NIETZSCHE'S FUTURES
Nietzsche's Futures Edited by John Lippitt Senior Lecturer in Philosophy University of Hertfordshire
First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-27054-5 ISBN 978-1-349-27052-1 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27052-1 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21559-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nietzsche's futures / edited by John Lippitt. p. cm. ''Most of the essays... arose from papers presented at the Fifth Aunual Conference of Britain's Friedrich Nietzsche Society, held at the University of Hertfordshire during September 1995"-lntrod. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21559-0 (cloth) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. I. Friedrich Nietzsche Society. Conference (5th: 1995 : University of Hertfordshire ) B3317.N4976 1998 193--dc21 98-21080 CIP Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 6 John Lippitt 1999 Chapters 1-5 and 7-10 Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to crimiual prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
To my wife, Jo, and my parents, Pat and Ken - for love, support and laughter
Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts Introduction Part One: Nobles and Exemplars 1 Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics David Owen 2 Annunciation and Rebirth: The Prefaces of 1886 Daniel W. Conway 3 Stendhal's Ecstatic Embrace of History as the Antidote for Decadence Brian Domino Part Two: Laughter and Comedy 4 Nietzsche's Best Jokes Laurence Lampert 5 Waves of Uncountable Laughter Kathleen Marie Higgins 6 Laughter: A Tool in Moral Perfectionism? John Lippitt ix x xii xiii 1 3 30 48 63 65 82 99 Part Three: Art, Nature and the Transhuman 127 7 A 'Pessimism of Strength': Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime Jim Urpeth 129 8 Creating the Future: Legislation and Aesthetics Gary Banham 149 vii
viii Contents 9 Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker Graham Parkes 10 Loving the Poison: On the 'Meaning' of the Transhuman Condition Keith Ansell Pearson Index 167 189 '2fJ7
Acknowledgements As is always the case with such ventures, more people have contributed to this project than can be named here. In particular though, I should like to thank the following: the officers of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society for help in the organisation of the conference (especially Keith Ansell Pearson, who provided the idea for its original theme, and Duncan Large); other conference contributors whose papers I have been unable to include in this volume; the University of Hertfordshire for making its facilities available; and Margaret Mitchell-Jubb for her invaluable, highly efficient secretarial support during the organisation of the event. I should also like to thank Athlone and Cambridge University Press for their financial support for the conference, and Rebecca Jiggens for help with proof-reading. The publishers and editor also acknowledge with thanks permission from Routledge to reproduce Essay 10, from Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life (1997). JOHNuppm ix
Notes on the Contributors Keith Ansell Pearson is Director of Graduate Research in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His most recent books include Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (1997) and the edited Deleuze and Philosophy (1997). His next book, Deleuze and Germinal Life: Essays on Evolution, Ethology, Ethics, and Literature, is forthcoming in 1998. Gary Banham is a member of Hertford College, Oxford, which is where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. He has published articles on Nietzsche, Kant, Derrida, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, and is currently writing a book on Kant's aesthetics. Daniel W. Conway is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely in the fields of political theory, ethics, and contemporary continental philosophy. His most recent publications include Nietzsche and the Political (1997) and Nietzsche's Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (1997). Brian Domino is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of articles on Nietzsche's medico-political thought. Kathleen Marie Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1987), The Music of Our Lives (1991), and co-editor (with Robert C. Solomon) of Reading Nietzsche (1988), The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love (1991), From Africa to Zen (1993) and (with Bernd Magnus) The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (1996), among other books and articles. She has recently completed a book-length study of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Laurence Lampert is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He is the author of Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1986), Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (1993), Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (1996), and articles on William Butler Yeats and the Canadian philosopher George Grant. x
