128, 233, 235 industrialization  211, 220 innocence  79, 81, 90 n. 4, 173 intoxication  85, 123, 177, 188, 211–212 intuition  129; distrust of 27; intellectual 27, 129; otherworldly 178; philosophers of 129 isolation  183, 232 Israel  82

j

James, William  113 n. 77

Janaway, Christopher  1, 58, 69 n. 36, 90 n. 7, 95, 98–99, 112 n. 54, 164 n. 30, 166 n. 58 Jehovah  80 Jesuitism  16, 134 Jews, the  80, 82, 85–86, 209, 213 Johnson, Mark  104 joy  58, 64, 83, 88, 101, 134, 136, 144, 173, 180, 182–185, 188, 193, 195–196, 201; of living 43, 75, 199, 201; trinity of 180 justice  4 17, 36, 50, 64, 71, 81, 88, 121, 125, 130, 183

k

Kant, I.  15, 29–31, 35, 48–49, 66, 93, 98, 115–116, 118–119, 137 n. 5, 170–171, 176, 178–179, 185 n. 21, n. 24, n. 25, n. 27, n. 28; Kant’s Copernican revolution 30, 35 Katsafanas, Paul  155, 159, 162 n. 8, 165 n. 35, 166 n. 49, 240–241 Kaufmann, Walter  224 n. 38 Kierkegaard, S.  33 Klein, Wayne  113 n. 79 knowledge; passion of  4, 8, 16, 28–29, 32, 42, 119, 126–129, 131– 133, 135–137, 142, 146, 155, 192, 201, 239; love of 134, 236; moral 104; pursuit of 8, 130, 136, 194; quest for 3; tree of 16 know thyself  172, 182 Köselitz, Heinrich  9, 206, 248–251, 253 Kundera, Milan  6

l

Laban  255 La Mettrie, J. O.  147, 162 n. 10, 163 n. 12, 165 n. 45

Index

Lampert, Laurence  1 Lane, Melissa  61, 69 n. 35 Langer, Monika M.  1 Large, Duncan  151, 232 La Rochefoucauld  20, 23, 33, 117 Leiter, Brian  12 n. 7, 67 n. 10, 109 n. 5, 110 n. 24, 240–241 lento  20, 24, 50, 176 Lenzer Heide notebook  235 Lessing, G. E.  115 libido  95 Lichtenberg, Georg  73 Livingstone, David  213 Locke, J.  178 Loeb, Paul S.  1, 4–5, 195–196, 225, 237, 241–243 love  23, 36, 57, 60–61, 73, 87, 105, 125, 143–144, 175, 181–183, 196, 200, 208, 232, 256; divine 180; of God 78, 178; of impropriety 19; of knowledge 134, 236; of life 196, 200; of money 175, 208; of nature 77; of pleasure 50; of power 74; story 80; thy neighbor 50, 181; of wisdom 105; universal 98, 183; unrequited 135 Löwith, Karl  235 Ludermann, H.  90 n. 9 lust  43 n. 17; for domination 86–87; for possession 182; for power 84 Luther, Martin  33, 115, 121

m

madman, the  128, 236 magnanimity  18, 128, 231 malice  48, 53, 226, 253 Manfred  248 marriage  183, 255 Martin, Clancy  68 n. 33 Martin, Nicholas  115, 117, 121

