nietzsche------------mitleid-------------and-moral-imagination-2020

93 4 Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination When Schopenhauer writes in praise of compassion, he knows that there are many thinkers in Western philosophy who have not accorded compassion any value, and indeed that many have regarded it with suspicion. In his book On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer mentions in this regard the Stoics (such as Seneca), Spinoza, and Kant as intellectual figures that positively reject and condemn compassion.1 It is the likes of Spinoza and Kant that Nietzsche calls to his aid when he says that the task today is for us to call into question our uncritical and unreflective valuation of the value or virtue of compassion (GM Preface). Schopenhauer refers to one great moralist before him who made compassion (la pitié) central to his reflections on human existence, namely, Rousseau. Schopenhauer calls him the greatest moralist of modern times and a profound analyst of the human heart. This is the same figure that Nietzsche went on to denounce as a fanatic and dangerous idealist (see Nietzsche “contra Rousseau” D 163). A great deal is at stake in our appreciation of compassion, of attempts to write in praise of it, and those that try to cast a deep suspicion over our estimation of it, such as Nietzsche. But we have to be careful: we would go wrong if we supposed that Schopenhauer proves himself as a great moral philosopher in his account of the sources of compassion, while Nietzsche confirms all our worst fears of him — that he is an immoral monster — on account of his attack on compassion. The issues at stake are much more complex than this. Even attempting and daring to question the value of compassion is, in the eyes of some, to condemn oneself to immorality or immoralism. In what follows in this chapter, we examine Nietzsche’s thinking on the concept of Mitleid — we will discuss the complexities of translating this concept into English later — in Dawn. We will examine how Nietzsche’s critical engagement with this concept is importantly dependent on the role of drives in his wider moral psychology in this text. As part of this line of argument, we provide a friendly Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

94 Nietzsche’s Dawn amendment to previous accounts that have given substantial weight to the role of the individual in understanding Nietzsche’s critical engagement with an ethic of compassion. To do so, we examine the role of mood and social transmission of feeling in his critique, arguing that these factors play key roles in Nietzsche’s development of a substantial critique of an ethic of compassion, and in his pursuit of an alternative ethic. We will also show how Nietzsche’s exposure of an ethic of compassion as fundamentally flawed opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration of the concept of moral imagination, and facilitates development of a more robust, creative, and experimental concept of ethical imagination as a part of Nietzsche’s broader effort to provide a framework for ongoing moral therapy. ­Approaches to Nietzsche’s Engagement with Mitleid Let us begin by taking stock of the main lines of approach to Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid in the available scholarly literature.2 One strand of the available scholarship of Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid has tended to interpret his remarks primarily in terms of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Schopenhauer’s ethics. For example, David Cartwright has pointed out that, while Schopenhauer’s ethics “describes an emotion that serves as an incentive which has as its end another’s well-being,” Nietzsche’s ethics are concerned with a moral emotion that “has as its end the interests of the agent.”3 For Cartwright, the relevant moral emotion targeted by Nietzsche’s critique — pity — is judged as morally undesirable by Nietzsche “insofar as it expresses contemptuous attitudes towards others and relegates some of the most vital interests of others to interests that are of dubious worth to the agent.”4 Mitleid as pity, on this account of Nietzsche’s thinking, embroils us in a failure to respect others as well as in augmentation of our feelings of “self-esteem and superiority” by means of devaluing others.5 Cartwright contends that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion ultimately fails, because its target misses: a critique of pity does not engage an ethics of compassion.6 Moreover, Cartwright suggests that Schopenhauer’s thought remains an essential influence upon Nietzsche’s thinking about Mitleid even given his largely critical approach to Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion [Mitleids-Moral].7 A second line of scholarly inquiry has suggested that the principal function of Nietzsche’s critical remarks on Mitleid throughout his works is to foster the revival of Stoic values, especially the values of “self-formation and self-command.”8 According to Martha Nussbaum, Nietzsche’s attack on pity is a core component of his critical engagement with the “roots of cruelty and revenge.”9 Like the Stoics, Nussbaum argues, Nietzsche’s repudiation of pity is not a matter of callousness or of brutality: it is rather a matter of developing invulnerability to external influence through the extirpation of passion, and of pursuing redemption from the perceived need for revenge.10

