Keith Ansell-Pearson
Care of Self in Dawn: On Nietzsche’s
Resistance to Bio-political Modernity
The middle period writings (1878–82) are without doubt the most heavily neglected texts in Nietzsche’s corpus, especially the two volumes of Human, all
too Human and Dawn. How should they be read? The question is a difficult
one to answer given the multifaceted and multi-layered character of the works
in question. One can find different philosophical resources in them, including
a naturalist agenda and anticipations of phenomenology. I think one especially
productive way to read the texts I am referring to is as works of “resistance”.
In this essay I examine aspects of Dawn, from 1881, in the light of this theme
of resistance. In these neglected texts we encounter a Nietzsche preoccupied
with the care of self and in opposition to the fundamental disciplinary tendencies of bio-political modernity. What intrigues me about the text Dawn, for example, are the rarely examined references in the book to “commercial society”
and “security”. There is a socio-political backdrop to the work and to Nietzsche’s attack on the presumptions of morality. This is not to say that Nietzsche
is a political thinker in Dawn; it would be much more incisive to describe his
project at this time as one of an ethics of resistance. “Our age”, Nietzsche
writes at one point in the text, “no matter how much it talks and talks about
economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, spirit” (D 179).
Nietzsche succinctly articulates his concern in the following manner: “Political
and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society’s
most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than
having none at all” (D 179). Today, he goes on to note, everyone feels obliged
to know what is going on every day to the point of neglecting their own work
or therapy and in order to feel part of things, and “the whole arrangement has
become a great and ludicrous piece of insanity” (D 179). The therapy Nietzsche
is proposing in Dawn is, then, directed at those solitary free spirits who exist
on the margin or fringes of society and seek to cultivate or fashion new ways
of thinking and feeling, attempting to do this by taking the time necessary to
work through their experiences.
In Dawn Nietzsche employs a care of self as a way of taking to task what he
identifies as some worrying developments in modern society. We can describe
Nietzsche, like Foucault, as a modern-day virtue ethicist who seeks “to liberate
the capacity of individual self-choice and personal self-formation from oppressive conformism…” (Ingram 2003, p. 240) This is the set of concerns I wish
to explore in this essay.
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I
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche informs his readers that his “campaign” against morality begins in earnest with Dawn and he adds that we should not smell gunpowder at work here but, provided we have the necessary subtlety in our nostrils,
more pleasant odours. I think Nietzsche is here drawing the reader’s attention
to something important, namely, the fact that he wants to open up the possibility of plural ways of being, including plural ways of being moral or ethical. His
act is not one of simple wanton destruction.
The “campaign” against morality centres largely on a critique of what
Nietzsche sees as the modern tendency, the tendency of his own century, to
identify morality with the sympathetic affects, especially Mitleid, so as to give
us a definition of morality. Nietzsche has specific arguments against the value
accorded to these affects, but he also wants to advocate the view that there are
several ways of living morally or ethically and the morality he wants to defend
is what we can call an ethics of self-cultivation. At one point in Dawn he writes:
“You say that the morality of being compassionate is a higher morality [Moral]
than that of Stoicism? Prove it! But remember that what is ‘higher’ and ‘lower’
in morality is not, in turn to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no
absolute morality [Moral]. So take your rule from somewhere else – and now
beware!” (D 139) With regards to the modern prejudice, which is one of the
main foci of his polemic in the book, here there is the presumption that we
know what actually constitutes morality: “It seems to do every single person
good these days to hear that society is on the road to adapting the individual
to fit the needs of the throng and that the individual’s happiness as well as his
sacrifice consist in feeling himself to be a useful member of the whole…”
(D 132) As Nietzsche sees it, then, the modern emphasis is on defining the
moral in terms the sympathetic affects and compassion (Mitleid). We can, he
thinks, explain the modern in terms of a movement towards managing more
cheaply, safely, and uniformly individuals in terms of “large bodies and their
limbs”. This, he says, is “the basic moral current of our age”: “Everything that
in some way supports both this drive to form bodies and limbs and its abetting
drives is felt to be good” (D 132)
Nietzsche’s main target in the book is what he sees as the fundamental
tendency of modern “commercial society” and its attempt at a “collectivitybuilding project that aims at disciplining bodies and selves and integrating
them into a uniform whole” (Ure 2006, p. 88). Here “morality” denotes the
means of adapting the individual to the needs of the whole, making him a
useful member of society. This requires that every individual is made to feel,
as its primary emotion, a connectedness or bondedness with the whole, with
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society, in which anything truly individual is regarded as prodigal, costly, inimical, extravagant, and so on. Nietzsche’s great worry is that a healthy concern
with self-fashioning will be sacrificed and this, in large part, informs his critique of what he sees as the cult of the sympathetic affects within modernity.