martyrdom  37 Marx, Karl  212 masochism  95 maxim  22–24, 31, 174, 197, 201; art of 22, 174; psychological 23 McGinn, Colin  163 n. 14 mechanization  209, 212–13 medicine  4, 88, 125, 179 melancholy  16, 77, 82, 135, 148, 150, 199, 252, 255 Menoeceus  197–198 mercy  181; God of 82; kingdom of 181 Mérimée, Prosper  10, 252 messianism  86 metaphysical need  16, 27, 29–30, 72, 121–122, 179 metaphysics  29–30, 88, 112, 133–134, 156, 170, 175 Mexico  208, 215–216 Meyer, Matthew  1, 201, 225, 234, 238, 244 n. 4 Meysenbug, Malwida von  9, 28 Michelangelo  229 migration  9, 205, 210–211, 215–217, 221 misery  79–80, 82, 136, 199 Mitcheson, Katrina  67 n. 13, 138 n. 16, 165 n. 39, 244 n. 10 Mitleid  2, 28, 72, 93–104, 106–109, 109 n. 5, 110 n. 24, 111 n. 39, 112 n. 63, 183; see also compassion; see also pity moderns, the  27, 30, 35, 77–78, 80, 122, 129, 170, 172, 177, 183 modesty  36, 128, 179; of human existence 188; virtue of 21, 122 Mohammed  6, 252 Moira  76; see also fate money  175, 206–209, 211, 219

263

264

Index

Montaigne, Michel de  32–4, 43 n. 17, 90 n. 2, 117, 174, 188, 247, 250 Montesquieu  168 Montinari, Mazzino  119–120, 129, 134 mood  41, 57–58, 61, 63, 68 n. 25, 33, 70 n. 39, 94, 98–100, 102–104, 180; alienated 40; customary 61; of cynicism 34; of experience 38; of fear 57–58, 60–61, 63, 67 n. 20, 99–100, 102, 107; the individual’s 69 n. 36; of serenity 23; of social groups 69 n. 36 moral interregnum  4 morality  2–12, 27, 35, 42, 45–68, 73–74, 82–84, 86–9, 90 n. 7, 93, 97–100, 102–105, 107–109, 110 n. 24, 112 n. 51, 116, 118, 122, 124, 129,137, 141–142, 151, 156–160, 164 n. 25, 167–173, 176–181, 192–194, 197, 205–207, 209, 212, 221–222, 240, 243, 250; customary 2–10, 11–12 n. 7, 12 n. 10, 45–47, 51–61, 63–67 n. 10, 67 n. 19, 67 n. 20, 97–100, 102–105, 107–109, 111–112 n. 51, 112 n. 63, 142, 154, 158, 190, 193–194, 197, 201, 205, 207, 209, 211–212, 217, 221, 225–226, 232, 238–243; daring 130, 137; petty bourgeois 2, 103; seduction of 49, 58, 176; self‐sublation of 47–8, 50, 67 n. 13; sympathy‐based 151; see also ethics morality of custom: see morality, customary mortality  142, 173, 188, 190, 192–194, 196, 198, 200 Mullin, Amy  238 Murdoch, Iris  6

music  18, 26, 40–41, 107, 248, 254–255 mysticism  170; metaphysical 32, 106; practical 170 myth  200; firewater 211–212, 222 n. 10; of Oedipus 149; mythology  72

n

Napoleon  6, 215–216 narcissism  128, 149–150 naturalism  164 n. 30; evolutionary 16, 18 nature  22, 29–30, 35, 40, 75–77, 80, 87, 90 n. 3, 105–107, 137 n. 5, 147, 152–153, 158, 162 n. 9, 164 n. 30, 174, 186 n. 37, 190, 196, 199, 223 n. 14, 226–227, 229, 231–232, 247, 254; silence of 226, 230 Nealon, Jeffrey T.  207–208 Neocleous, Mark  169–170 neurosis  22, 25, 28, 159, 179 188 New Testament, the  82 Newton, Isaac  119 Nietzsche, Franziska  163 n. 21 nihilism  121, 235, 245 n. 27 Nueva Germania  222 n. 11 Nussbaum, Martha  94, 98, 199

o

obscurantism  31, 35, 119; metaphysical 31–32 Odysseus  188 Oedipus  149 Oldenburg, H.  162 n. 9 Old Testament, the  82 optimism  27, 117 Oschatz, Richard  248–250 Overbeck, Franz  10, 46, 132, 237, 249 Owen, David  1, 137 n. 5

