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TRACY B. ..... “Learning to Love: Nietzsche on Love, Education and Morality,” in B.N.Ray Contemporary Political Thinking (Kanishka Publishers, New Delhi, 2000)
TRACY B. ..... “Learning to Love: Nietzsche on Love, Education and Morality,” in B.N.Ray Contemporary Political Thinking (Kanishka Publishers, New Delhi, 2000)
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TRACY B. ..... “Learning to Love: Nietzsche on Love, Education and Morality,” in B.N.Ray Contemporary Political Thinking (Kanishka Publishers, New Delhi, 2000)
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Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Scarica in formato PDF, TXT o leggi online su Scribd
Love, Education and Morality Tracy B. Strong This is an age without passion: it leaves everything as it is, but it cunningly empties it of Instead of culminated in a rebellion, it reduces outward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous. - S. Kierkegaard, The Present Age Catastrophe: whether one should not believe in God, not because he is true (but because he is false) -Nietzsche, WKG VIII 2 , p. 382 1 Plato begins his dialogue about the philosophical availability of excellence- the Protagoras- with an erotic badinage between Socrates and an unnamed friend. Socrates is hurrying from In memorium Sarah Kofman, a great spirit, who left life voluntarily on Nietzsche's 150th birthday. 7'2 Tracy B. Strong the of Protagoras (to keep an urgent appointment, we later fmd out) when he encounters his friend who tease him with the suggestion that he is in hot pursuit of Not really so, responds Socrates, he has been in pursuit of knowledge with Protagoras. He then proceeds to give a full account of his encounter with the great Sophist - we must his appointment was to make knowledge <wadable to his friends, and, through Plato, to his readers. The point of the exchange is not, I think, to indicate that Socrates' friend is mistaken about Socrates' intent; it is rather to show that love and knowledge are similar passions. Importantly, the story bet,rins with the account of how the young Hippocrates had come crashing into Socrates' bed- room in the pitch dark, inquiring if Socrates were asleep or awake. Hippocrates' enthusiasm is due to his having just learned that Protagoras is in town; he intends to learn from him. We_ are meant, I think, to be dubious of Hippocrates's prep_aratwn for philosophical knowledge; after all, his first mqmry of Socrates was the paradigm of the question that has but one possible - and uninteresting - answer. We also learn immediately that Hippocrates' slave Satyrus has just run away. Hi_rpocrates cannot manage his eroticism and is not ready for phll_osophy. Socrates, by contrast, has integrated both eros and philosophy. Indeed, Socrates moves easily from the love of an other to the love of knowledge. The erotic appears in the as it will in the Symposium, as an integral part of cog- mtion. However, there are two dangers that arise from this link: that oflove overwhelming knowledge, and that of knowl- edge going wrong for being without love. Hippocrates's eros is out of control- as his question and the escape of his slave who -and will take anything for an answer. The reverse situation is that we can have too little of it, such that nothing appears to be an answer. Or so Plato shows us a few pages later in the dia- logue when the eunuch guarding the door of the house in which Protagoras is residing denies entrance to Socrates on the grounds that he is a Sophist. A lack of Eros makes it impos- sible to recognize those who seek knowledge. Learning to Love 73 If love is a form of, a necessary part of, knowledge, it is not sufficient simply to announce this fact. What forms may that relation take? What are possible interactions? Much has been written recently about what one might call non-rational forms of cognition. 2 I do not want here to replay that work, except to call attention to the fact that important anticipations of it are in Nietzsche, as they were in Plato. In general, authors who fol- low in this line of thought find it important not to detach the considerations of questions for that of the relations that exist between particular persons, nor, indeed, form the relations a person might have to him - or herself.3 I want then to look at what Nietzsche has to say about love. While I shall be looking at what he says about Liebe, this will require me to look, at least in passing, at what he says about Eros. It will raise the following questions. What is the relation of morality to love? If God loved the world, whom or what may or do humans love? What does it mean to know love? What is the relation of love and law? And, finally, if one is "beyond good and evil," where exactly is one? Some general considerations first. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche glosses Spinoza's claim that laughing, lamenting and detesting are other than understanding by asserting that intelligere is in fact the "form in which we come to feel the other three at once." 4 Nietzsche is concerned here to deepen both the notion of thought and that of understanding. Most of our cognitive activity, he says, "takes place unconsciously and unfelt." Indeed, "conscious activity, especially that of the phi- losopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely phi- losophers are the most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge." The following paragraph in The Gay Science extends the thought in a specific direction. It is entitled "One must learn to love" and suggest that loving is a cognitive capacity analogous to being able to hear a musical figure. We must, he says, isolate it, tolerate it, be patient with it until we are used to it. Such goodwill, patience, fair-mindedness and gentleness - all Njetzsche's terms- with what is strange leads to the revelation 74 Tracy B. Strong of a new beauty. Nietzsche's montage of these two paragraphs underscores first that love is a form of knowledge, albeit not conscious in origin and, secondly, that even unconscious forms of knowledge have to be learned, i.e. they are not in some crude sense of the word, "natural." They are an acquired nature that may become our first nature. 