For Nietzsche it is necessary to contest the idea that there is a single moralmaking 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). In the future, Nietzsche hopes, the inventive and fructifying
person shall no longer be sacrificed and “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. 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
are no longer to be viewed with contempt and impatience (D 547). In place of
what he sees as the ruling ethic of sympathy, which he thinks can assume the
form of a “tyrannical encroachment”, Nietzsche invites individuals to engage
in self-fashioning, cultivating a self that others can look at with pleasure and
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 (Taine 1906, p. 191). As one
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commentator notes, those who favoured 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” (Rasmussen 2008, p. 18). It is clear that in the aphorism I 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 (Ure
2006, p. 82). Unknown to ourselves 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 which 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 of 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).
Perhaps Nietzsche’s fundamental presupposition in the book is that ours
is an age of great uncertainty in which 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 right.
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 statements on security seem to describe our present-day reality
to an uncanny degree. 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 it (Neocleous 2008, p. 3). Moreover, a prevailing assumption is that
such security is a good thing, something fundamentally necessary in spite of
all interrogations of it. The common assumption is that only security today is
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able to guarantee our freedom and the good society, and the main issue on the
agenda is how to improve the power of the State so it can secure us better. But,
then we need to ask some critical questions. As Neocleous bravely 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?” (Neocleous 2008, p. 4)
The critique of security would see security not as a universal or transcendental value, but rather as an exercise in political technology that shapes and
orders individuals, groups, classes, as well as capital. It would contest the “necessity” of security that appears obvious 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” (Neocleous
2008, p. 7). 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, he 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”.
The morality Nietzsche wants to subject to critique refers to certain ways
and habits of thinking, including the morality that is part of our modern selfimage of ourselves (as moral agents), and that lacks intellectual conscience
and integrity. Morality as we moderns conceive it gives our attempts at selfmastery a bad conscience and infuses our behaviour with guilt. (a) 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. (b) 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. (c) It is supposed we have an adequate understanding of moral agency,
e.g. 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 entire-
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ly lack knowledge in moral matters. (d) 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. Where morality centres on “continually exercised self-mastery and self-overcoming in both large and the
smallest of things,” he champions it (WS 45). 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 its own lawgiver, cannot be treated with prescriptions to the path to happiness simply because individual happiness springs
from one’s own unknown laws and external prescriptions only serve to obstruct and hinder it: “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). Here there are links to be made
between Nietzsche and Foucault regards an ethics of the care of self.
II
Before turning to an explicit examination of the idea of the care of self in Nietzsche, and to see how he mounts a resistance to disciplinary modernity, let me
first outline some salient features of Foucault’s account of this task and project.
For Foucault self-cultivation takes the form of an ‘art of existence’ – a techne tou biou – and is guided by the principle that one must ‘take care of oneself’
(Foucault 1986, p. 43). Foucault claims that care of self (epimeleia heautou,
cura sui) is a Socratic notion or one that Socrates consecrates (Foucault 1986,
p. 44; see also Foucault 2005, pp. 6f.). However, it only becomes a universal
philosophical theme in the Hellenistic period, being promoted by the likes of
Epicurus, the Cynics, and Stoics such as Seneca. According to Foucault, the
Delphic injunction to know one’s self was subordinated to self-care. He gives
several examples from the literature to vindicate his core thesis, including Epicurus’s letter to Menoeceus, a text in which it is stated that it is never too early
or too late to occupy oneself with oneself: “Teachings about everyday life were
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organized around taking care of oneself in order to help every member of the
group with the mutual work of salvation” (Foucault 1988, p. 21; see also Foucault 1986, p. 46). For Foucault it is in Epictetus that we find the highest philosophical development of the theme of care of self. For Epictetus the human is
destined to care for itself and is where the basic difference between the human
and other creatures resides. Moreover, for Epictetus the care of self “is a privilege-duty, a gift-obligation that ensures our freedom while forcing us to take
ourselves as the object of all our diligence” (Foucault 1986, p. 47). For Foucault
the care of self is not constituted as an exercise in solitude but as a “true social
practice” (Foucault 1986, p. 51). He is keen to stress that the “conversion to
self” entails the experience of a pleasure that one takes in oneself:
This pleasure, for which Seneca usually employs the word gaudium or laetitia, is a state
that is neither accompanied nor followed by any form of disturbance in the body or the
mind. It is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of
ourselves and therefore escapes our control. It arises out of ourselves and within ourselves. (Foucault 1986, p. 66)
For Foucault the contrast to be made is with voluptas which denotes a pleasure
whose origin resides outside us and in objects whose presence we cannot be
sure of (a pleasure that is precarious in itself). What Foucault is delineating
here resonates, I think, with the “joy of existing” Nietzsche seeks to restore in
his middle period as a central concern of a post-metaphysical philosophy and
after two centuries of training by morality and religion (see WS 86). However,
this tradition has become obscure to us today and we can account for this
obscurity in terms of several developments. Foucault notes that there has been
a deep transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it
difficult to base a morality of austere principles on the precept that we should
give ourselves more care than anything else in the world. Rather, we are inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality and as a means of escape from all possible rules. We have inherited the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. Here, “to know
oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation” (Foucault 1988, p. 22).