Index

p

pain  10, 38–41, 47, 57, 65, 79, 89, 97, 100–101, 136, 144, 150, 189, 198, 201, 248 Paraguay  222 n. 11 Parkes, Graham  59, 68 n. 31, 110 n. 19, 164 n. 29, 165 n. 43 Pascal, Blaise  15, 23, 78, 90, 142–143, 181, 247, 250 passion of knowledge, the: see knowledge passions, the  15, 17, 26, 79, 130–131, 133–134, 139 n. 36; religious 71 Passmore, John  184–185 n. 19 pathos  7, 15, 42, 174 Paul, L. A.  228 pedagogy  175 penance  10, 250 personhood  40, 156 Peru  208, 215–216 pessimism  27, 39, 41, 49, 199, 201; about life 41; Dionysian 201 Petrarch  115, 121 Pforta  255 philology  20, 81, 88 philosophy: Epicurean  194, 201; German 16, 19–20, 116–118, 134; historical 122; Kantian 29; Latin American 224 n. 25; materialist 162 n. 10; meta‐ 243; metaphysical 21, 26; modern 120, 172; moral 65, 105, 118, 176, 178; natural 118; plebeian 187; post‐Socratic 201; scientific 27, 72; sublimities of 230; therapeutic 205; Western 93 physics  24, 188 physiology  4, 10, 125, 145, 157, 179; psycho‐ 97–98

pity  32, 65, 94–96, 101, 153, 157, 164, 167; see also compassion; see also Mitleid Plato  27, 35, 90, 122, 129, 164 n. 29, 199 Platonism  16, 124 pleasure  4, 12, 12 n. 10, 17–18, 22–23, 32, 37, 50, 73, 75, 77–80, 95, 101, 126, 128–129, 143, 151, 153, 168, 171, 173–174, 177, 188, 190, 198–201, 210, 233; capricious 39; eroticism of 95; of learning and knowledge 4; love of 50; object of 126; of the profligate 188 Pliny  172 Plutarch  23, 174 poetry  19 poets, the  26, 231 politics  9, 89, 105, 174–175, 205, 221 polyp, the  147, 159, 162 n. 10 Pope, Alexander  69 n. 34 Porter, James I.  199–201 power  7, 12 n. 10, 54–55, 58, 76, 79, 84, 88, 95, 99, 101, 103, 105–107, 111 n. 51, 129, 132, 136, 142, 149, 152, 160, 169, 174–175, 179, 183, 185, 190, 194, 201, 206, 208–212, 216–18, 220, 223, 226, 231, 233, 239, 241; appetite for 175, 208; feeling of 3, 12 n. 10, 64–5, 71, 73, 89, 142, 149, 174–175, 177, 209, 218; of freedom 38; hereditary 27, 72; intellectual 26; of life 136; love of 74; lust for 84; passion for 73; ‐ relationship 101, 112 n. 57, 194; seductive 100; source of 17; supernatural 75; thirst for 87; see also will to power pre‐Platonic philosophers  16

265

266

Index

pride  6, 15, 39–40, 74, 78, 83, 86, 106, 133, 142–143, 149, 171, 180, 183, 190, 229, 234 Prometheus  157 providence  35 psychology  10, 20, 27–28, 72–4, 85, 87, 95, 164 n. 29, 175; drive‐ 8, 68 n. 23, 98, 103, 111 n. 39, 136; history of 205; of love 73; moral 93; religious 78 Pugliese, Joseph  215 Pyrrho  31, 33