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination Renewed attention to Nietzsche’s Stoicism within the available scholarly literature has also incorporated the earlier view that Nietzsche’s “principal object of criticism” is Schopenhauer’s (and indeed Rousseau’s) ethics of pity.11 And, as Michael Ure has pointed out, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with the concept of Mitleid draws significantly on the Stoic view that pity ultimately produces cruelty and vengefulness.12 According to Ure, Nietzsche accomplishes this by attending to psychoanalytic insights that he builds into an account of “our subterranean intrapsychic and intersubjective stratagems for restoring to ourselves the illusion of majestic plenitude.”13 A third scholarly approach has focused in most depth upon ways in which the ethics of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid are tied up with his thinking on human psychology.14 This approach overlaps with aspects of the second Stoicbased approach described earlier, but is distinctive in its attention to relations of power in Nietzsche’s thinking. As a part of a broad project that develops a psychodialectical reading of logic and libido in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Henry Staten has offered an analysis of suffering and Mitleid that identifies complementarity between the aggression of the Freudian libido and the aggressive eroticism of pleasure in excitation of will to power.15 For Staten, this complementarity is best explained through Nietzsche’s exploration of sadomasochistic subjectivity, which he shows incorporates intersubjective fluidity — the interchangeability of active and passive subject positions in the relationship between the sadist and the masochist.16 Staten points out that such fluidity is present in Nietzsche’s remarks on the striving for distinction in D 113.17 In a more recent book, Christopher Janaway has provided a sustained analysis of the complexity of the psycho-physical states involved in Nietzsche’s remarks on the “polyphonic” concept of Mitleid in Dawn, focusing in particular upon aphorisms 132–38 of this text.18 A fourth line of criticism has sought to attend to the complexities that the issue of translation from German to English contributes to the debate on approaching Nietzsche’s remarks on Mitleid. In English, the term “Mitleid” may be translated as a referent of “pity” or of “compassion.” It is a translation question as to whether, by Mitleid, Nietzsche’s remarks on this concept are best reflected by the word “pity” or by the word “compassion,” and whether or not Nietzsche consistently uses Mitleid in a way that can be translated uniformly within each relevant text, and across all of his writings. However, it is a philosophical question as to whether and how the moral emotions of pity and compassion might be distinguished from one another, including within Nietzsche’s philosophy. In English-speaking Nietzsche scholarship, these two distinct questions of translation and philosophy have a tendency to be taken together and to be used to inform one another. However, Mitleid is not the only word that one finds in Nietzsche’s writing that is used to convey moral emotions such as pity or compassion; another key term, Erbarmen, is also present in Nietzsche’s discussions of moral emotions.19 This complicates both translation and philosophy questions. 95