Such is our assimilation of this morality of self-denial, to the point where we
identify it as the domain of morality in and for itself, that the kind of morality
pursued by the ancients strikes us today as an exercise in moral dandyism (see
Foucault 2005, p. 12). As Foucault notes, we have the paradox of a precept of
care of self that signifies for us today either egoism or withdrawal, but which
for centuries was a positive principle, serving as the matrix for dedicated moralities. Christianity and the modern world have based the codes of moral
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strictness on a morality of non-egoism to the point where we forget that such
codes originated in an environment marked by the obligation to take care of
oneself.
We can note here: Nietzsche, at least in the popular imagination, is taken
to be an immoralist in the crude sense identified by Foucault when, on the
contrary, he needs to be read as an ethical thinker in the way Foucault thinks
we have forgotten ethics. We have developed a bad conscience over an ethics
centred on self-care and 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 find that there is
pleasure to be taken in this mastery. I can impress myself by what I can deny,
defer, resist, and so on. It is through this mastery that I grow and develop. And
yet morality, as we moderns have come to understand it, would have to give
this ethical self-mastery a bad conscience. If we take as our criterion of the
moral to be self-sacrificing resolution and self-denial, we would have to say, if
being honest, that such acts are not performed strictly for the sake of others;
my own fulfilment and pride are at work and the other provides the self with
an opportunity to relieve itself through self-denial.
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 ordinarily think when we
think of the ancient Greeks: we imagine that they were ruled by the precept,
“Know thyself” (gnothi seauton). 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 (centred 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 are worth making 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” (Foucault 1997,
p. 269). Second, regarding the taking care aspect, Foucault stresses that the
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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.
III
Foucault contends that in Greek ethics we find a focus on moral conduct, on
relations to oneself and others, rather than a focus on religious problems such
as what is our fate after death? What are the gods and do they intervene in life
or not? For the Greeks, Foucault argues, these were not significant problems
and not directly related to conduct. What they were concerned about was to
constitute an ethics that was an “aesthetics of existence”. Foucault thinks we
may in a similar situation to the Greek today “since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion” (Foucault 1997, p. 255). 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’s 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?” (Foucault, 1997, p. 260) 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 tekhne of life was to take care of the city and his
companions, by the time of Seneca the problem is to primarily take care of
himself. This taking care of the self for its own sake is something that starts
with the Epicureans.
This is remarkably similar to how Nietzsche presents the issue of ethical
life in the free spirit period where he suggests we need to cultivate an attitude
of indifference with respect to the first and last things. In Dawn he explicitly
appeals to Epicurus and Epictetus as thinkers who present a model of ethics
quite different to what we have inherited through Christianity and modern secularism.
Ruth Abbey is one commentator who has drawn attention to the centrality
of an ethics of care of self in Nietzsche’s middle period. This centres on a concern for quotidian minutiae, attention to individualized goods, and an aware-
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ness of the close connection between psyche and physique (Abbey 2000,
p. 102). For Nietzsche, as Abbey notes, the small, daily practices of care of self
are undervalued (Abbey 2000, p. 99). In modern culture we can detect, Nietzsche writes, a “feigned contempt for all the things that humans really take to
be most important, all the nearest things” (WS 5). As Abbey further notes, in
devaluing the small, worldly matters Christian and post-Christian sensibility,
“puts people at war with themselves and forbids a close study of which forms
of care of the self would be most conducive to individual flourishing” (Abbey
2000, p. 99). As Nietzsche notes, most people see the closest things badly and
rarely pay heed to them, whilst “to be ignorant in the smallest and most everyday things and not to have a keen eye – that is what makes the world into a
‘pasture of troubles’ for so many people” (WS 6). Nietzsche goes on to name
Socrates as a key figure in the history of thought who defended himself against
this “arrogant neglect” of the human for the benefit of the human race (D 9).