r

rapture  36, 119, 134; cry of 28, 72 rationality  56, 58, 78, 102; embodied 227; human 104, 186; imaginative 104; retroactive 52 reason  6, 35, 46, 49, 56, 58, 82, 105, 119, 122, 129, 148, 155, 169, 176, 178, 180, 183, 186 n. 28, 191, 197, 207, 215, 226–227, 230, 239; divine 35, 122; Enlightenment 85; errant paths of 72; human 31; philosophical 80; practical 35; raving of 179 Recoaro  252, 254 redemption  29, 87, 94, 181, 235; Paul’s 85; self‐ 75, 84, 235 Redlichkeit  33, 36–7, 55, 60–61, 68 n. 22, 69 n. 35 Rée, Paul  19, 28, 98, 248, 254 Reformation and Counter‐ Reformation  121; Luther’s 121 relativism  30 religion  7, 16–18, 26–29, 36, 42, 71–2, 75–84, 87–88, 135, 172–173, 175– 177, 191–192, 196, 235

religious Phoenicianism  78 Rempel, Matthew  203 n. 24 Renaissance, the  117, 121, 215, 218; Italian 26; Napoleon’s 215; new 26 repentance  33 resurrection  29, 116, 235 retribution  54, 192; supernatural 192 revenge  52–53, 87, 94, 100, 150 revolution  115–117, 119, 120–121, 178, 185 n. 23, 25; Copernican 30, 35; French 105–106, 115, 117, 120–121, 179, 185 n. 23; post‐ 21 Robertson, Simon  11 n. 7, 46, 66 n. 8, 90 n. 7, 164 n. 30, 166 n. 58 Robespierre  176 Rohde, Erwin  250 romanticism  50, 71, 121 Roos, Richard  201 Rousseau, J.J.  15, 22, 48, 77, 90 n. 2, 93, 95, 116–118, 176, 178, 185 n. 23 Rowlands, Mark  62, 69 n. 37, 112 n. 54

s

Sachs, Carl B.  68 n. 23, 70 n. 39, 154–156, 161 n. 5, 166 n. 58 sacrifice  2–3, 47, 52–53, 73, 76, 78, 84, 89, 99, 102–103, 106, 127–128, 132, 167, 175, 177, 179, 183, 185 n. 21, 188, 192, 200–201, 227; self‐ 73, 229 sadomasochism  95 Safranski, Rüdiger  37–38 sage, the  127, 178, 183, 190; Epicurean 190 Saint Paul  71, 84–89, 90 n. 9 Saint Peter  88 saint, the  74–76, 80 Salomé, Lou Andreas  5, 67 n. 14

Index

salvation  48, 73, 78, 134; from death 8, 191; eternal 192–193; need for 72, 75; Paul’s 86; of poor eternal souls, 192, 194; psychology of 28, 72; of the soul 35, 74 sanctification  33 sanctity  53; of the custom 99; of life 79 Savulescu, Julian  104 Schacht, Richard  3, 45 Schelling, F. W. J.  20, 27 Schiller, F.  118 Schmeitzner, E.  10, 248–250, 252 Schmidt, Jochen  1 Schoeman, Marinus  220, 224 n. 37 scholar, the  4, 18, 23, 29, 52, 65, 81–82, 126, 206, 215 scholasticism  29 Schopenhauer, Arthur  2, 7, 15–16, 20, 23, 26–32, 34, 43 n. 17, 66, 88, 90 n. 2, 90 n. 3, 93–98, 106–107, 109 n. 5, 110 n. 24, 118–119, 121–2, 133, 137, 145, 170 Schotten, C. H.  223 n. 14 Schrift, Alan D.  96, 166 n. 50 Schutte, Ofelia  216–218, 224 n. 25 science  2, 4, 7, 15–18, 22, 24–27, 29–30, 42, 49, 64, 71, 76, 88–89, 104, 118–122, 124–127, 132–3, 174, 179, 194, 200, 203 n. 24, 206 Scott, Jacqueline  213–214 secularism  173, 186 n. 28 security  168–170, 207–208, 211; Christian 177 seer, the  231, 236 self‐analysis  219–222 self‐command  94, 180 self‐creation  226, 231

