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Introduction: Nietzsche and the Passions

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jnietstud.44.1.0001

1538-4594

Keith Ansell‐Pearson, Michael Ure,

Philosophical Ethics and Theory

Nietzsche has some striking thoughts on the passions. In a note from the end of 1880 he writes that without the passions the world is reduced to simply “quantity and line and law and nonsense,” presenting us with “the most repulsive and presumptuous paradox” (KSA 9:7[226]).1 Indeed, Robert Solomon has argued that Nietzsche attacks the modern stress on epistemology within philosophy and seeks to return philosophy to its true vocation as a doctrine of the passions. For Solomon, the title The Gay Science, signals a defense of the passionate life, since la gaya scienza is a life of longing and love.2 This special issue of JNS has been put together with a view to exploring and illuminating Nietzsche as a philosopher of the passions. The suggestion is not, however, that he is a philosopher of the passions at the expense of reason. We have no desire to tout the familiar conception of Nietzsche an arch-irrationalist.The idea of Nietzsche as a “passionate defender of the passionate life,” as Solomon puts it, a thinker who wanted to promote living with passion and who writes from the perspective of the passions and not from the supposedly “objective” perspective of reason and rationality and offers an unrestrained defense of them, requires some qualification since Nietzsche's views on the passions (or emotions and affects) undergo complex transformations in the course of his intellectual development.In his middle period writings, he idealizes a free spirit that is free in a specific sense. It does not enjoy the freedom of action, which is an illusion. Rather, through what Nietzsche calls the “purifying knowledge,” it has become “rid of emphasis” (HH 34), realizing that all is nature and nothing more than nature, so that it finally lives among human beings “as if in nature, without praise, reproaches, or excessive zeal, or as if at a play, feasting upon the sight of many things that had previously made us only afraid.” This is a much simpler life than that lived hitherto by humanity, one that is “more purified of the affects than at present” and that speaks of a “good temperament” and a “cheerful soul.” Such a free spirit, who has become liberated from the ordinary chains of life, lives “only in order to know better,” renouncing many things without envy or bitterness, and now practices the most desirable state, one of “free, fearless hovering above people, customs, laws, and traditional appraisals of things” (HH 34). Although this state is one of a certain renunciation—for example, the renunciation of action—it is not without joy, and it is this joy that the free spirit seeks to communicate to others. In this context the “joy” being referred to is that of liberation from the primeval affects we have inherited.In Dawn, Nietzsche argues that Christianity has brought into the world a 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, even into our noblest arts and philosophies, the old habits associated with these securities and evaluations (D 57). 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 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). Paul Franco has recently 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.”3As 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. In WS 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].” In WS 53, he 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.In his later writings Nietzsche is perhaps most keen to combat what he sees as the degrading of the passions. He thinks we misunderstand the relation between passion and reason when we treat the latter an independent entity and not as “a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason—” (KSA 13:11[310]).4 The fear of the senses, of desires, and of the passions, and that goes as far as counseling us against them, is to be viewed as a symptom of weakness, as an inability to restrain impulses (KSA 13:14[157]).5 In terms of human life and its economy of affects we discover, Nietzsche argues, that the affects “are one and all useful,” whether directly or indirectly, and considered in economic terms the forces of nature are both useful and the sources of much terrible fatality (KSA 12:10[133).6 As he famously writes, we both need to have and not to have our emotions or affects, to know how to employ their stupidity as well as their fire. Nietzsche's art of the passions is an intricate and delicate one.So what of the contributions to this topic that make up this special issue? In the opening essay Aurelia Armstrong considers Spinoza and Nietzsche as two modern thinkers who inherit the ancient Stoic conception of philosophy as a therapeutic practice aimed at producing human flourishing. However, she argues that both thinkers depart from the Stoic endeavor of seeking to attain freedom through liberation from the passions. There are two problems with a “nonimmanent” model or conception of human freedom: first, it elevates the person of virtue above nature and accords to the soul, but not the body, the power to transcend natural determination; second, it narrows our conception of what counts as the self to the rational soul of a person that is engaged in a permanent struggle for liberation from the body, passivity, and the passions. The result is a divided individual split between the cognitive and the affective, the mental and the bodily, the rational and the instinctive, and a negative philosophy of the passions that leaves the individual in this torn state. What is needed, then, is a quite different appreciation of the passions, one that will show how it is possible to increase our power in the world. But here we need to appreciate that our freedom is limited