Politics, Friendship and Solitude in Nietzsche (Confronting Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in ‘Politics of Friendship’)1 Paul J.M. van Tongeren2 Visiting Scholar, Department of Philosophy University of Pretoria Pretoria 0002 The paper offers a counter-reading to Derrida’s “utopian” reading of Nietzsche, focussing instead on Nietzsche’s cynical view of friendship, based on the impossibility of being a friend to oneself. Unlike Aristotle, who sees the basis of human political nature in their shared rationality and mutual friendship, Nietzsche sees not only politics, but human beings themselves as being constituted by a violent act of submission, and characterised by an ongoing struggle for power. The paper further examines two intellectual traditions about friendship and politics, one (primarily associated with Aristotle) according to which the two are positively related and no real tension could exist between them. Another tradition (primarily associated with Montaigne) holds friendship to be irreconcilable with politics. Elements of both traditions can be recognised in Nietzsche who, finding the radical deceptive nature of friendship unacceptable, moves to a solitude which is equally unbearable. For it is precisely the hermit that knows that his solitude makes him into an other to himself, which turns out to be a motive for real friendship, the third element which prevents the lonely hermit from sinking into the depth of self-interrogation. The paper concludes with the recognition that friendship, for Nietzsche, can only have an intermediary function on the way to full realisation of friendship, which will be a friendship of an inner difference or plurality, i.e. on our way to what is ultimately beyond the human condition, to the “overman”.
1. Introduction Nietzsche in Derrida’s book on the politics of friendship It is impossible, at least for me, to give a correct account of Derrida’s book; it is so rich and full of motives, of suggestions and detours in different directions, that it would demand a whole series of articles, or even books, to do justice to it. When I start now with some summarising remarks on the book (with which I will inevitably show, more than anything else, how little of it I really understand), I concentrate on the chapters in which Nietzsche is the main author. 1 2
Paper presented at the Third International Conference for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities in Pretoria, South Africa, 26-30 June 2000. To whom correspondence should be addressed. Address: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nijmegen, PO Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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The book opens with this famous quotation that does not have a real origin, and that was repeated time and again in the history of our culture. One of those who repeat this quotation, is Friedrich Nietzsche. But he repeats it in a revolutionary way, i.e. by inverting it: “Perhaps the day of joy will also come on a day when each will say: ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ cried the dying wise man; ‘Enemies, there are no enemies!’ cry I, the living madman.” (HAH I, 376) One of the ways in which Derrida reflects on this inversion, is by relating it to Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysical belief in exclusive oppositions, or – as Nietzsche calls it – “the faith in opposite values” (BGE 2), the faith that makes the metaphysicians say that whoever thinks (Nietzsche writes: whoever dreams) that anything could originate out of its opposite, “is a fool”, a madman. Derrida suggests that the transition from friends to enemies, is not just an inversion from the one into its opposite, but also an inversion from thinking in terms of exclusive opposites into another way of thinking, from the logic of opposition and exclusion into another logic. That would on the one hand be a radical rift or rupture, but on the other hand one which breaks with the concept of rupture. This way of breaking and not breaking, of inverting and not inverting (a way of thinking that probably is the most explicit where Nietzsche speaks about the real world and the apparent world), is expressed in this word that is so frequently used by Nietzsche: the word “vielleicht”, “perhaps”, “peutêtre”. Nietzsche’s thinking is a thinking of the perhaps. A thinking which announces and realises something radically new, something of which the newness or difference can nevertheless not be thought according to the metaphysical logic of oppositions. Nietzsche makes the perhaps into an event in the Heideggerian sense of the word. Derrida relates this perhaps-saying to what he calls the teleiopoietic (or auto-teleiopoietic) structure of some typical Nietzschean sentences, in many of which Nietzsche addresses his friends: “meine Freunde...” The inversion we started with – the inversion from friends into enemies, which was at the same time an inversion from wisdom into madness (“ ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ cried the dying wise man; ‘Enemies, there are no enemies!’ cry I, the living madman.”) – this inversion should therefore at the same time be thought as a connection, that announces something which is not yet there and which is being realised in the announcement. Everybody will be aware that the connection between friend and enemy has already its tradition. One important element in that tradition is the evangelical word: love thy enemies. But this is quite another way of connecting friendship or love and enmity. For here the connection or transition not only excludes the exclusion, but also removes the whole opposition; it neutralises the distinction. The enemy that is loved, is no longer an enemy. Those who love their enemies do not have enemies. Contrary to this elimination of the difference, the postponement, the “tele”-element in the teleiopoiesis, Derrida seems with Nietzsche to look for an inversion, a revolution, which saves the difference and the distance: a friendship that saves the disproportion (Derrida: 81), a philia without oikeiotes (178), and a politics of not only difference, but also even of separation (73). This search for friendship is being recognised in Nietzsche’s image of friends who are primarily friends of solitude, who are “solitaires” rather than “solidaires” (Derrida: 73): friends who, precisely as friends are not related, do not form a community, let alone a democratic community; friends who as future philosophers do think that truth
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is no truth anymore as soon as it becomes common. In Nietzsche’s writings this community which is not a community, is described, and we are called to belong to it, a belonging which is no belonging. And as the addressed, we become friends of these strange friends, so it seems. Derrida’s utopian interpretation of Nietzsche I don’t know to what extent it is due to my reading, but I was struck by a more or less optimistic-prophetic, or even a utopian tone in Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche. I realise that I probably underestimated the frightening possibilities that he recognises as well. But still Derrida stresses the importance of the “perhaps”: the announcement of a possibility which is beyond all guarantees, beyond all guesses. He points to the teleiopoietic structure of Nietzsche’s addresses and announcements, in which the far-away is simultaneously realised and kept at a distance. He calls this teleiopoiesis a messianic structure (Derrida: 55; on page 84 he speaks of a messianic revolution or interruption; on page 152 of a teleiopoietic or quasi messianic logic; is it enough to say that the messiah could also be a monster, in order to prevent a prophetic understanding of these expressions?). He points to the way in which Nietzsche involves his readers, by addressing them, in what he announces, making them with him into heralds and predecessors of what will be, involving them (i.e.: involving us) in a responsibility for what is announced; a responsibility to let the others (the philosophers of the future) appear, to allow them to appear. And Nietzsche does so by calling us, and therewith making us into his friends. On page 317 Derrida renders Zarathustra’s words about the friend and the neighbour, and relates it to the evangelic word on the love of one’s neighbour; he acknowledges that Zarathustra is perverting this evangelic saying, but “pour en tenir la promesse”. From this prophetic, utopian perspective he recognises in the community of those without community, the image of a friendship which is ruled by the logic of the gift and by the irreducible priority of the other, a loving (aimance) beyond friendship and love (Derrida: 88), an image of the ‘event’, and he asks for the political consequences and implications of this breaking with the idea of reciprocity and equality (82 passim.), looking for a possibility which might change the concept of the political. I was struck by this tone, because in my reading of Nietzsche, and especially where he writes on friendship, it is rather the impossibility of friendship that stands in the forefront. In this paper I would like to explain this rather distressing image of friendship which I find in Nietzsche. And this difference between these two readings of Nietzsche, is the first point of discussion that I propose. Now about the way to proceed: Instead of moving from a utopian image of friendship to a similarly utopian politics, I will start from a presentation of at least some aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking about politics, and from there I will move over to what he writes on friendship. And here will appear a second question or point of discussion: I will suggest that it is the impossibility of being a friend to oneself which is the basis for Nietzsche’s cynical view of friendship. But we first look at the following theme.