self‐cultivation  9, 34, 141–142, 150–151, 153–158, 160, 171, 175, 219–222, 225, 239 self‐denial  74, 170–171, 206 n. 6 self‐experimentation  134 self‐fashioning  97–98, 100, 103, 151, 156, 164 n. 25, 167–168 self‐intoxication  117, 185 n. 23 selfishness  187; ideal 63, 70 n. 39 self‐knowledge  8, 62, 75, 125, 144, 146–147, 153, 158, 183, 244 n. 10 self‐legislation  236, 241–242 self‐mastery  74, 143, 170–171 self‐overcoming  3, 47–48, 52, 67 n. 13, 99, 171, 241–242 self‐redemption  73, 235 self‐renunciation  74, 171 self‐rule  136, 217–218, 220 self‐sacrifice  73–74, 170, 177 self, the  19, 36, 38–40, 55, 73, 124, 135, 141, 144–145, 147, 149–50, 154–160, 163 n. 20, 23, 172, 182–183, 227–228, 230–1, 241–2; care of 173, 181–182, 190, 230; extra‐ and sub‐ 227; love of 182; Nietzschean 158–159, 164 n. 30, 166 n. 50, 58; rational 227; ‐ sufficiency 180, 190; tekhne of 172; true 212; as unified 155, 157–158, 179 Seneca  23, 33, 93, 164 n. 30, 172, 174 Sensus allegoricus  72 serenity  23, 64, 131, 134–135, 173, 179, 190 Sermon on the Mount, the  73 Shakespeare  79 Shapiro, Gary  196 sin  33, 72, 74–76, 82, 85–88, 91 n. 10, 157, 194; original 181

267

268

Index

skepticism  7, 24, 30–36, 89, 90 n. 3, 106, 116, 122, 131, 139 n. 31, 141, 146, 169, 175, 201; Mediterranean 89, 116, 131, 139 slavery  210, 220 Smith, Brittain  11–12 n. 7, 56, 91 n. 12, 164 n. 29, 203 n. 22 socialism  120–121, 219, 222 sociology  4, 125, 179 Socrates  29, 37, 60 172 solitude  4, 38, 53, 97–98, 111 n. 41, 125, 135, 152–153, 179 Solomon, Robert C.  12 n. 8, 67 n. 19, 68 n. 33, 109, 113 n. 77 Sommer, Andreas Urs  112 n. 63 Sorrento  28 soul, the  15, 32, 35, 39, 62–63, 73, 75, 80, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 100–101, 117, 131, 142, 147, 156, 176, 183, 189, 192, 195–196, 198–199, 229; afflictions of 206; ‐ anxiety 33; and ascetics 64; diseases of 3, 229; eternal 134, 192, 194; European 235; existence of 147; health of 198; history of 15; human, the 24; immortality of 134, 142, 197; loftiness of 88; mortal 192; physicians of 3; polymorphic 28; repose of the 4, 42, 131; salvation of 74; torments of 80; tranquillity of 61, 74 sovereign Individual, the  238–242 Spinoza, B.  15, 26–27, 30, 90 n. 2, 93, 129, 132, 136, 162 n. 9 spirituality  214; pure 77, 142, 199 spiritualization  47, 142, 144, 170 Stack, George J.  147, 162 n. 10, 165 n. 45 Staten, Henry  95, 101, 112 n. 57

Stendhal  252 Stern, Tom  160–161 n. 1 Stifter, Adalbert  251 stock exchange, the  175, 208 stoicism  95, 97, 118 Stoics, the  93–94 Strauss, D. F.  34 Strong, Tracy B.  5 subjectivity  4, 8, 59, 68 n. 25, 68 n. 29, 70 n. 39, 141–142, 147, 150, 153–156, 161 n. 3, 228, 240; autonomous 156; heteronomous 156; material conditions of 160, 166 n. 46; sadomasochistic 95 sublimation  122, 170; of drives 165 n. 43 sublime, the  35, 60, 77; moral sublimeness 85 suffering  3–4, 38–41, 75, 95–96, 100–103, 136, 168, 175, 183, 201, 209 superhuman, the  2, 72, 75–76, 83, 165 n. 31, 237, 242 See also: Übermensch supreme divinity, the  169, 207 Svendsen, Lars  68 n. 25 Switzerland  254 symbolism  88, 232 sympathy  41, 77, 119, 130, 151, 183, 207, 218; ethic of 97; see also morality, sympathy‐based