and that our flourishing life is a precarious one.In the next contribution, Michael Ure explores Nietzsche's sources in both ancient and modern currents of thought, aiming in particular to show how Nietzsche's thinking is best seen as an amalgam of an ancient model of philosophy (with its concern with “spiritual exercises” as Pierre Hadot has called them) and the new paradigm of evolutionary thinking. Specifically, Ure argues that Nietzsche attempts to wed one particular ancient spiritual exercise—that of attaining “the view from above”—with the new perspective of evolutionary naturalism. Nietzsche's practical philosophy repudiates the ordinary emotions of compassion, fear, and grief in an effort to attain the classical ideal, namely, freedom from mortal affective life. For Ure, the significance of this reading is that it means it is no longer sufficient to construe Nietzsche as a philosopher of the “tragic,” since what is unleashed with the revival of the view from above is the philosophical passion of joy. The new science, “the gay science,” is that mode of knowledge that seeks the view from above, or the perspective of the economy of the whole, and takes pleasure in the experimental sacrifice of humanity; indeed, it derives joy from this. Thus, for Ure, the joy of science is the joy of Schadenfreude.In the next contribution Joanne Faulkner undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the affect—and metaphor—of disgust in Nietzsche's writings. For Faulkner Nietzsche's recourse to disgust is an essential part of the corporeal and affective imagery Nietzsche often draws on in his evaluations of philosophy and culture. She argues that disgust operates on a number of levels in the writings, including as a means of communicating a visceral response to philosophy and to society, as well as the general cultural malaise—the self-disgust—that characterizes the affective life of late nihilistic modernity. It also operates playfully and ironically in his writings. However, perhaps the most interesting figuration of disgust in the text of Nietzsche is its deployment as a means of generating a future community of “Nietzscheans”: here the affect of disgust works by contagion and in opposition to the lowly affect of pity or compassion (Mitleid) that degrades both benefactor and receiver. We thus have another opposition between strength and weakness, namely, the contagion of disgust contra the contagion of pity. There are for Faulkner a number of questions to be asked of Nietzsche's affective philosophy of disgust. How do we avoid becoming contaminated by this disgust with life? What are the assumptions about the sphere of the social that underlie his use of disgust as the chief affective orientation toward others? What might be the potentialities of disgust that remain underexplored in Nietzsche's work and our reception of it? And, finally, what of the tensions that govern Nietzsche's thinking on disgust and his quest for purification? Does not the desire for purity move in the direction of an intolerance of difference and ambiguity that runs contrary to Nietzsche's stated goals of promoting diversity and creativity? Faulkner concludes by suggesting that the best use to be made of Nietzsche's philosophy of life affirmation consists in reading against those moments in his texts that favor purity and attempting instead a “redemptive dialectic” of disgust.In the final contribution Joseph Kuzma takes the reader on a journey into Nietzsche's search for a new erotic ideal. For Kuzma, as for readers like Robert Pippin, the figuration of desire that forms the basis of a Nietzschean eroticism is a risky and unconventional one of distance and the infinitely remote. Kuzma wants to know how the specific demand of fashioning such an ideal came to impose itself on Nietzsche's thinking and why an unqualified affirmation of erotic distance prominently asserts itself in his mature philosophy and as a response to the impasses of nihilism. In the article, he seeks to show that a possible impetus for the new eros can be traced back to Nietzsche's formative exposure to the pathos of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. For Nietzsche, Tristan is Wagner's “non plus ultra,” a central work and possessing a fascination for him that was without equal or parallel. What has not been explored in the literature to date, however, is the presence of Tristanian tropes in Nietzsche's mature writings and concepts such as eternal recurrence. On Kuzma's reading, the opera offers its audience two separate narratives: one that culminates in presence, satisfaction, and ultimately release and another in which the unceasing movement of courtly deferral remains unvanquished. While it pushes the desire for amorous consummation to the farthest point possible, it also offers at the same time a portrait of unrelenting erotic forbearance. And it is this tension that captivates Nietzsche, according to Kuzma. What Nietzsche ultimately sees in this regimen of erotic deferral and distanciation is an implement to be deployed in the struggle against romanticism and the whole tradition of consummatory and nihilistic thinking that goes back to Plato. In short, Nietzsche's desire is for a deep “eternity” (“Ewigkeit”) that is bereft of release and consummation. This rehabilitation of erotic distance finds its consummate articulation in the curious thought of eternal recurrence conceived as a thought of absolute separation. For Kuzma, it is this thought alone that provides us with an articulation of distance unfettered by any and every limit. The great difficulty of presenting this thought—which, as every reader of the text knows, is a strong feature of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—is part of its enigmatic truth: the exigency of deferral that is the meaning and message of eternal return must be testified and borne witness to.