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination purpose of Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid across the body of Nietzsche’s writings even more challenging. More recently, efforts to analyze the specific projects contained within individual texts has revitalized efforts to further clarify our understanding of Nietzsche’s thinking on Mitleid. At the same time, insights gleaned from attending to Nietzsche’s critical response to Schopenhauer’s ethics, to Nietzsche’s Stoicism, and to his investigation of psycho-physiology, have been integrated into an approach that prioritizes the therapeutic dimension of Nietzsche’s ethics.27 Pursuing this approach, Keith Ansell-Pearson has argued that Nietzsche’s critical remarks on Mitleid should be taken as forming part of Nietzsche’s effort to engage in the work of moral therapy, and to prompt similar such engagement on the part of his readers.28 According to Ansell-Pearson, moral therapy distinguishes Nietzsche’s contribution in Dawn.29 This new line of argument is promising, and in what follows we will review the reasons why, while also proposing a further development of this approach. Ansell-Pearson argues that Nietzsche develops more of a meditative and ruminative therapeutic resource than a standard philosophical argument in Dawn; according to him, Nietzsche leaves the more fruitful possibilities that might arise from critical engagement with the presumptions and prejudices of morality, and leaving the text open for the reader to develop their own intimate relationship with it in order to explore for themselves a new possible future heralded by the book.30 Furthermore, Nietzsche contrasts the tyranny of the ruling ethic of sympathy with an ethic of self-fashioning. This enables us to pursue self-fashioning in two ways: (i) by taking seriously and exploring personal, small, ethical questions and concerns; and (ii) by relieving those emerging individuals who reject customary morality from the guilty consciences with which the ethic of sympathy troubles them, and from the “moral” interpretation of the body and its affects that inhibits a naturalist approach to refashioning of the self.31 In order to engage effectively in self-fashioning, according to Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche emphasizes two necessary things. First is the importance of experiencing solitude, which helps us to think better of things than constant contact with others (D 443, 485, 491).32 Second, in light of work by Ruth Abbey, we can note that, for Nietzsche, achieving greatness in pursuing knowledge through freer thinking than has been possible under the tyranny of customary morality requires us to be able to “endure, inflict, and witness pain” and to sustain the necessary fortitude to endure and resist in the face of hardship, all of which is challenged by Mitleid.33 If one of our primary presumptions as customary moralists is to adopt an ethic of sympathy, then a substantial part of Nietzsche’s ethical project in Dawn must be to call the ruling ethic of sympathy into question. The approach adopted in Dawn constitutes, we suggest, a significant new direction compared with Nietzsche’s previous engagements in psychological dissections, the benefits of which to humanity were far from clear to him: in works such 97

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination important factor in Nietzsche’s work that demands attention.45 We agree with Janaway that Nietzsche does work to engage his readers’ affects through his aphoristic construction of the text; yet at the same time, we think that Nietzsche’s efforts in this regard are critical to the task of targeting the mood of superstitious fear that weighs on humans in much of contemporary society as an entire social group through the operation of customary morality. Let us now expand on some of the textual evidence supporting these points. ­Mood, Mitleid, and Customary Morality In Chapter 2, we showed how the primary ethical project embedded within Dawn is the development of a substantial challenge to what Nietzsche terms customary morality [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], which is set alongside Nietzsche’s development of a set of experimental, playful, aphorisms that encourage exploration of new ethical alternatives to customary morality, and its ethic of compassion.46 Customary morality problematically inhibits us from having new experiences, from correcting old, harmful customs, and from developing new, better customs (D 19). In short, customary morality gets in the way of humans being human beings. Someone might point out that this may appear to be the point of customary morality. However, as Nietzsche identifies, the feeling for custom is not based as clearly on what is perceived to be useful or harmful to humans as might be assumed, but is rather based on the age-induced sanctity of the custom (D 19). Nietzsche suggests that our obedience to traditions and moral customs is made far more consistent through our susceptibility to a special type of superstitious fear, which arises for us out of concern for the consequences of transgressing against an “inexplicable, indeterminate power” (D 9).47 The superstitious fear that arises is best understood as a mood, because our fear of transgression against an unseen and unknowable power isn’t ultimately directed toward one single action or event, but rather surrounds us and frames all of our moral reflections and experiences.48 We are all, Nietzsche suggests, constantly concerned about committing an individual thought or action in a way that might negatively affect the broader community; this is why, he suggests, customary morality insists that “the individual must sacrifice” and the self must be overcome in order to protect tradition from individuals and indeed from originality (D 9). In order to mount a successful campaign against customary morality, Nietzsche’s survey of the problem in the first book of Dawn shows that a way must be found to counter three specific issues.49 First, when considered from the perspective of customary morality and its socially entrenched authority, a project devoted to challenging that morality is deemed immoral — undertaking such a project is therefore likely to be inhibited in, or rejected by, anyone concerned by 99