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2. Nietzsche on politics Nietzsche as a political thinker If we look for what Nietzsche writes about politics, we have to be prepared to find things that do not simply fit into the pattern of what is usually called ‘politics’; or with the words of J. Derrida: it might be about ‘the political’ rather than about the way this defined itself in terms that became canonical; it might be at a distance from the dominant tradition of politics. But with this in mind, we may, I think, consider Nietzsche to be a political thinker. To explain what I mean, I take Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as my starting point. Nietzsche points to a very important event in the history of mankind as the genealogical basis of the typological division between the noble or master morality on the one hand and the slave (or herd, or Christian) morality on the other; an event which can even be considered to be constitutive for this division, and which also bears on the relation between humans and animals. Many moral and political philosophers since modern times have considered some kind of pacification as being the origin of our ordered society: the social contract which allows for the coexistence of groups or individuals that were previously fighting each other. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are the clearest examples. Nietzsche does the opposite. He places a violent submission at the beginning of the history of morals and politics: some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organised for war and with the ability to organise, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. (GM II, 17) In the Genealogy of Morals this original submission is said to be at the basis of bad conscience. In Beyond Good and Evil (section 257) we find a similar text, in which the same violent submission is indicated as the origin of aristocracy: Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilised, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. Aristocracy and slavery both seem to have the same genealogical basis: a violent act of submission. This original submission originated the distinction between the two parties as two types of human beings: it made the subordinated into those in which the bad conscience could grow, and the submitters into those out of whom a powerful type of human being could develop. Both have their origin in a violent struggle. Now it also becomes clear why one can speak of a genealogical “basis”, although genealogy is the method which describes phenomena as the products of a history of different and conflicting ways in which they are interpreted without there being a firm basis on which one could decide about the right interpretation. The genealogical basis is not an original truth behind all interpretations, but it nevertheless is the presupposition of those in-
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terpretations in a certain way. Nietzsche’s genealogy always points to the struggle as the origin of the matter in question. Now, in this case the struggle seems even to be considered to be the beginning of the history of the human being. Nietzsche compares it with decisive moments in the evolution of animal life. Only at this point the history of mankind begins; only here man jumps out of “his animal past” (GM II, 16). Those who carry out the attack are called “human beings” indeed, but such “whose nature was still natural” and “more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, ‘more whole beasts’)” (BGE 257). They are completely natural, without any restriction; they are not yet “as yet undetermined” (which is Nietzsche’s definition of the human being: “the as yet undetermined animal”). These are preceding beings. Therefore Nietzsche’s terminology refers as much to animals as it does to humans: “men of prey” (BGE 257). In the Genealogy he speaks of “semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure” (GM II, 16). In this act of violent submission, this unconcealed manifestation of the will to power, which is the will of life (BGE 259), originates the human being and the distinction between humans and animals. In other words: where humans come into being, they do so within a relation of power, as either commanding or obedient. To be more precise: as soon as humans appear, they appear either as ones that can both command and obey, or as ones that can only obey. This relation is never stable and fixed; it can always change. Preceding this distinction no human beings actually exist. Those who are distinguished as ‘only obeying’ run the risk of becoming completely determined, i.e. of becoming reduced to animals, they run the risk of “animalisation” (BGE 203). The proper condition of the human being is in-between being still or again totally determined. The human being is the not-yet-determined animal. Nietzsche presents his genealogy here as an hypothesis about “how the ‘state’ began on earth”, and opposes it explicitly to the hypotheses of the political philosophers of the social contract (GM II, 17). In this sense, he discusses as a political philosopher with other political philosophers. When we, however, take serious what we saw so far, and when we consider politics (or “the political”) as the distribution and organisation of power among people, Nietzsche turns out to be even in a much stronger sense a political philosopher. For: according to him the human being does only exist as such through this distinction between those who submit and those who