5 Both love and sexuality are fused with what a person is. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche notes that "The de_gTee and kind of a person's sexuality ( Geschlechtlichkeit) reach up into the last peaks of his understanding ( Geistes). "<i While Nietzsche's comments on Eros and the erotic are not many, they are not categorically disjunctive with what he says about love. The erotic is not, I think, of central interest to Nietzsche. But it is a way into what he thinks about love. If we take the notion of Wollust to be the equivalence of the erotic, the con- siderations in "On the Three Evils" in Zarathustra indicates only that Wollust is a motile emotion, differing in its actualiza- tion relation to character. Or, in the general process of workmg up a theory of what we would call sublimation, he remarks that "pity and the love of mankind [is a] development of the sexual drive" and that "all virtues are really refined pas- sions."7 The point here is not to suggest that at the bottom all that goes by the name of moral discourse, that all considera- tions of justice are merely sublimations of our drives, but that understanding of such judgments must, if it is to be true, mclude a consideration of the whole person by whom they are made. We need then, for an understanding of what Nietzsche means by love, look, if too briefly, at what he says about sexual passion. 8 Sexuality is from early on in Nietzsche a topic which as avoided in philosophy by most others, mcludmg his friends. During the middle 1870's, for instance, the eroti_c was _much on his mind. His friends were marrying and havmg children. It is clear from a letter to Rohde on july 18, 1876, on occasion of his friend announcing his engage- that expected from marriage a "completely trustmg soul, With whom when found one might find oneself on a "higher level." He himself proposed to Mathilde Learning to Love 75 Trampedach in April 1876. About a month after she declined, he wrote to Erwin Rohde in relation to the publication of Rohde's book on the Greek novel. He told his friend that he, Rohde, had, like others including Burckhardt, avoided the topic of pederasty. (T)he idealization of Eros and the most pure and wist- ful feeling for the passion of love among the Greeks first grew upon this ground [of pederasty], and, it seems to me, was only transferred from there to pro- creative [geschlechtliche]love, whereas earlier it actually hindered the more delicate and higher development of procreative love. 9 The older Greeks had not been able to make the transition from pederastic love to procreative love. But such a transition is possible and tells us something about what love can consist of. Rohde's avoidance or omission had kept him from seeing the way in which <j>tA.ta, which Nietzsche identifies with pederastic love, and to which the "Aphrodite aspect of Eros is not essential but only occasional and accidental," is at the centre of things Greek. It is important to realize here that Nietzsche sees in this both a strength and weakness of Greek culture. Women, he says in a remark in Human All Too Human a few years later, were to masculine Greek culture only publicly endurable on stage. Their social role was to produce bring forth "beautiful powerful bodies." 111 This relegation of women leads to,-as the next paragraph makes clear a prejudice in favour of bigness and to the monstrous development of only one part of their abilities. "Men (Manner) subject themselves from habit to all that wants to have power." 11 There is a four-part sequence here. Nietzsche is consider- ing the dynamics that can attach themselves to a philosophical education. He note in the Greek experience a progression from <j>tA.ta to the love of boys, to that is Eros and pederasty. From there erotic love is idealized from its origins in male edu- cation. His indication is that the image we have of procreative 76 Tracy B. Strong love - often translated misleadingly these days as "sexual love" - that is, the image we have of erotic love between men and women is distorted because we have derived it from an idealization of the pederastic developments emerging from male philosophical education. The point is, I think, that love and education (each of the other) are part of any complete relationship. It is not hard to read in this some of Nietzsche hopes for and disappointment in his erotic relations with women. The subject is much on his mind in his letters in the 1870's. The same hopes will appear again during the period of his relation with Lou Salome. I do not wish to pursue that topic here, nor do I wish to pursue the general relation of pederasty to Eros and knowledge and/or politics. It has in any case been recently done better than I might. What is clear though is that when connected with education the notion of love and the erotic has a polymorphous sexual element for Nietzsche from early in his writing. II All of this is significant for Nietzsche's understanding of the human condition when read in relation to his examination of the relation of the passion for human knowledge to its acquisi- tion. This topic - that of the Protagoras - is already at the centre of the third of the Thoughts Out of Season, Schopenhauer as Educator. Two qualities of this essay are noteworthy. First, the essay has an almost breathless erotic quality - that of the eromene to the erastes. Nietzsche starts out by a description of himself as what can only be seen as philosophical cruising. "In those days, I roved as I pleased through wishes of all kinds ... I tried this one and that." His first stance is thus that of the