Nietzsche argues: “…our continual offences against the simplest laws of the
body and spirit bring all of us, young and old, into a shameful dependency
and unfreedom…upon doctors, teachers and pastors, whose pressure now lies
constantly upon all of society” (WS 5). All the physical and psychical frailties
of the individual derive from a lack of knowledge about the smallest and most
everyday things, such as what is beneficial to us and what is harmful to us in
the institution of our mode of life, in the division of the day, eating, sleeping,
and reflecting, and so on.
For Foucault the principle of the care of self allows for variation: in Plato’s
Alcibiades care of self “refers to an active political and erotic state”, but in the
Hellenistic and Roman periods the care of self has become a universal principle
and politics is left to one side as so to take better care of the self (Foucault
1988, p. 24 and Foucault 1988, p. 31). How does Dawn fit into this schema as a
nineteenth century work of resistance? It is worth here making a comment on
the diagnosis that informs Nietzsche’s social critique in Dawn. Nietzsche laments the development he sees taking place where old Europe is being infected
by the distinctive vice of the new world, the work ethic, which spreads “a lack
of spirituality” like a blanket (GS 329). Such is Nietzsche’s concern that he
thinks that people are becoming frugal with regard to joy, increasingly suspicious of it, and with work enlisting a good conscience on its side to the point
where “the desire for joy calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’” (GS 329). He wonders whether we shall soon reach a point “where people can no longer give in
to the desire for a vita contemplativa…without self-contempt and a bad conscience” (GS 329; see also D 178). Nietzsche notes that the modern culture of a
society is the “soul” of commerce, as the personal contest was for the Greeks
and war and victory was for the Romans: “The man engaged in commerce
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understands how to appraise everything without having made it, and to appraise it according to the needs of the consumer… ’who and how many will
consume this?’ is his question of questions” (D 175). This mode of appraisal
then gets applied, Nietzsche notes anxiously, to everything, including the productions of the arts and sciences, of thinkers, scholars, artists, statesmen, etc,
so becoming the character of an entire culture.
It is certain that Nietzsche sought to found a philosophical school modelled on Epicurus’s garden. In a letter of 26 March 1879 he asks Peter Gast:
“Where are we going to renew the garden of Epicurus?” (KSB 5, p. 399) For
commentators such as Horst Hutter, Nietzsche’s ultimate goal is the shaping
of the future of European humanity and society, and on this conception of his
philosophy the retreat into an Epicurean-inspired community of friends is
merely a temporary expedient in which free spirits work on themselves so as
to become philosophical legislators of a future culture. As Hutter has written,
“such fraternities of free spirits would be necessary to traverse the period of
nihilism until a future point in time, when direct political action would again
become possible” (Hutter 2006, p. 5). One thinks in this regard of what Nietzsche notes in The Wanderer and his Shadow when he says that free spirits withdraw into concealment but not out of any kind of personal ill-humour, as
though the present social and political situation was not good enough for
them; rather, it is that through withdrawal they wish to economize and assemble forces of which culture will one day have great need: “We are accumulating
capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in times of great peril, to do that
we have to bury it” (WS 229).
IV
Let me now turn to illuminating the reception of Epicurus and Epictetus we
find in Dawn and in Nietzsche’s middle period in general.
What appeals to Nietzsche about Epicurus 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 centred on a
concern with the healing of our own lives so as to return us to the joy of existing (Hadot 1995, p. 87), then in the texts of his middle period Nietzsche can be
seen to be an heir to this ancient tradition. Indeed, if there is one crucial component to Nietzsche’s philosophical therapeutics in the texts of his middle period 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 mo-
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rality 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 middle period, then, Epicurus is an attractive figure for Nietzsche because of the attention given to the care of self, and also because he conceives
philosophy not as a theoretical discourse but one that, first and foremost, is a
kind of practical activity aimed at the attainment of eudemonia or the flourishing life (Young 2010, pp. 279ff.). Nietzsche wants free spirits to take pleasure
in existence, involving taking pleasure in themselves and in friendship. Nietzsche is keen to encourage human beings to cultivate an attitude towards 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 (see D 13,
33, 36; see also Hadot 1995, pp. 87, 223, 252).