are submitted. Whereas the political philosophers of the social contract all had to invent an origin for politics, because they started with a-political human beings, Nietzsche brings the political within the concept of the human being. As Aristotle, for whom the human being is “by nature” a political being (just as he is by nature befriended with other human beings), so Nietzsche claims that it is the natural event of a political division and organisation of power that introduces the human being in history. But while Aristotle finds the basis for this political nature of humans in their rationality (their “having logos”) and their being friends, Nietzsche points rather to their being enemies, to a violent submission, i.e. to “will to power”. In the same way as the stories about the social contract do not refer to a historical origin, also Nietzsche’s myth of origin does not refer to a specific first moment in history. Overpowering, submission and struggle are not so much the first step of the development of the human being, but they are its continuous principle. Human beings are from the beginning, always already, characterised through this distinction (which
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therefore seems to be even more fundamental than the sexual difference). The human being is not only in its origin, but also in its development: a political being: they originate and develop and grow in strength and nobility through this tension-full distinction between them (BGE 257), through struggle or fight (BGE 262). Nietzsche turns out to be a political thinker not only in so far as he – among other things – develops a theory about politics, but his philosophy is through and through political; he develops a political ‘anthropology’ on the basis of his political ‘ontology’ of the will to power. But ‘politics’ has to be taken in a Nietzschean sense. In Ecce Homo (EH: Destiny 1) Nietzsche writes that with him, “the concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits (”Geisterkrieg”); all power structures of the old society have been exploded”. Politics is not any longer the organisation of human social life, but it is the principle for the agonistic, tensionful, fight or war. Politics is not a unifying force, but rather a multiplying one, not a pacification but a war-making reality. The quote from EH continues as follows: “there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.” Not a war between well-defined and determined parties (“all power structures of the old society have been exploded”), but a war in which the parties themselves dissolve, they become spectres (“Geisterkrieg”). It is not a war between nationalities or peoples; that would be what Nietzsche would call “kleine Politik” (petty politics). “Great politics” (“Große Politik”), however, is the politics of “Heimatlosen”, people without a home, without a determined, fixed identity. Nietzsche’s critique of the “Kleinstaaterei Europa’s” (“the European system of a lot of petty states”) seems not to aim at a unified Europe, let alone a universal peace, but rather at a (paradoxical) universalisation of war and an endless multiplication of differing, conflicting parties. Politics and friendship My last quotations about the “the European system of a lot of petty states” were taken from The Gay Science, section 377 which is entitled “We who are homeless”; it is one of those texts in which Nietzsche addresses his friends. That is: he seems to address his friends with words that do point to a situation in which there are only enemies left; a situation in which every coherence and community is dissolved in agon and struggle. Nietzschean politics seems to be not a democratic politics of friends or brothers. We all know his anti-democratic feelings and his critique of democracy (democracy is in Nietzsche’s opinion the destruction of difference; democracy is – according to the preface to Beyond Good and Evil the proper antidote against war: “The Germans have invented gunpowder – all due respect for that! – but then they made up for that: they invented the press”; and “the press”, or “the freedom of the press and newspaper-reading” is for Nietzsche the instrument of “the democratic enlightenment”). Nietzschean politics is not a politics of friends, so we may conclude. But what then does it mean that Nietzsche addresses his fellow homeless ones, his co-non-patriots, as his friends? It seems that we have reached here at least one of Derrida’s questions in the book we are discussing. A question that cannot be answered in a simple way, as Derrida has pointed out in such a fascinating way.
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3. Two ways of thinking about the relation between politics and friendship One of the lines one might draw through the history of thinking about friendship, is the line along which one could distinguish two ways of relating friendship and politics. One according to which the two are positively related, even to the extent of almost being identified; the other according to which they are rather negatively identified, in which the one seems almost to replace the other. Aristotle is clearly a representative (or even the standard) for the first line: not only because friendship is a form of community, and every community is embedded in the comprehensive political community, but also because every community is constituted not only by justice and law, but also – and even primarily – by friendship or natural affinity. It is – I think – more than only an analogy when Aristotle