Notes on the Contributors John LippiH is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published numerous articles on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and theories of humour and laughter; and is currently working on two books on Kierkegaard: one entitled Kierkegaard and the comic, the other a commentary on Fear and Trembling. David Owen is Lecturer in Politics and Assistant Director of the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Maturity and Modernity (1994) and Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995), editor of Sociology after Postmodernism (1997) and co-editor of The Politics of Critique (1998) as well as numerous articles on contemporary continental philosophy and political theory. He was until recently editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. He is the editor of Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987) and Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), translator of Nishitani Keiji's The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990) and Reinhard May's Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Thought (1996), and author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology (1994). His current work on Nietzsche is more biographically and filmically oriented. Jim Urpetb is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Greenwich. He has written on Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Deleuze and Foucault, and is an editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on the relationship between philosophy and theology in contemporary thought. Other research interests include the philosophy of art and contemporary critiques of 'humanism'. xi
Reference Key to Nietzsche's Texts Several different editions and translations of Nietzsche's works have been used by the various contributors to this volume. Titles have been abbreviated according to the following key. (See the endnotes to each chapter for publication information.) AC ADM ASC BGE BT CW D EH GM GS HC HH KGW KSA RWB SE TI UD UM WP WS Z The Anti-Christ (or The Anti-Christian) 'Assorted Opinions and Maxims' (incorporated into HH IT) 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism' Beyond Good and Evil The Birth of Tragedy The Case of Wagner Daybreak (or Dawn of Morning) Ecce Homo On the Genealogy of Morals (or On the Genealogy of Morality) The Gay Science (or The Joyful (or Joyous) Science) 'Homer on Competition' (or 'Homer's Contest') Human, All Too Human (two volumes, I and II) Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe Siimtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth' 'Schopenhauer as Educator' Twilight of the Idols 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life' Untimely Meditations (or Unfashionable Observations) The Will to Power 'The Wanderer and his Shadow' (incorporated into HH II) Thus Spoke Zarathustra xii
Introduction Most of the essays in this volume arose from papers presented at the fifth annual conference of Britain's Friedrich Nietzsche Society, held at the University of Hertfordshire during September 1995. The conference had the dramatic - even apocalyptic - title 'Nietzsche and the Future of the Human'. ('That's right', Richard Schacht felt obliged to add when advertising the conference in the North American Nietzsche Society newsletter. 1) In this volume, as at the conference, contributors address the 'future of the human' theme from a variety of perspectives. These range from various concerns about 'self-overcoming' in a person's own future - raising issues about 'noble ethics', exemplarity and moral perfectionism - through a consideration of a Nietzschean vision of the future characterised by laughter and 'joyous science', to contemporary issues concerning humanism and anti-humanism, humanity's relation - in an age of ecological crisis - to the natural world of which we are a part, and the ramifications of contemporary views of evolution on questions about the 'transhuman condition'. The essays are grouped under three broad themes. The following brief outlines may also suggest alternative lines of development that can be traced through the collection. I NOBLES AND EXEMPLARS Major features of any future commended by Nietzsche, surely, would be some sort of 'noble morality', the ability to learn from exemplars, and a proper orientation towards 'health' and'sickness'. In 'Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics', David Owen addresses the 'problem of the noble ideal' raised in On the Genealogy of Morality (GM I 16); and of the way that Nietzsche manages to seduce us with this ideal. He relates Nietzsche to Kant's concern about 'the great unthinking mass' being so 'immature' as to allow others to do their thinking for them. Owen shows that whereas Kant's world-view allows him to legislate for maturity via an ideal dependent upon the transcendental status, absolute authority, and unconditional value of reason, Nietzsche would find such a xiii
xiv Introduction solution repellent due both to his perspectivism and his objections to Kant's conception of morality. Nietzsche can recommend - but not legislate - the 'noble ideal' as a goal. But what is Nietzschean 'nobility'? Owen focuses upon the discussion of conscience in the second essay of the Genealogy, with the aim of explaining Nietzsche's desire to exempt the noble from 'bad conscience'. He points to a crucial ambiguity in Nietzsche's use of this term: between bad conscience in its 'raw', 'formless' state; and that which has been turned in a particular direction by the 'ascetic priest'. Owen reconsiders the difference between the 'mature' Ubermensch and the 'immature' last man, arguing that the main features of the former are 'self-affirmation disclosed as the disposition of amor fati', and an Enlightenment ideal of self-government. Nietzsche's commitment to this latter ideal, Owen suggests, means that a particular kind of morality will emerge from such a view. Against common images found both inside and outside Nietzsche scholarship, Owen argues for a noble ethics which includes such features as 'mutual recognition, honesty, loyalty, magnanimity and, even, courtesy'. The themes of sickness, convalescence and health are central concerns of the next two contributors. Daniel W. Conway's 