Introduction Nietzsche and the Passions
Author(s): Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Ure
Source: Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, Special Issue: Nietzsche and the
Affects (Spring 2013), pp. 1-5
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.44.1.0001
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2 Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Ure
is not without joy, and it is this joy that the free spirit seeks to c ommunicate to
others. In this context the “joy” being referred to is that of liberation from the
primeval affects we have inherited.
In Dawn, Nietzsche argues that Christianity has brought into the world a new
and unlimited imperilment, creating new securities, enjoyments, recreations,
and evaluations. Although we moderns may be in the process of emancipating ourselves from such an imperilment, we keep dragging into our existence,
even into our noblest arts and philosophies, the old habits associated with these
securities and evaluations (D 57). Nietzsche holds that in wanting to return to
the affects “in their utmost grandeur and strength”—for example, as love of
God, fear of God, fanatical faith in God, and so on—Christianity represents a
popular protest against philosophy, and he appeals to the ancient sages against it,
since they advocated the triumph of reason over the affects (D 58). Paul Franco
has recently argued that Nietzsche’s love of knowledge is part of “an ongoing
therapeutic praxis” designed to work against the seductions of philosophical and
epistemological rhetoric, and this resistance may explain “why he also enlists a
fresh vocabulary to express himself, one free of the hazardous emotional baggage of traditional philosophy.”3
As part of this search, Nietzsche gives the impression of wishing to reduce all
passions, with their “raptures and convulsions” (AOM 172), to their minimum
articulation. Nietzsche speaks of their conquest, mastery, and overcoming. In
WS 88, he writes of the “spiritually joyful, luminous and honest [aufrichtigen]
human being” that has overcome its passions, while in aphorism 37 of the same
text he invites his reader to “work honestly [redlich] together” on the task of
“transforming the passions [Leidenschaften] of mankind one and all into joys
[Freudenschaften].” In WS 53, he makes it clear that he regards the overcoming
of the passions as a means and not an end in itself: the aim is to overcome them
so as to enter into possession of the most fertile ground.
In his later writings Nietzsche is perhaps most keen to combat what he sees as
the degrading of the passions. He thinks we misunderstand the relation between
passion and reason when we treat the latter an independent entity and not as “a
system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason—” (KSA 13:11[310]).4 The fear of
the senses, of desires, and of the passions, and that goes as far as counseling us
against them, is to be viewed as a symptom of weakness, as an inability to restrain
impulses (KSA 13:14[157]).5 In terms of human life and its economy of affects
we discover, Nietzsche argues, that the affects “are one and all useful,” whether
directly or indirectly, and considered in economic terms the forces of nature are
both useful and the sources of much terrible fatality (KSA 12:10[133).6 As he
famously writes, we both need to have and not to have our emotions or affects,
to know how to employ their stupidity as well as their fire. Nietzsche’s art of the
passions is an intricate and delicate one.
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Introduction 3
So what of the contributions to this topic that make up this special issue?
In the opening essay Aurelia Armstrong considers Spinoza and Nietzsche as
two modern thinkers who inherit the ancient Stoic conception of philosophy
as a therapeutic practice aimed at producing human flourishing. However, she
argues that both thinkers depart from the Stoic endeavor of seeking to attain
freedom through liberation from the passions. There are two problems with a
“nonimmanent” model or conception of human freedom: first, it elevates the
person of virtue above nature and accords to the soul, but not the body, the power
to transcend natural determination; second, it narrows our conception of what
counts as the self to the rational soul of a person that is engaged in a permanent
struggle for liberation from the body, passivity, and the passions. The result is
a divided individual split between the cognitive and the affective, the mental
and the bodily, the rational and the instinctive, and a negative philosophy of
the passions that leaves the individual in this torn state. What is needed, then,
is a quite different appreciation of the passions, one that will show how it is
possible to increase our power in the world. But here we need to appreciate that
our freedom is limited and that our flourishing life is a precarious one.
In the next contribution, Michael Ure explores Nietzsche’s sources in both
ancient and modern currents of thought, aiming in particular to show how
Nietzsche’s thinking is best seen as an amalgam of an ancient model of philosophy (with its concern with “spiritual exercises” as Pierre Hadot has called
them) and the new paradigm of evolutionary thinking. Specifically, Ure argues
that Nietzsche attempts to wed one particular ancient spiritual exercise—that
of attaining “the view from above”—with the new perspective of evolutionary
naturalism. Nietzsche’s practical philosophy repudiates the ordinary emotions
of compassion, fear, and grief in an effort to attain the classical ideal, namely,
freedom from mortal affective life. For Ure, the significance of this reading is
that it means it is no longer sufficient to construe Nietzsche as a philosopher of
the “tragic,” since what is unleashed with the revival of the view from above
is the philosophical passion of joy. The new science, “the gay science,” is that
mode of knowledge that seeks the view from above, or the perspective of the
economy of the whole, and takes pleasure in the experimental sacrifice of humanity; indeed, it derives joy from this. Thus, for Ure, the joy of science is the joy
of Schadenfreude.
