Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought

11. Zarathustra and His Asinine Friends: Nietzsche and Taste as the Groundless Ground of Friendship

287 The Turn from Friendship To ask of Nietzsche sage wisdom regarding friendship seems somewhat misguided—like turning to Henry VIII for marriage advice or to JeanJacques Rousseau for tips on parenting. By most accounts Nietzsche was something of a misanthrope, and his biography recounts a litany of failed friendships and long periods of loneliness.1 In his thought, especially his later work, he repeatedly praises solitude and individualism and takes to calling himself a “free spirit.” These free spirits, he says, are “jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude.”2 But not only does Nietzsche praise solitude, he goes so far as to disparage the company of others: “He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green 11 Zarathustra and His Asinine Friends Nietzsche and Taste as the Groundless Ground of Friendship Richard Avramenko 040 pt4 (285-348) 3/20/08 12:53 PM Page 287 and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an elevated taste [Geschmack].”3 In an even more vitriolic moment, he remarks, “[S]olitude is with us a virtue: it is a sublime urge and inclination for cleanliness which divines that all contact between man and man—‘in society’—must inevitably be unclean. All community makes somehow, somewhere, sometime—‘common.’”4 So what, then, does this misanthropic loner have to add to a discussion of friendship? According to Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche is not always so caustic with regard to friendship. In the middle period of his work, she argues, the issue was a central concern and, though mostly neglected in the secondary literature, here “Nietzsche suggests that there is a close connection between friendship and selfhood, contending that an individual’s friendships reflect something about his or her identity.”5 Moreover, in this period, one is able to discern that for Nietzsche friendship lends itself nicely to self-knowledge, that it is not inimical to self-overcoming, that “friendship is a forum in which pity’s positive characteristics can manifest themselves,” and finally that “solitude need not exclude friendship.”6 Nietzsche, it appears, was not always the misanthrope he is generally considered to be. There is, then, a disconnect between the younger Nietzsche and the more mature one with regard to the idea of friendship. As Abbey informs us, “there is a gradual enervation of Nietzsche’s depiction of friendship and its importance for higher human beings.”7 There is, so to speak, a turn from friendship. And while Abbey is correct that it was a departure from his optimistic view of friendship, there was really nothing gradual about it. In fact, there is a clear and abrupt departure from his middle work to Zarathustra and beyond. One is hard-pressed to find anything praiseworthy of friendship after his famous Incipit tragoedia at the end of the book 4 of The Gay Science.8 As it were, when Zarathustra left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains, so too did Nietzsche. What, then, is the relationship between Nietzsche’s literary introduction of Zarathustra and his turn from friendship? Many commentators point to a thinker’s personal life as the impetus for their meditations on friendship. Jacques Derrida suggests this very thing when he claims that “the great canonical meditations on friendship . . . are linked to the experience of mourning, to the moment of 288 T Richard Avramenko 040 pt4 (285-348) 3/20/08 12:53 PM Page 288 loss—that of the friend or of friendship.”9 While this may be the case for Cicero, Montaigne, and Blanchot, it simply does not apply to Nietzsche . If, as Abbey claims, friendship is a central concern for Nietzsche during his middle period, then this “moment of loss” must have occurred at the end of the so-called first period, or at the beginning of the second. If there actually is any mourning or moments of loss in Nietzsche ’s personal life, these supposed ruptures begin either near the end of his second period or well into the third. For example, the death of Albert Brenner, the split with his old friend Carl von Gersdorff, the falling out with Richard Wagner, all take place in about 1879—and many of the middle-period thoughts on friendship had been developed and written by this time. Of the moments of...