distinguishes the various forms of political organisation and their respective perversions in terms of various family-relations and the type of friendship they represent (or lack). Politics is always, in some way or another a realisation of friendship, and friendship is always, in some way or another, political. At least there can be no real tension between the two. A first sign of a possible tension we find already in Cicero, when he phrases the Aristotelian question whether a friendship might be ended when the friend loses the quality for which he is loved (EN IX, iii), in terms of the political correctness of the friend (De Amicitia XI, 36 – XIII, 44). But Cicero’s answer resolves the question immediately: there can be no friendship where there are political vices. Nobody can ever be legitimised in supporting a friend who acts against the political community. To say it with an inversion of a well-known modern expression: for Cicero public vices exclude the private virtue of friendship. But this way to put it, is mistaken because friendship precisely is not a private virtue; it is itself a public, a political virtue. It is different, however, with Montaigne. In his essay, he defends Cajus Blosius who responded to the questioning by Laelius, that he would have obeyed his friend Gracchus, even when he would have asked him to set the temples on fire. Montaigne comments: “they were more friends than they were citizens, rather friends to each other than friends or enemies to their country”. Friendship becomes something which leaves the political behind. One feels tempted to see Montaigne’s biography, his retiring from politics and public life before he starts writing his essays, as an image for a meaning of friendship as a refuge to which one withdraws. Without doubt these two lines will have something to do with the nature of politics as it developed. To the extent to which there is a political community, there will be something like friendship. But as soon as politics becomes the element in which one precisely cannot trust the other, in which peace is only the provisional and temporary figure of a struggle, people will be tempted to flee from this political jungle to a refuge where “real community” can be experienced. They take their refuge in the eros of friendship where politics becomes dominated by eris. But this suggests that they are disappointed with politics, which – according to them – should (but does not) provide a community. This diagnosis makes it not easy to situate Nietzsche with regard to the two ways of thinking about the relation between friendship and politics. On the one hand: if I were right in defining the political for Nietzsche in terms of struggle, we might expect Nietzsche to oppose friendship to politics, like Montaigne
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did, and like some romantic authors did too. However, on the other hand, we have to admit that Nietzsche is not criticising politics for being this kind of a struggle, but exactly the opposite: he criticises politics wherever it attempts to resolve the tension, as it does in what he calls “the democratic enlightenment” (BGE preface). And when one looks at what Nietzsche writes on friendship, one finds that he is again very critical of what there might be of peace, rest and stability in the community of friends. Does Nietzsche, who seems to replace the opposition between eros and eris by an identification of the two, does he fit at all in one of the two lines of thinking that I have outlined? It seems to me that to a certain extent both traditions can be recognised in Nietzsche. On the one hand, the friends are those to whom Nietzsche takes his refuge while taking distance from contemporary society. The poem with which BGE concludes is a cry for friends from a great distance, “from high mountains” as the title reads. On the other hand, there seems to be at least an imagined community of those for whom there is – at present – no community, i.e. the community of the homeless ones. The text from which I quoted before (GS, section 377) was taken from the fifth book of the Gay Science, i.e. from the book in which Nietzsche addresses his friends – more than in any of his other writings (maybe except the Zarathustra); the book also, in which more than in any other writing the “we” appear (“we” who have no determined identity). This meaning of “we” is given many different names in the fifth book of the Gay Science, the last one being “we nameless ones”; they are not any longer what the others are and not yet what the future ones will be; they are (we are) in between (today and tomorrow, here and there); “we” seem to be those who are asking the question “who we are” [the question which Heidegger takes as a way to approach the question of philosophy, of what philosophy is all about: section 19 from the Beiträge is entitled Philosophie (zur Frage: wer sind wir?)]. We are those who start asking questions where others take things for granted, e.g. about who we are, we who are asking questions. Nevertheless there seems to be some kind of a community of this “we”, albeit perhaps a community which is (“auto-teleio-poietically”) realised and postponed at the same time in this self-addressing speaking of “us”. And although there might not be many of “us”, they are at least more than one or two. Nietzsche is, speaking in the plural, addressing his friends in the plural. It still is questionable whether or not we might call this community of those without community “political”. It seems we may do so, though, because of Nietzsche’s concept of politics (or of the political) as the principle of difference, as I pointed out before. But instead of asking whether or not this community might be called political, let us first ask whether or not it might be called a community at all. Let us move over to what Nietzsche writes about friendship. 