nietzsche-on-fanaticism-and-the-care-of-the-self-2020

167 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.

168 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self 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 169

170 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self 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 171

172 Nietzsche’s Dawn ­ordinarily think when we think of the ancient Greeks: we imagine that they were 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 173

174 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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. 175

176 Nietzsche’s Dawn ­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 177

178 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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 179

180 Nietzsche’s Dawn “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. 181

182 Nietzsche’s Dawn ­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.37 183

184 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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

Nietzsche on Fanaticism, and the Care of the Self 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. 20 Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), 120–01. 21 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). 22 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. 23 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. 24 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.” 25 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.” 26 See Passmore, “Fanaticism, Toleration, and Philosophy,” 212. 27 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. 185

186 Nietzsche’s Dawn 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.”