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February 16, 2007
Brian Leiter in the Standford Encyclopedia 's entry on Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy says:
Nietzsche, then, has no political philosophy. He occasionally expresses views about political matters, but, read in context, they do not add up to a theoretical account of any of the questions of political philosophy. He is more accurately read, in the end, as a kind of esoteric moralist, i.e., someone who has views about human flourishing,
He concludes by saying that Nietzsche offers us a severe regime for the realization of individual potential — at least for the select few.
Though Nietzsche certainly was not a systematic philosopher, I find Leiter's claim that there is no political dimension to Nietzsche's text suprising, given that Nietzsche aimed to revolutionize society and culture and that Nietzsche is an aristocratic political thinker who dams democracy as an expression of modern nihilism. For Nietzsche, as well as for the ancients, philosophy was always more than the discourses of philosophers; such discourses had to reflect and be integrated into a practice of living. Nietzsche’s therapeutic project, if you like, is to “heal” nihilistic-modernity.
Secondly, maybe Nietzsche addressed specific issues in political philosophy such as friendship. The intimacy of friendship and philosophy is deep in classical philosophy and the consubstantiality of the friend and the philosopher was taken for granted. Aristotle, for instance, eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics. argued that one cannot live without friends, that it is necessary to distinguish between friendship founded on utility and on the pleasure of virtuous friendship (in which the friend is loved as such), that it is not possible to have many friends, that friendship at a distance tends to result in oblivion, etc.
Today the relation between friendship and philosophy has actually fallen into disrepute. So how did Nietzsche address this issue?
Nietzsche was more ambivalent: the necessity of friendship and, at the same time, a certain distrust towards friends was a key of Nietzscheʼs strategy. In Beyond Good and Evil political “friendship” is understood in terms of solitude (hermits) and references to the cultivation of agonistic friendships abound. In the "Our Virtues" section of this text Nietzsche writes:
Beware of those who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtley in making moral distinctions. They never forgive us once they have made a mistake in front of us (or, worse, against us); inevitably they become our instinctive slanders and detractors, even if they should still remain our "friends". (para 217)
In a latter section entitled 'What is Noble', where Nietzsche is discussing master and slave morality, he links friends and enemies within a value creating master morality. He says that this morality is alien and embarrasing to present tastes as it is beyond good and evil and the adds:
The capacity for, and the duty of long gratitude and long revenge---both only among one's peers---refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necesssity for having enemies (as it were, as drainage ditches for the effects of envy, quarrelsomeness, exuberance--at bottom in order to be capable of good friends): all these are typical characteristics of noble morality which, as suggested, is not the morality of "modern ideas" and therefore is hard to empathize with today, also hard to dig up and uncover. (para. 260)
Presumably, the sophisticated concept of friendship is an agonistic one. It is not one based on utility as that is a part of slave morality.
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Nietzsche says:
I believe friendship, as you say, is an ambivalent topic in Nietzsche's writings. For one thing the Hermit seeks solitude and affirmed distance from the rabble and crowd.
Yet at the same time one finds such quotes as above, whereof the friend is esteemed, though as an enemy. From my reading of Nietzsche I am quite the skeptic when such ambiguous flags are raised in relation to his other aphorisms, rather i try to think within the context to extract my meaning from it.
He goes on to say:
So I guess the friend is one who, despite resemblance, must be resisted to the point of being his best enemy.
There is no compassionate friendship for the overman, no overt submission (to anything external anyway).
The interesting idea here is Nietzsche's affirmative conciliation of the two public opposites: friend and enemy.
One must be fearful of unconditional friendship here. For by maintaining a persistent distance from a friend, the emotional barrier would no longer be an obstacle, and the disposition to wage war or harm upon him/her would be that much more prepared, less shocked. One must be ready to dispose of them as well, if they are unyielding to the individual.
As to the second quote...what can I say, the man never ceases to amaze me. So the friend is to be seen as one's reflection, a rough, imperfect reflection. So one's imperfect reflection is something to be overcome, a stepping stone, a certain phase or past persona. Then friends, chronologically, are to be embraced and discarded, so long as the Self's reflection remains, to use Nietzsche's rhetoric, more powerful, more affirmative, more perfect. His overman is not bred to ever be, but persistently become, overcoming with his iron-fisted will.
Therefore, one should rather look for enemies to befriend in the agonistic sense. Any other type of friendship is either despondent or Self-negating.