4. Nietzsche on friendship Friendship needs disguise and deceit Pascal wrote that if all people knew about what they tell about each other, there would hardly be four friends in the whole world. This seems to be also one of Nietzsche’s theses on friendship: friendship is only possible on the basis of veiling, of disguise or even of deceit. In Daybreak (D 335) Nietzsche writes that goodness and love towards others demand a practice of philanthropic dissimulation. This is true of friendship in the very large sense, let us say in the sense of “civic friendship”, the friendship of the
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many, friendship in the sense in which – according to Aristotle – every community is constituted by something like friendship; but it is also true of friendship in the strict sense, in which there are only a few friends. The democratic friendship of the many, of the herd, is built on falsehood and untruthfulness. When we – along with Aristotle – also call friendship the relation between the king or the aristocrats on the one hand and the people they rule on the other hand, then this will also be based on a lie; Nietzsche refers to the great lie of Plato. But the same is also true of the intimate friendship between two people. This inevitable deceit is not necessarily due to the others always being malicious. It is rather because there are always too many “occasions for misunderstandings, for hostility and rupture” (again a quote from HAH 376, the section in which Nietzsche renders this famous quote attributed to Aristotle, and which – not only for that reason – is so important in Derrida’s interpretation). Whoever reflects on these “occasions for misunderstandings, for hostility and rupture”, and on all the human all too human characteristics of our relations, will be ready to admit that “such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon” (same section). Nietzsche does not, however, make the same conclusion from this as Aristotle was reported to have done. I quote again from the same section: “One will, rather, avow to oneself: yes there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you, and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend”. It sounds like resignation when Nietzsche says that we do “have good reasons to think little of each of our acquaintances, even the greatest of them; but equally good reasons to direct this feeling back on to ourselves. And so, since we can endure ourselves, let us also endure other people” (ibid.). But with regard to friendship the conclusion must be almost cynical: friendship is in reality not what it pretends to be; friendship rests on the basis of disguise and deceit. Awareness of the necessary deceit leads to solitude There is always something paradoxical in the awareness of, or insight into the untruthfulness of our own practices. This is the case not only because of the self-defeating tendency of such insights (the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans lie), but also because we constantly try to “purify” and thus to safeguard the criticised practices, yet we almost inevitably fail in doing so. The critical diagnosis of e.g. friendship is not only an expression of the critic’s being attached to the ideal, but also makes him unable to meet his own criteria (this is nowhere more evident than in Nietzsche’s critique of the philosopher’s ideal of truthfulness, e.g. in BGE 1). This paradox is to my opinion the cause of one of the most distressing characteristics of Nietzsche’s writings: his awareness of the fact that his ever more radical, undermining questioning of human knowing and acting makes him ever more isolated and lonely. In Human All Too Human (HAH vol. I, section 65) he writes about “someone” (it might be Socrates, but also Nietzsche himself), whose “lack of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and (whose) irresponsible tendency to see what no one wants to see (...) brought him to prison and a premature death.” Nietzsche’s critique of moral disguise, religious idols, scientific and philosophical prejudices is always accompanied by self-criticism, or by this awareness of how the criticised is also present in himself. Therefore this critique makes him unable to simply indulge these beliefs, prejudices and practices, and alienates him from the life he shares with others. Nietz-
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sche’s biography illustrates this, as it shows how – with the development of his thinking – his life becomes ever lonelier: existing bonds are being broken and he fails where he tries to make new friends. In one of his latest notes (December 1888/January 1889) he writes these words (also reflected in the title of my paper): “- ich bin die Einsamkeit als Mensch” (I am the solitude as a human being; KSA 13, 25[7], 641). Solitude expresses itself in a longing for friends The many texts in which Nietzsche addresses his friends (I mentioned them before; Derrida refers to only a very few of the more than 100 one can find in Nietzsche), have to be understood from this background. It is, I think, significant that with a few exceptions we find all these texts in Thus spoke Zarathustra and the later