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination With this in mind, let us return to Dawn 113, the aphorism that inspires Staten’s psychoanalytic approach to reading Nietzsche on Mitleid, mentioned earlier. In this aphorism, Nietzsche argues that the empathy and “being-in-the-know” that the drive for distinction requires is not “harmless or compassionate or benevolent” and is better understood as the “striving for domination” (D 113). Any joy experienced through the striving for domination is brought about by someone having placed their “imprint” on the soul of another person (D 113). At one end of the spectrum of striving for domination, Nietzsche places the “barbarian” who delights in inflicting suffering on the other whose recognition he seeks; at the other end, Nietzsche places “the ascetic and martyr” who experiences the highest pleasure from personally enduring, through his own striving for distinction, the same suffering that the barbarian inflicts upon the other (D 113). Staten identifies that an intersubjective power-relationship is at work in this aphorism. He claims that the person who inflicts suffering forces the sufferer “to turn towards him and grant him an absolute recognition”; in so doing, the person who inflicts suffering “appropriates the substance of the sufferer as mirror of his own being.”55 Added to this, Staten suggests that, for Nietzsche, the sufferer reflects the person inflicting suffering back to themselves “with an intensity and inevitability which belong only to the being of the inflicter of pain.”56 On this basis, Staten claims that, for Nietzsche, recognition is forced, cruelly, upon the passive sufferer by the person who is actively inflicting pain. Both the barbarian and the ascetic in Dawn 113 do seem to conform to Staten’s suggested model of an intersubjective power-relationship. While the barbarian’s power-relationship is with an external other, the ascetic’s power-relationship is with himself. Nietzsche suggests that the ascetic or martyr performs a “triumph” over themselves; their eye is “trained inward” and it beholds “the human being cloven asunder into sufferer and spectator” (D 113). Henceforth, he suggests, it only glances “into the exterior world in order, as it were, to gather from it wood for its own funeral pyre” (D 113). The final “tragedy” of the striving for domination is, Nietzsche contends here, the reduction of humanity to a “Single Character” who “burns to ash” inside themselves (D 113). For Nietzsche, this circle of suffering can be redrawn to include the “pitying god,” so that whether human or divine the logic of Mitleid involves the agent in “doing hurt unto others in order thereby to hurt oneself” such that, through this, the agent can “triumph” over themselves and their “pity” once again (D 113). Through this, the agent can “luxuriate in utmost power!” (D 113). Staten’s view is that the subject position of the sufferer is always passive. However, the spectrum of suffering infliction that Nietzsche sketches out in Dawn 113 — along with his account of the circular logic of Mitleid — ultimately shows that, for Nietzsche, there is no clear passive role in suffering after all. This point is given further support by Nietzsche’s connection of his discussion of Mitleid with an account of the function of drives; for example, in 101

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

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

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination is meaningful within human existence, Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality is only one part of his broader ethics, which also incorporates exploration of what a revitalized ethical engagement might mean. We think Nietzsche does have something substantial to offer with respect to our contemporary understanding of the concept of moral imagination in light of the critique of customary morality that he develops in Dawn. To understand what it is that Nietzsche can provide, we need to begin with a brief account of how the concept of moral imagination found its way into contemporary ethical debate. The modern philosophical concept of moral imagination was introduced by Edmund Burke, in a well-known 1790 discussion of the French Revolution.72 Burke develops his concept of moral imagination through a discussion of the death of chivalry and the ending of the divine right of kings to rule, characterized as signs of the end of the glory of Europe.73 In a lament of the damage done to Europe by the upheavals of the Revolution, Burke writes: now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.74 Clearly the wardrobe of moral imagination, and the “decent drapery” that Burke suggests it proffers to society, inform the criticism of unimaginative and dogmatic moral philosophy that concern contemporary debates on moral imagination. Notice, however, that Burke’s notion of decent drapery is commensurate with Nietzsche’s broad characterization of customary morality as grounded in superstitious fear. Burke’s mention of our “naked shivering nature” as having been brought into the light from under the trappings of moral imagination immediately brings to mind Nietzsche’s discussion of the “great task [tolle Aufgabe]” of translating humanity back into nature, which is discussed by him in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 230). Of this great task, Nietzsche writes: we ourselves may well be the least inclined to dress ourselves up in the finery of those kinds of moralistic word sequins and fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this very taste and its merry opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, 105