young Hippocrates, in "need, distress and desire" for philosophy, but unable to rest with it. 13 His encounter with Schopenhauer is described in self-consciously explicit "physiological terms. " 14 The question he poses himself is that of given life to a bodily form. 15 The tone is different from that of the other essay in the . r 'f. Learning to Love 77 Untimely series. It is bodily, personal. As everyone notes it is not really a discussion of Schopenhauer. It is a discussion of himself and of the possibility of his relation to Schopenhauer. The tone of the essay is strongly influenced by Nietzsche's reading of Emerson. Indeed, two of Emerson's essays ("Expe- rience" and "Circles") make an explicit appearance. And here again Nietzsche's tone, as is Emerson, is of a to investigate the bounds of limitations of morality. (For those who doubt this in Emerson: "We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us .... I would gladly be moral . . . but I have set my heart on h t ")16 ones y .... Schopenhauer is here seen as an image of the hardest "Selbstsucht, Selbstzuchf' - self-seeking, self-rearing. It is thus about how one finds oneself by making or changing or con- structing a self that one acknowledges as oneself. The essay points, Nietzsche claims, to a way of seeking expression of being that is something new. It is, in other words, an essay about a kind of practicum, about how one becomes what one is. 17 It is also an essay that poses as the model of Erziehung the relationship that Nietzsche found in Greek male education . While Nietzsche's criticism of love between men and women in the culture as he experiences it probably owes a good deal to the problematic idealization of the erotic I noted above,_ he does retain the early vision oflove as a model for what a philo- sophical education would be like. I want to now to _the relation of love to Nietzsche's understanding of a phtlosoph!Cal education, not so much to say something about the latter as about the former. The aim of Schopenhauer as Educator is to establish what is necessary for it to be possible for one to attach one heart, to a great man. As he planned the essay, Nietzsche entertamed the possibility of calling Schopenhauer the Germa? Zuchtmeister, the taskmaster. 18 The figure of Schopenhauer IS what is called here an "exemplar." An exemplar is what one recognizes as part of ones self but which one not yet, to which one feels the obligation of becoming. It IS a recognition which happens only occasionally, when "the clouds are rent 78 Tracy B. Strong asunder, and we see, how we in common with all nature, press towards something that stands high over us." 19 Although this relationship is explicitly said to be available, indeed, required of
This relation is hard to obtain because "it is impossible to teach love." 21 We shall look later at how love can be learned if it is impos- sible to teach. I wish to look at now what the consequences of this difficulty might be. It is the case that, if you will excuse me, what the world needs is love. "Never was the world ... poorer in love .... The educated classes ... become day by day restless, thoughtless and loveless." They have, in other words nothing to love, especially after "the waters ofreligion" have receded. 22 I take these considerations to refer to the claim that there is nothing in the modern world for anyone to love- and that this is one of the reasons that philosophy has become impossible. Nietzsche is here concerned in Schopenhauer as Educator to establish the following claims. First, the question oflove and philosophy- of education - is not one of self-recognition. The question is if it is possible to find exemplars that one can recognize as one's own and with the explicit knowledge that one is not (yet) the exemplar. It is thus not coming to know how you know yourself. " Wie finden wir uns selbst wieder'
It is a question of finding and how one will recognize something as oneself own find. Nietzsche explicit rejerts what one might call the artichoke model of the person where one could discover the real person, the heart, by peeling away the inessential layers. The focus of Schopenhauer as Educator is to the future: to becoming what one is. Knowl- edge must be a form of becoming rather than recognition. But what one is has no existence prior to its existence. This is a complex theme in Nietzsche. In The Birth of Trag- edy, Nietzsche had argued against the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis, against, that is, the idea that the high point of trag- edy came in the recognition of self by the protagonist. Such a moment, for Aristotle, occurs, for instance, when Oedipus finally comes to the recognition of who he is and blinds himself. He sees rather than finds. Nietzsche argues against Learning to Love 79 this that the essence of tragedy is transformation Verwandlung- what he also calls transfiguration.H This experience is generally associated by Nietzsche with coming to know the place where one finds oneself, as if the self were a journey and not in place. Famously, Nietzsche begins the Preface to the Genealogy of Morals with "We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge." He continues, less famously, in the next line by asking "how it could happen that we should ever find