'Annunciation and Rebirth' considers the prefaces Nietzsche wrote, in 1886, to earlier works. What do they tell us about the development of his thought; and what intended reading do they signal? Conway aims to show how, through these prefaces, the story is told of Nietzsche's own development from sickness to convalescence, and from convalescence to health. This latter transformation is marked by a capacity for a Dionysian' squandering'. The prefaces also show the strategy Nietzsche would himself commend for reading him: one of 'symptomatology'. Conway argues that Nietzsche aims to tum himself into a 'sign'; into that of which he could only previously speak: the kind of exemplar upon which the future of humanity is dependent. Brian Domino continues the thought of images of 'health' being presented through particular exemplars in his 'Stendhal's Ecstatic Embrace of History as the Antidote for Decadence'. Domino argues that for Nietzsche, whether the future of humanity is one of health or sickness depends upon how we relate ourselves to history. He contrasts two flawed relations - decadents' 'grave-robbing' ideas that are likely merely to have the effect of increasing decadence (Wagner) and attempting to isolate oneself (the Nietzsche presented in Ecce Homo) - with the antidote exemplified by Stendhal. Stendhal's 'embrace' has
Introduction two crucial features: an aesthetics which is erotic, as opposed to disinterested; and placing oneself in what is foreign - in somehow inhabiting a period such as the Italian Renaissance. While accepting that Nietzsche offers no definite prescription or recipe for achieving this, Domino warns that the deconstruction of history found in certain strains of postmodernism may be a calamity, since the only remedy for decadence lies in relating ourselves to history in a way more appropriate than this. xv n LAUGHTER AND COMEDY Laughter is another feature which Nietzsche regularly hints would be an important part of any 'Nietzschean' future. Someone to whom I once mentioned my interest in Nietzsche and laughter expressed amazement at my connecting the two. He suggested that a Nietzschean laughter would be somewhat manic - perhaps prompting its panicked hearers to ensure that the steak-knives were safely locked away. Yet in contrast to this caricature, the next three contributors all consider aspects of the role of laughter and comedy in Nietzsche's thought. In 'Nietzsche's Best Jokes', Laurence Lampert presents what he takes to be some of Nietzsche's wittiest aphorisms, on the themes of both God and humanity. But he also assesses what he considers to be the real ground of joking in Nietzsche. Lampert argues that Nietzsche came to see that doctrines such as 'the sovereignty of becoming, the fluidity of all concepts, types and kinds, the lack of any cardinal distinction between human and animal', which he had once viewed as 'true but deadly' (UD 9), can in fact be the ground of, and spur to, gaiety, carnival and festival: a comedy of existence the eternal recurrence of which we could happily affirm. The relationship between tragedy and comedy - especially between the tragic and comic world-views mentioned at the start of The Gay Science - is a leitmotif of Kathleen Higgins's 'Waves of Uncountable Laughter'. By comparing Nietzsche's Zarathustra with the historical figure who inspired him, Higgins aims to explain Zarathustra's appearance at the end of The Gay Science. She aims to show how Zarathustra plays there the role of a tragic hero, and the rest of the book that of the tragic chorus, whipping up its readers to such a Dionysian frenzy that they see Zarathustra as a visionary, rather than a flawed human being. But in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests that when, at the end of the book, it is
xvi Introduction announced that 'the tragedy begins', we should consider that what is really being announced is that 'the parody begins' (GS Preface 2nd ed 1). Higgins argues that this is intended to make us recall the claim of the first section of the book; that the 'waves of uncountable laughter' of the comic perspective will always overwhelm the tragic outlook. Hence we are to recognise two things: that the tragic era in which we are ourselves situated will end, and that - if our experience of the book is such that we are already engaged in 'gay science' - we have ourselves embarked on the project of bringing it to an end. In my own essay, I am rather more sceptical about the festive or joyful laughter most commonly labelled as Nietzschean. In the cold light of day, just how useful could a recommendation to laugh such laughter be, given the 'all too human' position from which any 'selfovercoming' must start? In my 'Laughter: A Tool in Moral Perfectionism?', I consider some of the different roles of laughter at work in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, focusing upon two. There is indeed the ecstatic, Dionysian laughter associated with the embrace of eternal recurrence. But in Part IV, after Zarathustra's embrace of eternal recurrence, his laughter frequently remains akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as 'reduced' laughter. Containing no obvious elements of festive joy, it is sometimes mocking, sarcastic, and even angry. Yet a more 'reduced', 'all too human', more reflective laughter, I suggest, can play an important role in the moral perfectionist project which Stanley Cavell and others have seen at work in Nietzsche. I develop two ideas in particular. First, I aim to show how, when 'agonistic', publicly contested discourse reaches immovable bedrock, such laughter can occasion a 'non-discursive dismissal' of the competing views of others, which can fortify one in the pursuit of one's own path to 'self-overcoming'. Second, though, such reflective laughter can also help in situations in which we need to stand back from and judge our current selves. The ability to cultivate 'comic distance' here can help prevent the ossification of the self and resist the internalisation of potentially corrupting values, such as dangerous forms of 'bad conscience'. These are two ways in which even a 'reduced' laughter can kill the 'spirit of gravity'. ill ART, NATURE AND THE TRANSHUMAN Our third section deals with perhaps the widest diversity of topics. Both Jim Urpeth and Gary Banham are concerned with aspects of