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination (i) we ask the reason why a person feels something such as depression, so that we may feel that same feeling in response to our mental awareness of this same ­reason; and (ii) we produce the feeling in ourselves “according to the effects it exerts and displays on the other person [das Gefühl nach den Wirkungen, die es am Anderen übt und zeigt],” specifically by working to reproduce similar play of muscle, innervation, eye expression, gait, voice, and bearing as the other person, or even the reflection of such bearing in artworks, including those composed of “word, painting, music” (D 142).77 Added to these possible empathy mechanisms, Nietzsche points out in the same aphorism that humans are distinctive by virtue of being naturally “the most timorous of all creatures” (D 142). Human “timidity [Furchtsamkeit]” has been the “instructress” of our empathy or “rapid understanding of the feelings of others (and of animals as well)” (D 142). This timidity has led humans to see “a danger” in “everything alien and alive,” since, owing to the physical mirroring mechanism described in the first part of Nietzsche’s account, humans reproduce the relevant expression and bearing, and derive conclusions about the “type of malevolent intent” informing and directing these (D 142). In addition, this empathetic capacity is so efficient that it even applies our interpretations of movements “as emanating from intentions” to “inanimate things” and their nature; Nietzsche suggests that this is the foundation for what he calls “a feeling for nature [Naturgefühl]” (D 142). As Bamford suggests, Nietzsche’s theory of empathy ­provides a drive-based psycho-physiological explanation for the way in which ­customary morality consistently reinforces a social mood of superstitious fear, which inhibits creative experimentation and curiosity.78 As well as explaining how the mimetic arts are fostered through the promulgation of social fear, this “theory of empathy” also provides the basis for a second claim against an ethic of compassion (D 142). As Nietzsche shows, and as mentioned already, the supposed mystical process by which Schopenhauer’s “compassion [Mitleid] transforms two essential beings into one and to such an extent that each is vouchsafed unmediated understanding of the other” is revealed, he suggests, to be “rapturous and worthless poppycock [schwärmerischen und nichtswürdigen Krimskrams]” by virtue of drive-based power-relations (D 142). Schopenhauer’s morality of compassion is inadequate, Nietzsche suggests, when compared with the theory of empathy [Mitempfindung] that he has himself ­presented, with its basis in observation of human behavior in reasoning and in physical activity. Nietzsche provides further support for this implication of his theory of empathy by asking us to join in performing a thought experiment. If we imagine that “the drive for attachment and care of others” were twice as strong as is already the case, Nietzsche proposes, then we would see that “life on earth would be unbearable” (D 143). He makes this claim on the basis that in caring for ourselves, we constantly commit acts of foolishness and are insufferable in the process; as he suggests, if we became the object of others’ foolishness in caring, 107