writings. In the course of his development, Nietzsche’s solitude aggravates. It might also be significant that more often Nietzsche’s books close with some expression of solitude or of a desire for friends. The first volume of Human All Too Human closes with a chapter which is entitled “Man alone with himself”. In its final aphorism the philosopher compares himself with someone who walks in the desert, and who – when he is among human beings – sees even more desert, and who comforts himself with a vision of a community of kindred spirits (HAH I, 638). The book is completed with an epilogue of which the title reads: “among friends”, and which seems to express a fostered but futile illusion. Beyond Good and Evil has such an epilogue too. Its initial title was “a hermit’s desire” and it is a lyrical expression of the futile longing for friendship: “Watching all day and night, for friends I wait: / Where are you, friends? Come, it is time, it’s late!” When Nietzsche in his later writings addresses his friends, he addresses those who are not there; maybe one can say “not yet”; but when Derrida suggests that Nietzsche in these addresses realises the desired community in a teleiopoietic way, I think we should stress the “tele” in this expression and the postponement which is included with that. These imaginary friends underline the solitude of the one who is longing for them. And this is even more the case when this person is a philosopher who knows that “Our longing for a friend is our betrayer” (Zarathustra I, Friend). Sometimes the complaint of solitude and the longing for friendship take the form of an inner dialogue: a dialogue between the wanderer and his shadow (beginning and end of the last part of HAH), or between the author and the spirits of his own book (GS 383), or between the philosopher and his own thoughts (BGE 296), or the inner dialogue of Zarathustra with himself. We will see that these inner dialogues are again a symptom of solitude and explain the cynical view of friendship we started with. Solitude “turns into two” Sometimes it looks as if Nietzsche does enjoy a kind of friendship with his self-created friends, be it the free spirits (section 2 of the preface to HAH 1st volume), or Zarathustra (“Then, suddenly, friend, one turned into two – / And Zarathustra walked into my view” GS, Songs of Prince Vogelfrei, Sils Maria). But just as the friends are only appearance, also the friendship is merely apparent. In fact this contact with self-created others and these inner dialogues are symptomatic of a characteristic of solitude with which Nietzsche seems to be particularly familiar. He knows as a hermit that it is not only hard to endure solitude, but also that it is impossible to be really alone with oneself. Precisely the hermit knows that his solitude makes him into an
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other to himself (not the “other oneself” of Aristotle, not “oneself as another” as Ricoeur puts it, but oneself and against another). These “two” are not always very kind to each other. This is even truer when the hermit is a critical, unmasking (deconstructionist) philosopher. We are reminded of the relation between criticism and self-criticism to which I have pointed earlier. There are many examples of Nietzsche’s extending his critique to a self-critical questioning of himself. I refer to the way in which he investigates the moral motives of his critique of morality (e.g. Daybreak, preface 4), or the piety in his critique of religion (e.g. GS 344) or the truthfulness in his critique of truthfulness (BGE 1). [cf. also Derrida 188]. What it means to apply in that way the axe to oneself, is expressed in one of his Dionysus Dithyrambs, “Zwischen Raubvögeln”: Einsam! (...) Jetzt – einsam mit dir, zwiesam im eignen Wissen, zwischen hundert Spiegeln vor dir selber falsch, zwischen hundert Erinnerungen ungewiss, an jeder Wunde müd, an jedem Froste kalt, in eignen Stricken gewürgt, Selbstkenner! Selbsthenker! This self-dividing solitude turns out then to be a motive for “real” friendship. The section “on the friend” in Thus spoke Zarathustra (a section which Derrida also quotes) opens with this inner conflict: ‘There is always one too many around me’ – thus thinks the hermit. ‘Always one times one – eventually that makes two.’ I and me are always too deep in conversation: how could one stand that if there were no friend? For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third is the cork that prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depths. The friend is the third after the two that are involved in the inner or imaginary dialogue. This third one is necessary in order to keep the lonely hermit at the surface of everyday life, and to prevent him from sinking into the depths of his self-interrogation. For any unambiguous engagement, any clear devotion, and thus any resolute life is made impossible for him who is torn apart in different roles. The friend is the island where the lonely one can rest from his solitude, the cork that enables him to float for a moment and to dwell in the everyday reality of life. This vital friendship demands disguise, as we saw earlier. We have already found one of the reasons for this, a reason that we may understand better now: the many possibilities that there are for misunderstanding. In order to endure oneself, one has to endure the image(s) that the others entertain about us. Thanks to the friend, one can pretend to be “just one of us”, to join the others. But therefore one has to be incognito.
