Introduction: Nietzsche and the Passions

Nietzsche has some striking thoughts on the passions. In a note from the end of 1880 he writes that without the passions the world is reduced to simply “quantity and line and law and nonsense,” presenting us with “the most repulsive and presumptuous paradox” (KSA 9:7[226]).¹ Indeed, Robert Solomon has argued that Nietzsche attacks the modern stress on epistemology within philosophy and seeks to return philosophy to its true vocation as a doctrine of the passions. For Solomon, the title The Gay Science, signals a defense of the passionate life, since la gaya scienza is a life of longing and love.² This special issue of JNS has been put together with a view to exploring and illuminating Nietzsche as a philosopher of the passions. The suggestion is not, however, that he is a philosopher of the passions at the expense of reason. We have no desire to tout the familiar conception of Nietzsche an arch-irrationalist.

The idea of Nietzsche as a “passionate defender of the passionate life,” as Solomon puts it, a thinker who wanted to promote living with passion and who writes from the perspective of the passions and not from the supposedly “objective” perspective of reason and rationality and offers an unrestrained defense of them, requires some qualification since Nietzsche’s views on the passions (or emotions and affects) undergo complex transformations in the course of his intellectual development.

In his middle period writings, he idealizes a free spirit that is free in a specific sense. It does not enjoy the freedom of action, which is an illusion. Rather, through what Nietzsche calls the “purifying knowledge,” it has become “rid of emphasis” (HH 34), realizing that all is nature and nothing more than nature, so that it finally lives among human beings “as if in nature, without praise, reproaches, or excessive zeal, or as if at a play, feasting upon the sight of many things that had previously made us only afraid.” This is a much simpler life than that lived hitherto by humanity, one that is “more purified of the affects than at present” and that speaks of a “good temperament” and a “cheerful soul.” Such a free spirit, who has become liberated from the ordinary chains of life, lives “only in order to know better,” renouncing many things without envy or bitterness, and now practices the most desirable state, one of “free, fearless hovering above people, customs, laws, and traditional appraisals of things” (HH 34). Although this state is one of a certain renunciation—for example, the renunciation of action—it is not without joy, and it is this joy that the free spirit seeks to communicate 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...