108 Nietzsche’s Dawn then even the mere possibility of engaging with others would drive us to run away. In light of this, Nietzsche asks us to imagine: wouldn’t we also in such circumstances heap “the same imprecations on sympathetic affection that we currently heap on egotism?” (D 143). The question mark at the end of this aphorism signals the opportunity for the reader to actively engage with their assumptions about sympathetic affection, by reflecting upon and digesting the possibility Nietzsche opens up for us.79 ­Conclusion By way of drawing this analysis of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with compassion in Dawn to a close, let us mention some possible results that might arise from the reflection and digestion that the thought experiment in Dawn 143 prompts. Nietzsche’s cautioning of us against the illusions created by an ethic of compassion in Dawn — specifically, the illusion that compassion unifies us and that Mitleid should be uncritically assumed to be a positive value — neatly prefaces his remarks on the same topic in Beyond Good and Evil. As we saw, those remarks provide a strong criticism of Burke’s social conservativism and his apology for bankrupt aristocratic values as a basis for his account of moral imagination. Burke’s characterizing of the concept of moral imagination in terms of a “wardrobe” promoting social “dignity” is revealed by Nietzsche’s account to be nothing more than the adornments of a highly problematic customary morality, which Nietzsche has called into question.80 As well as opening up the idea that Burke’s model for the concept of moral imagination has been poorly conceived, Nietzsche’s approach offers a tangible framework from which we can begin the necessary work to revalue the concept of moral imagination. First, instead of simply assuming that any perspective based in an ethic of compassion is always morally defensible, we might begin to subject this ethic to critical question on a more consistent basis. Imaginatively inhabiting another person’s perspective is a useless endeavor if such an imaginative act is strictly limited in its scope by the presumptions of customary morality based in compassion, or, alternatively, if analysis of the flight path of an unfettered imagination is circumscribed by dogmatic adherence to the moral language of a moral theory grounded in customary morality, such as a right action theory. Second, and in line with Nietzsche’s broader interests in experimentalism as critical to the ethos of inquiry, the production of new experiences requires that we transgress against the moral norm: that we engage in “tiny deviant actions” (D 149) and that we explore multiple, diverse, ways of making “novel experiments” both “in ways of life” and in “modes of society” (D 164).81 Doing so would allow us to engage in acts of imaginative resistance to the orthodoxy of customary morality, as well as to carry out acts of imaginative affirmation of new ethical possibilities.

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination Further investigation of this possibility would show how such imaginative resistance and imaginative affirmation hold the potential to revive non-dogmatic engagement with ethical problems, which as mentioned earlier, is of increasing concern within practical ethics. It is tempting to conclude this chapter by suggesting that Nietzsche opens up the prospect of an immoral imagination. However, as Robert Solomon has pointed out, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Mitleid, and with customary morality more generally, need be treated as neither immoral nor antimoral; in general, Nietzsche is arguing in favor of an affirmative form of ethics.82 For this reason, it seems more plausible to us to suggest that Nietzsche’s critique of an ethic of compassion opens up space for a free (and potentially at least, free-spirited) ethical imagination.83 The possibility of a free and creative ethical imagination, and the pathway to securing such an ethical imagination through rejection of mindless adherence to compassion-based morality, constitutes the most fundamental and important example of moral therapy that we can attribute to Nietzsche in Dawn. Notes 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 183. 2 This section builds on and develops an earlier discussion in Rebecca Bamford, “Dawn,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas, (London: Routledge, 2018), 25–40. 3 David E. Cartwright. 1988. “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity.” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch 69: 557–67. 4 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. 5 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. Similarly to Cartwright’s analysis, Brian Leiter has pointed out that Nietzsche’s “well-known polemics against Mitleid as a moral ideal are clearly directed at Schopenhauer’s ethics,” listing HH 50, HH 103, D 134, GS 99, BGE 201 and BGE 225 as textual evidence in support of this claim. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 57. 6 Cartwright, “Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity,” 564. 7 David E. Cartwright, “Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy for Life,” in Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Christopher Janaway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 116–50. 8 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 139–67. 9 Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy,” 146–47. 109

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

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination 28 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. For a more detailed discussion of the influences of Epicurus and Guyau on Nietzsche’s ethics in Dawn, see also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Selfishness: Epicurean Ethics in Nietzsche and Guyau,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 49–68. 29 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 30 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182–83. 31 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 188–90, 199. 32 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 202. 33 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 202. See also Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61. 34 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 35 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 36 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. 37 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 182. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 38 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 186–87. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 39 We shall have more to say on Nietzsche’s thinking on drives in Chapter 6. For now, we simply note that for Nietzsche in Dawn, Mitleid fits within his drive psychology and is not an absolute moral value standing outside drive psychology. 40 Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy;” Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 41 Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion.” Mark Alfano has also recently pointed out the importance of solitude in Nietzsche in chapter 10 of his Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 42 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 43 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 31. 44 For further discussion see Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76. 45 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 98. Bamford, “Dawn,” 30. 46 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 55–76. 47 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. 48 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. 49 Some remarks in this paragraph are developed from an earlier version in Bamford, “Dawn,” 27. See also Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality.” 50 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 62. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond Compassion,” 193. 51 Nietzsche’s thinking on fear as a social phenomenon produced through the functioning of customary morality is reflected in his later works, as David E. Cooper has pointed out. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche discusses how fear is taken as the determinant of the power relations within a 111

