Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being

Giving and Forgiving

4 Giving and Forgiving Nietzsche’s opposition to Christian morality is commonly thought to be an aspect of his immorality or nihilism. In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche rejects Christianity in favor of a positive morality that has its source in the practice of gift-giving. Gift-giving is of great importance to Nietzsche —especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra—for its ability to promote freedom and justice. Not only does gift-giving liberate both the one who gives and the one who receives, but it is also a way to do them justice. In this sense, the virtue of gift-giving belongs to a positive conception of morality that is political, revealing an aspect of gift-giving that has not been sufficiently taken into account by recent commentaries on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. By ‘‘political,’’ I mean a conception of justice that gives priority to the relationship with the other. Nietzsche’s vision of justice, like Rawls’s, rejects utilitarian conceptions on the grounds that they reduce the other to a permutation of the self.1 What distinguishes Nietzsche ’s anti-utilitarian conception of justice from other critiques of utilitarianism is that it does not base the relationship to the other on the notion of a social contract in which the self and the other have a reciprocal relationship, such that the terms for the relationship that the self offers to the other must be terms that the other can envisage offering back to the self. For Nietzsche, justice is structured by gift-giving, where the relationship between the self and the other is not symmetrical.2 In such an asymmetrical relationship, what the self gives to the other and the other to the self stand as acknowledgments of the distance and difference between the 61 self and the other. There is also a second sense in which Nietzsche’s virtue of gift-giving is political. Namely, insofar as it revives the Greek conception of political friendship, philia politiké, it can be understood as a bond between equals who stimulate each other to develop their own virtue. Greek political friendship preserves the other’s freedom through distance, while continually challenging the other to enhance that freedom through struggle and competition (agon). According to Nietzsche, these political friendships constituted by gift-giving stand in opposition to the Christian idea of fellowship or companionship based on the love for one’s neighbor. The practice of gift-giving contrasts sharply with the Christian practice of forgiveness. Nietzsche provides two primary reasons for contesting the latter. First, Christian forgiveness fails to break the cycle of revenge. It does not redeem the past, but rather stirs up feelings of resentment, hatred , and revenge. Second, Christian forgiveness does not enhance human animal life, but poisons it (AOM 224; BGE 168).3 In contrast, Nietzsche only approves of those practices of forgiveness that are fueled by gift-giving and that redeem the past. The overcoming of revenge is crucial to the possibility of a positive notion of forgiveness insofar as Nietzsche sees, in the desire for revenge, an obstacle to the development of forms of sociability that are based on gift-giving. I argue that the double failure Nietzsche detects in the Christian practice of forgiveness results from denying the human being’s animality a productive role in the constitution of sociability . In particular, Christian forgiveness ignores the value and significance of what Nietzsche refers to as the forgetfulness of the animal. Animal forgetfulness is not only indispensable to breaking the cycle of revenge, but also to establishing a relationship with the other that is based on giftgiving . Because the forgetfulness of the animal is an essential component of Nietzsche’s analysis of forgiveness as gift-giving, I contend that the giftgiving virtue should be understood as an animal rather than a human virtue .4 Likewise, friendship, as Nietzsche conceives it in opposition to Christian love for one’s neighbor, has its source in the antagonism between human and animal life forces. The idea that the animal (the other) challenges the development of greater freedom and virtue is best illustrated by the friendship between Zarathustra and his animals. In current ethical reflection, Derrida’s recent work on forgiveness and friendship bears the strongest affinity with Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality.5 In my discussion of Nietzschean morality, I will point out the similarities I see between Nietzsche and Derrida on giving, forgiving, and friendship.6 Arendt is the other major contemporary thinker...