Introduction xvii Nietzsche's aesthetics in relation to humanism. In 'A "Pessimism of Strength": Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime', Urpeth argues that the limits of the 'human' are disclosed by a Nietzschean conception of the 'tragic' sublime which can be opposed to 'moral' conceptions thereof, such as Kant's. The central theme here is different ways of overcoming pessimism through art. To a 'slave' approach, such as that of Schopenhauer - in which our only hope is to obtain transcendence of 'this world' via redemption from the will, the body, and so on - Urpeth opposes Nietzsche's 'noble' overcoming of pessimism, which denies the evaluation of life on which the 'slave' world-view hinges. The 'slave' world-view derives from the unnecessary adoption of the man-nature distinction of 'Platonic-Chrlstian' metaphysics. Urpeth aims to develop a notion of 'immanent transcendence'. He argues that, in The Birth of Tragedy as well as in later texts, Nietzsche provides us with an account of such a notion which allows a conception of the sublime that is thoroughly 'this-worldly', and which resists the criticisms he later - mistakenly - makes in the 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism'. In 'Creating the Future: Legislation and Aesthetics', Gary Banham derives from Thus Spoke Zarathustra an account of legislation and creation and their relation to questions about futurity. He considers this alongside a reading of Nietzsche's early and later critiques of Wagner, and what these reveal about the different views of art and aesthetics held by the two men. Then, via a reading of the threefold nature of the term' aesthetic' found in Kant's three critiques, Banham aims to show how Nietzsche's 'selective inheritance of the Kantian legacy' enables him to conceive the future of the human as an aesthetic problem. He concludes with some suggestions as to what implications this has for questions about the iibermensch and the human body. The final two essays address, in very different ways, particularly timely themes. In what is increasingly perceived as an age of ecological crisis, Graham Parkes draws attention to aspects of Nietzsche's thought which locate him in a tradition of thinking which demands a reverence for the 'natural' world. In 'Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker', Parkes draws on a variety of texts, published and unpublished, to show how Nietzsche develops a philosophy of nature which both stresses the continuity between humanity and the natural world and shows his tendency to construe nature as divine. Along the way, Parkes draws brief but suggestive parallels between Nietzsche and aspects of East Asian thought. Taking Nietzsche's view of nature seriously forces us to consider the implications for our relation to the natural
xviii Introduction world. Parkes wants to impress upon us the urgency of doing so because (but not only because) the 'future of the human' is dependent upon the 'future of the earth'. The final contribution is Keith Ansell Pearson's 'Loving the Poison: On the "Meaning" of the Transhuman Condition'. Ansell Pearson, it seems, would wish to challenge aspects of the continuity between man and nature in Nietzsche sketched by Parkes. The status of 'man' in relation to 'the animals' is one of Ansell Pearson's concerns; yet he argues that to say that man 'belongs' amongst them (or, by implication, is part of 'nature') is to overlook man's peculiar status as the 'sick', 'strange' animal. Against readings of Nietzsche which present the Ubermensch or 'overhuman' as something radically discontinuous with the human, Ansell Pearson insists on the importance of recognising the overhuman's human origins. Moreover, man's promise is to be found in his 'becoming sick', through the triumph of the 'slave' over the 'noble'. Prima facie 'reactive' values conceal a hidden' activity'; and can be re-evaluated if we consider them as tools through which the 'human animal' can be further cultivated. One of the main claims of Nietzsche's genealogy, therefore, is that morality is not merely the 'danger of dangers', it is also the 'breeding ground' for an extra-moral self-overcoming. This enables us to read the invention of 'bad conscience' as a decisive stage in evolution. With this thought in mind, and with reference to such thinkers as Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, Ansell Pearson examines different pictures of evolution and 'recent reports on the transhuman condition', aiming to explain why, from a Nietzschean point of view, so many of them are fundamentally wrong-headed. Taken together, these essays provide a range of perspectives on the thought of futurity in Nietzsche's work. It is hoped that this collection will contribute to the continued debate about Nietzsche, one of the most engaging thinkers of the past, who has much to say about - and to - both the present and the future. University of Hertfordshire Mily 1997 JOHN LIPPITT Note 1. Nietzsche News, no. 16 (Spring 1995), p. 3.