112 Nietzsche’s Dawn specific community as well as across different communities; fear becomes the source of morality because moral values become established in terms of how certain actions will affect the wellbeing of the group (BGE 201). SeeCooper, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 31. See also Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 55–76. 52 Stanley Corngold. 1990. “Nietzsche’s Moods.” Studies in Romanticism 29(1): 67–90. 53 Corngold, “Nietzsche’s Moods,” 67–90. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 65–66. 54 Both Janaway and Bamford have explored the affective power of rhetoric in this context, though it is important to note that they have done so in different ways: Janaway focuses on the individual’s capacity to be changed by such rhetoric, while in drawing on the concept of active externalism, Bamford’s account incorporates attention to why the environment, including the social ­environment, might play a plausible role in constituting mental processes of which we are aware, and mental processes that remain largely unknown to us yet, which still play a role in our moral behavior. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 48–49. Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 70. See also Mark Rowlands. 2009. “The Extended Mind.” Zygon, 44(3): 628–41. See also Chapter 1 of this volume. 55 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. 56 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 102–03. 57 Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, 147. Nietzsche’s discussion in HH 50 of the unfortunate sufferer who inflicts his laments and whimpers on the spectator and who thus inverts the apparent power relationship between them, turning the spectator into a sufferer. On this, see Bamford, “The Virtue of Shame: Defending Nietzsche’s Critique of Mitleid,” 251. 58 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 45–46. 59 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 66. 60 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 67. 61 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 45–47. Bamford, “Dawn,” 28. 62 Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against Morality,” 67. 63 As Andreas Urs Sommer has pointed out, the “freed spirits [freigewordne Geister]” that we find in Nietzsche’s writings of 1888 are not always separable from the “we ourselves, we free spirits” that Nietzsche describes as being “already a ‘transvaluation of all values’” in others of his late writings (AC 13). The question of how and when a very free, or freed, spirit should exhibit Mitleid while remaining consistent with Nietzsche’s critique of customary morality might benefit from further attention in analysis of the development of free spirits. See Sommer, “Is There a Free Spirit in Nietzsche’s Later Writings?” in

Nietzsche, Mitleid, and Moral Imagination Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 253–65. See also Bamford, “Dawn,” 37. 64 Bamford, “Dawn,” 37. 65 See e.g. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 66 Soloman Benatar. 2005. “Moral Imagination: The Missing Component in Global Health,” PLoS Medicine 2(1): e400. 67 Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 68 Julian Savulescu. 2015. “Bioethics: Why Philosophy is Essential for Progress.” Journal of Medical Ethics 41: 28–33. 69 Johnson, Moral Imagination, x. 70 Johnson, Moral Imagination, 187, 243. 71 Johnson, Moral Imagination, 30. 72 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 73 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75–77. 74 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. 75 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. 76 Sommer, “Is There a Free Spirit in Nietzsche’s Later Writings?” 259–60. 77 Bamford, “Dawn,” 33. Nietzsche’s explanation in this 1881 aphorism is similar to the account of emotion provided three years later in William James. 1884. “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9: 188–205. Robert C. Solomon notes that even though James identifies the emotion with a conscious sensation, while Nietzsche does not, they are both claiming that an emotion is “a physiological phenomenon” rather than simply a mental experience. See Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73; Bamford, “Dawn,” 39. 78 Bamford, “Dawn,” 34. On curiosity, see also Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32. 79 The question mark functions similarly to the long dash in that it reinforces readers’ active engagement. On Nietzsche’s use of Gedankenstrich, see Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), xvii, 63. 80 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 77. 81 For a more detailed account of Nietzsche’s experimentalism, see Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29. 82 Solomon, Living With Nietzsche, 17. 83 Bamford indicates this possibility, but does not develop it in detail, in “Dawn,” 37. 113