At this time Nietzsche is committed to a philosophical therapeutics in
which the chief aim is to temper emotional and mental excess. One might contend that there is an Epicurean inspiration informing Nietzsche’s actual philosophical practice at 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” (Tsouna 2009, pp. 257f.). In part,
Nietzsche conceived the art of the maxim in therapeutic terms. The modern
age has forgotten the art of reflection or observation, in which it is possible to
gather maxims “from the thorniest and least gratifying stretches of our lives”
so as to make ourselves feel better, to give ourselves a lift and a tonic. We can
return to life revivified rather than depressed from our encounter with thorny
problems, and with “presence of mind in difficult situations and amusement
in tedious surroundings” (HH I: 38). There is a need, therefore, for modern
spirits to learn how to derive pleasure from the art of the maxim, from its construction to its tasting. Nietzsche notes that it is virtually impossible to say
whether the inquiry into the “human, all too human” will work more as a
blessing than a curse to the welfare of humanity; at any rate, and for the time
being, the issue is undecided. He further notes that because science, like nature, does not aim at final ends, any fruitfulness in the way of promoting the
welfare of humanity will be the result of science’s attaining something purposeful without having willed it. But where science is needed now, as part of
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a general therapeutic practice of reflection and observation, is in tempering
the human mind: “shouldn’t we, the more spiritual human beings of an age
that is visibly catching fire in more and more places, have to grasp all available
means for quenching and cooling, so that we will remain at least as steady…
and moderate as we are now…” (HH I: 38) The illnesses and neuroses we encounter in humanity require that “ice-packs” be placed on them (HH I: 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 I:
244). This concern with a cooling down of the human mind continues in Dawn
where Nietzsche’s makes even more explicit his concern with the spread of
fanaticism in moral and religious thinking (see D 50).
In the middle period, then, 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 “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 I: 244). The task, Nietzsche says, is to live in terms of “a constant
spiritual joyfulness [Freudigkeit]” (HH I: 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).
I have mentioned Nietzsche’s concern with religious and moral fanaticism
in Dawn. Nietzsche’s search for a non-fanatical (nicht fanatisch) mode of living
leads him to 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 self-sufficient, “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 himself
to be given gifts, expecting the best of life not to come from himself and his
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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 non-fanatical modes of living: one way of life is selfsufficient 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 to come), and it lacks the quiet and calm dignity
of self-sufficiency that is the Epictetean ideal.
Epictetus is also admired by Nietzsche 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, and Nietzsche
is silent about this aspect of Stoic teaching. Nevertheless, it is true that the
ethical outlook of Epictetus does invite people “to value their individual selves
over everything else,” (Long 2002, p. 3) and 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 towards themselves. A “bad” person is one
that runs from himself and hates himself, causing injury to himself. Such a
person is rescuing himself from himself 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, I think, that Nietzsche has what I am crediting him
with in Dawn, namely, an intimate concern with the care of self.
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V
In the interview entitled “On the Genealogy of Ethics” Foucault says:
What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related
only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized
or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? (Foucault 1997, p. 261)
Foucault is keen to say that what he’s advocating here is not the Californian
cult of the self and neither is the heroic freedom of Sartrean existentialism.
Both have major flaws for him. He likes to give the example of the Stoics as an
alternative: “the experience of the self is not a discovering of a truth hidden
inside the self but an attempt to determine what one can and cannot do with
one’s available freedom” (Foucault 1997, p. 276). He tells us that he’s suspicious
of the notion of “liberation” since it suggests a self that is repressed and waiting to be liberated beneath the layers of social and historical determination.
He makes clear his conception of freedom as ethos in his account of how the
Greeks problematized the freedom of the individual as an ethical problem. Here
the word “ethical” denotes a way of being and behaviour. Somebody’s ethos
is evident in their clothing, appearance, gait, and in the calm with which they
respond to every event. Thus, a human being possessed of a splendid ethos,
who could be admired and put forward as an example, was someone who practised freedom in a certain way. However, extensive work by the self on the self
is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ethos that can be
said to be beautiful, honourable, estimable, memorable, and exemplary.
For Foucault the elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art
was at the centre of moral experiences in antiquity (even if it conformed to
certain collective canons or practices). In Christianity by contrast, with the religion of the text, the idea of the will of God, and the principle of obedience,
morality increasingly took on the form of a code of rules. From antiquity to
Christianity we pass from a morality that was primarily the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. Foucault holds that
for a whole series of reasons the idea of morality as obedience to a code of
rules is now disappearing and this absence of morality is to be replaced with
the search for an aesthetics of existence (Foucault 1990, p. 49).