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But there is another reason as well (or maybe I should say: another aspect of this very reason) – one that will bring us again to the question of politics. But let us first read a few more lines from the section on the friend in the Zarathustra: You do not want to put on anything for your friend? Should it be an honour for your friend that you give yourself to him as you are? But he sends you to the devil for that. He who makes no secret of himself, enrages: so much reason have you for fearing nakedness. Indeed, if you were gods, then you might be ashamed of your clothes. Disguise is needed in order to prevent the friend from becoming the second instead of the third; to prevent him from becoming a second one in the sense of a second ego: another myself which no longer questions myself, but affirms it. As soon as the friends don’t keep a secret from one another, their friendship runs the risk of becoming a disguise itself: a self-affirming mirror that makes the unmasking paradoxical truthfulness disappear. Only gods may be ashamed of their clothes: only they are able to present themselves naked, without tying themselves down to one fixed identity. Gods are, unlike human beings, always different, and therefore necessarily hidden. But the human being is constantly threatened by fixation in one solid form. The disguise does not only save the relation with others; it also preserves the human being from becoming identical with what he is in the eyes of the friend. Concealing himself gives him to the friend the identity of a thing, the identity which is only the difference from another thing, but as a disguise it prevents him from coinciding with this identity, from becoming identical with this identity, from losing the difference which he carries within himself and which caricaturises him as a human being. By concealing himself he enables himself to remain different, not only different from the others, but also different from himself. In order to explain this a little bit more, I return – in conclusion – to my depiction of Nietzsche as a political thinker. 5. Politics and the “individual” One point has to be added yet to my depiction of the political so far: the distinction and struggle which were constitutive for the development of the human being does not only occur between human beings, but also within the human being. The “individual” (but here the word needs its quotation marks) originates, according to Nietzsche, where the tension between individuals becomes a tension within the individual (BGE 262), and the great individuals are those in whom the “opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life”, those who develop “a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself” (BGE 200). The individual turns out to be itself a political reality, “a social structure composed of many souls” (BGE 19 says this of the body). Earlier I have said that the “we” on behalf of whom Nietzsche sometimes speaks, are those who are ready to ask who they are, who therefore not just are who they are, who do not stick to some determined, fixed identity, but whose identity consists in questioning their identity, and who therefore cannot form a community except in a paradoxical sense. But now we have to add that the “we” might also indicate the plurality of forces that struggle with each other inside the “individual”. “We” might be those who preserve their own plurality, who realise a politics of difference up to the point
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where they become themselves political structures instead of “individuals”, and who therefore might no longer be “material for a society”: What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any more, is – a society in the old sense of that word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come. (GS 356) I am afraid that what Nietzsche says about “society”, “Gesellschaft”, is also true of “Gemeinschaft”, or community; there is not much space left for friendship either. Friendship can only have an intermediary function, on our way to a full realisation of this inner difference, of this plurality, i.e. on our way to what is ultimately beyond the human condition, to the “overman”: “you shall be to (your friend) an arrow and a longing for the overman.” (Zarathustra) That this ideal is called the over-man, that it is beyond the human, seems to exclude the possibility that the inner plurality becomes itself a form of friendship. Aristotle asks the question whether someone can be a friend to himself (EN, IX, 4; 1166a30vv). Although he does not really answer this question, he does say that it certainly is impossible for an evil man, because he is divided within, or against himself. We saw that for Nietzsche, this plurality is valued in a completely different way, but that it is still inspired by eris rather than by eros. The nature of difference is struggle rather than love. Maybe – perhaps – we have to become madmen or fools in order to enjoy this tensionful plurality within ourselves: “Foes, there are no foes!” say I, the living fool. (HAH I, 376) Bibliography Aristotle, (EN). Nicomachean Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. Derrida, J. 1994. Politiques de l'Armitié. Paris: Galilée. English translation: (1997), Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso. Heidegger, M. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis. Frankfurt a.M.: Klosterman. Nietzsche, F. (KSA) 1980. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. 15 vols. Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Munich: DTV/De Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (BGE) 1967. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (D) 1982. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (EH) 1967. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (GS) 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F (GM) 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (HAH) 1986. Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Nietzsche, F. (Zarathustra) 1982. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Penguin.