In the next contribution Joanne Faulkner undertakes a wide-ranging
examination of the affect—and metaphor—of disgust in Nietzsche’s writings.
For Faulkner Nietzsche’s recourse to disgust is an essential part of the corporeal and affective imagery Nietzsche often draws on in his evaluations of
philosophy and culture. She argues that disgust operates on a number of levels
in the writings, including as a means of communicating a visceral response
to philosophy and to society, as well as the general cultural malaise—the
self-disgust—that characterizes the affective life of late nihilistic modernity.
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4 Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Ure
It also operates playfully and ironically in his writings. However, perhaps the
most interesting figuration of disgust in the text of Nietzsche is its deployment
as a means of generating a future community of “Nietzscheans”: here the affect
of disgust works by contagion and in opposition to the lowly affect of pity or
compassion (Mitleid) that degrades both benefactor and receiver. We thus have
another opposition between strength and weakness, namely, the contagion of
disgust contra the contagion of pity. There are for Faulkner a number of questions to be asked of Nietzsche’s affective philosophy of disgust. How do we
avoid becoming contaminated by this disgust with life? What are the assumptions about the sphere of the social that underlie his use of disgust as the chief
affective orientation toward others? What might be the potentialities of disgust
that remain underexplored in Nietzsche’s work and our reception of it? And,
finally, what of the tensions that govern Nietzsche’s thinking on disgust and his
quest for purification? Does not the desire for purity move in the direction of an
intolerance of difference and ambiguity that runs contrary to Nietzsche’s stated
goals of promoting diversity and creativity? Faulkner concludes by suggesting
that the best use to be made of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life affirmation consists
in reading against those moments in his texts that favor purity and attempting
instead a “redemptive dialectic” of disgust.
In the final contribution Joseph Kuzma takes the reader on a journey into
Nietzsche’s search for a new erotic ideal. For Kuzma, as for readers like Robert
Pippin, the figuration of desire that forms the basis of a Nietzschean eroticism is a
risky and unconventional one of distance and the infinitely remote. Kuzma wants
to know how the specific demand of fashioning such an ideal came to impose
itself on Nietzsche’s thinking and why an unqualified affirmation of erotic distance prominently asserts itself in his mature philosophy and as a response to
the impasses of nihilism. In the article, he seeks to show that a possible impetus
for the new eros can be traced back to Nietzsche’s formative exposure to the
pathos of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. For Nietzsche, Tristan is Wagner’s
“non plus ultra,” a central work and possessing a fascination for him that was
without equal or parallel. What has not been explored in the literature to date,
however, is the presence of Tristanian tropes in Nietzsche’s mature writings and
concepts such as eternal recurrence. On Kuzma’s reading, the opera offers its
audience two separate narratives: one that culminates in presence, satisfaction,
and ultimately release and another in which the unceasing movement of courtly
deferral remains unvanquished. While it pushes the desire for amorous consummation to the farthest point possible, it also offers at the same time a portrait of
unrelenting erotic forbearance. And it is this tension that captivates Nietzsche,
according to Kuzma. What Nietzsche ultimately sees in this regimen of erotic
deferral and distanciation is an implement to be deployed in the struggle against
romanticism and the whole tradition of consummatory and nihilistic thinking
that goes back to Plato. In short, Nietzsche’s desire is for a deep “eternity”
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Introduction 5
(“Ewigkeit”) that is bereft of release and consummation. This rehabilitation of
erotic distance finds its consummate articulation in the curious thought of eternal
recurrence conceived as a thought of absolute separation. For Kuzma, it is this
thought alone that provides us with an articulation of distance unfettered by any
and every limit. The great difficulty of presenting this thought—which, as every
reader of the text knows, is a strong feature of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—is part
of its enigmatic truth: the exigency of deferral that is the meaning and message
of eternal return must be testified and borne witness to.
Notes
1. Translations from Nietzsche’s notebooks are our own, unless otherwise indicated.
2. Robert C. Solomon, Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3. Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 382.
4. Translated in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §208.
5. Translated as The Will to Power, §402.
6. Translated as The Will to Power, §485.
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