With respect to this idea of an “aesthetics of existence”, this is one area
where Foucault’s work has invited much criticism. He has been accused of
retreating in his late work into an amoral aesthetics, privileging an elitist notion of self-centred stylization, and undermining possibilities of emancipatory
politics. Johanna Oksala is a recent defender of Foucault: she argues that his
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ethics-as-aesthetics needs to be understood first and foremost as a continuation of his permanent questioning of the limits of subjectivity and the possibilities of crossing them. Foucault’s ethics thus represent an attempt to seek ways
of living and thinking that are transgressive and, like a work of art, are not
simply the product of normalizing power. For Oksala one way to contest normalizing power is by shaping one’s self and one’s lifestyle creatively and the
exploration of possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new fields of experiences, pleasures, modes of living and thinking. She thus argues that the quest
for freedom which characterises Foucault’s late work is a question of developing forms of subjectivity that are capable of functioning as resistance to normalizing power. This concern on his part can even enable us to understand
better the importance of the ancient practices of the self for Foucault. As he
stresses, we cannot find in Stoic ethics the attempt to normalize and there is
no attempt to normalize the population. Rather, it was, says Foucault, a matter
of personal choice, making the choice to live a beautiful life and to leave to
others memories of a beautiful existence (Foucault 1997, p. 254). Oksala maintains, then, that Foucault’s aesthetics of existence should not be understood
as a narcissistic enterprise nor as aesthetic in a narrow visual sense of the word
as in looking stylish. It is an aesthetics not because it calls on us to make
ourselves beautiful, but because it calls on us to relate to ourselves and our
lives in terms of a material, a bios, that can be formed and transformed (Oksala
2005, p. 169). It is Nietzsche who perhaps best revives this conception of ethics
for us moderns:
It is a myth to believe that we will find our true or authentic self once we have left out or
forgotten this and that. That way we pick ourselves apart in an infinite regression: instead, the task is to make ourselves, to shape a form from all the elements! The task is
always that of a sculptor! A productive human being! Not through knowledge but through
practice and an exemplar do we become ourselves! Knowledge has, at best, the value of
a means! (NL, KSA 9, 7[213])
VI
Neither Nietzsche nor Foucault advocates 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, and this in itself is sufficient, Nietzsche
thinks, to derail the idea that there is a single moral-making morality. Both
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thinkers seek to work against the construction of moral necessities out of historical contingencies. A key difference from the ancients is that Nietzsche is
developing a therapy for the sicknesses of the soul under specifically modern
conditions of social control and discipline.
I think we find in Dawn and the resistance to modernity it mounts a clear
rebuttal of what Roberto Esposito construes as the guiding idea of modern political thought, namely, the idea of preserving life through the abolition of conflict, difference, and heterogeneity:
One could say that the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy will be found in his rebuttal of
such a conception, which is to say in the extreme attempt to bring again to the surface
that harsh and profound relation that holds together politics and life in the unending
form of struggle. (Esposito 2008, p. 85)
Esposito goes so far as to claim that although Nietzsche did not formulate the
term he nevertheless “anticipated the entire biopolitical course that Foucault
then defined and developed…One can say that all the Foucauldian categories
are present in a nutshell in Nietzsche’s conceptual language” (Esposito 2008,
p. 85). As Esposito rightly notes, Nietzsche challenges the idea that the human
species is ever given once and for all; rather, it is susceptible, “in good and
evil, to being moulded in forms for which we do not have exact knowledge, but
which nevertheless constitute for us both an absolute risk and an inalienable
challenge” (Esposito 2008, p. 83). He quotes Nietzsche from 1881 on the “selection” of the human: “why should we not realize in the human being what the
Chinese are able to do with the tree, producing roses on the one side and on
the other side pears?” (NL, KSA 9, 11[276]) Nietzsche’s ambition in Dawn is
clear, I think, from the following note, and it centres on the experiment of
cultivating what we can call human pluralization and working against the closure of the human:
My morality [Moral] would be to take the general character of man more and more away
from him […] to make him to a degree non-understandable to others (and with it an object
of experiences, of astonishment, of instruction for them)… Should not each individual
[Individuum] be an attempt to achieve a higher species than man through its most individual things? (NL, KSA 9, 6[158])
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