t

Taine, Hyppolite  168 tekhne of life  172; see also self terror  64, 198; subterranean 193 tetrapharmakos, the  189 Tevenar, Gudrun von  96 theology  83, 118; tricks of 72

Index

therapy  89, 150, 214, 219, 221; of anguish 189; moral 94, 97, 100, 109; political 9, 205, 222 Tocqueville, Alexis de  168 Torah, the  88 Toscano, Alberto  176, 186 n. 28 tragedy  64–65, 101; Greek 81 tranquillity  23, 61; contemplative 199; domestic 61; of the soul 61, 74, 204 n. 35 Tremblay, Abraham  147, 162 n. 10 Tristan and Isolde  131 Trophonius  48 truth  7, 15–19, 21, 24–27, 29–30, 35–36, 38, 50–51, 55, 59, 71, 73, 82–84, 88, 106, 120, 122–123, 128–129, 131, 136, 138 n. 24, 142, 145, 171, 175–177, 180, 182, 194, 199, 208–209, 211, 226, 235–236, 244 n. 10; love of 105 tyranny  97, 164 n. 25, 168, 238; communitarian 168; of customary morality 97; of timidity 168, 208; of the true 129

vice  37, 116, 170–171, 218, 239 Vicenza  252 violence  17, 208, 215 virtue  4, 6, 9, 12 n. 8, 12 n. 10, 22, 33, 37, 50, 54, 60–61, 78–79, 82–83, 89, 107, 118, 127, 155, 164 n. 30, 170, 195–196, 206, 218–220, 224 n. 37, 225, 231, 237, 239; Asian 219; of antiquity 116; of cautious reserve 32; Christian 37, 60; of compassion 66, 93; European 211–212; future 231, 233; German 89, 116; of honesty 33; of ignorance 79; impossible 82; intellectual 36, 128; language of 174; of modesty 21, 122; Nietzschean 68 n. 33, 138 n. 20; paragons of 33; politics of 174; of the rational or free death 81, 196 vita contemplativa  23, 135 vita practica  135 void  199–200 Volk  223 n. 14 Voltaire  28, 34, 115–117, 119, 121, 168

u

w

Übermensch  2 see also superhuman underworld, the  188 universalism  86 Universe, the  147, 162, 174, 199 utility  25, 151, 201; of humanity 22; of the individual 159; of Nietzsche’s philosophy 215

v

vanity  30, 61, 73–4, 84, 106, 153, 157, 251 Vattimo, Gianni  159–160, 166 n. 53 Venice  248–251, 253–254

Wagner, Richard  119, 177 war  74, 88–89, 120, 126, 129, 131, 174, 210, 218 Warren, James  189 welfare  170; of humanity 22, 25, 174, 178 White, Richard  13 n. 24 Widemann  248 Wienand, Isabelle  228 Williams, Bernard  45 will to life  2, 30, 106 will to power  2, 95, 106, 238; see also power

269

270

Index

will to system  19 will to truth  238 wisdom  6, 22, 29, 33, 45, 71, 75, 88–89, 129, 188, 218, 231, 252; love of 105; of nature 226; philosophical 131 Wöhrmann F. von  248, 252 world order  132, 183; moral 35

y

Young, Julian  202 n. 6 Yovel, Yirmiahu  136

z

Zarathustra  43 n. 21, 195–196, 225, 237, 241–242 Zetetics  32 Zweig, Stefan  32

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