He goes on to intimate that what is wrong with humans is that none of us appear to have sufficient earnestness for "experiences" and that this is the case because we only care about "bringing something The question then is what has to be the case for one to find where one is. The first answer in the Genealogy is that one should not rush about with ones only intention being to "bring something back home." I take this to be related to the implied critique of Aristotle which I take to govern The Birth of Tragedy- Aristotle having held, in Nietzsche's understanding, that who one was was something that would be revealed at home, and that one's task, willy-nilly, was to get back. So Oedipus rec- ognizes himself at the end in the home of his parents which, tragically, is also his home. Home, after all is the place at which, when you go there, they have to let you in - which Robert Frost noted as a tepid consolation of necessity in an absence of freedom. The presumption in Nietzsche's version of Aristotle is that one must encounter who one is, as if who was is needed only to be seen. (The key passage for Aristotle is the moment of recog- nition in Oedipus the King). For Nietzsche, rather, "one must not look back towards oneself for each glance will become the 'evil eye'." 27 The governing trope in this situation is not sight but oversight and love. One will have found oneself when one has lost oneself and been freed from what one is by love: "What have you ... truly loved? What has pulled out your soul, mastered it and at the same time made it joyful"? Love pulls us away from ourselves and dissolves the self into what Nietzsche here calls "Freedom." 28 Love and freedom are linked. Love we know is learned. So 80 Tracy B. Strong how is freedom learned? The second claim in Schopenhauer as Educator is whereas before freedom had been learned from models, in the present day and age these models are not avail- able. (As I noted above, Nietzsche, is incidentally, quite clear that such models are in principle available to everyone). Why, however, are such models - the ones that one might love, that are the principle of freedom and finding - not available? Nietzsche's answer is the beginning of what will be a life-long theme. He tentatively attributes this to a double fact: first, Christianity had triumphed over antiquity, and, secondly, it is now in decline. This has as consequence that when the "better and higher ideals" of Christianity proved unattainable, one could no longer relinquish them to go back to the still extant but now devalued "good and high ideals" of antiquity. The comparative leaves people in a The passage is worth citing at some lenhrth; In this back and forth (Hin und Her) between Christian and Ancient ( Christlich und Antik) between an imitated or hypocritical Christianity of morals and an equally disheartened and self-conscious (hefangen) antiquitizing lives the modern human being and he finds himself quite unhappy with it. The inherited fear of the natural and the renewed attraction of this naturalness, the desire to have some place to stop, the impotence of his knowledge, a reeling back and forth between the good and the better - all this brings out a restlessness, a confusion in the modern soul which condemn it to be unfruitful and joyless. 30 We are caught in an unresting pendulum swing, drawn towards two incompatible poles by virtue only have been hung between them. I might note here that Nietzsche is careful to say a "Christianity of morals" ( Christlichkeit der Sitte) and not Christian morals. 31 It is what Christianity has done rather than what it is that is the problem. The contemporary world is char- acterized by Nietzsche as always going someplace, but with no destination able to evince the quality of being satisfactory. It Learning to Love 81 was from this condition, Nietzsche says, that he found release when he found an educator. But such an educator, such love- the capacity for philoso- phy- is rare, almost non-existent. Why so? Nietzsche then ties this to a tendency in modern philosophy to moralize the world and morality in particular, to become a "reformer of life" rather than a philosopher. 31 The third point in Schopenhauer as Educator is then a consid- eration of what is wrong with modem so-called philosophy. Nietzsche here approaches this question without discussing the answer. He only asserts, with no real preparation, that the answer is that of Empedocles. In the next Untimely Meditation, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," Nietzsche will link the name of Schopenhauer with that of Empedocles (and that of Wagner with Aeschylus, that of Kant with the Eleatics). 33 \Vhat did Empedocles signify for Nietzsche? Nietzsche's admiration is important here in that Empedocles understands the world as the interaction between love and hate. He thus sees even that which appears in the world as rational as resting on "profound irrationality." This is for Nietzsche a political position which, however, was not to acquire the world-histori- cal importance that became that or Socrates. The indication is that a philosophy based on dynamics such as those of Empedocles could have provided a continuation of what had been achieved in the tragic age. Empedocles is a reformer of Greek life who stood as a possible opponent to Socrates. "With Empedocles ... the Greeks were well on their way toward assessing correctly the irrationality and suffering of human existence; but thanks to Socrates, they never reached the goal." 34 The important thing about this passage is that it adds an explicitly political dimension to the analysis of the Birth of Tragedy. It is worth remembering that the Birth is about how it is possible to be Greek and that Nietzsche fully recognizes the centrality of agonistic politics in Greece. The material that found its way to the essay "The Greek State," one of"Five Pref- aces to Five Unwritten Books" presented to Cosima Wagner was originally intended to be part of an expanded form of the 82 Tracy B. Strong Birth of Tragedy. 35 There existence had only admitted of an aesthetic justification (which tells us more about justification than existence, I believe). Now, had Empedocles carried the day, the Greeks would have seen that value and beauty may be found only in the world, not outside of the world, nor under the world, nor in abstract forms that give meaning to the world. We should rather look here, rather than run back out of the world to home. It is also the case, I think that the reason that "we are unknown to ourselves" when we are men of knowledge is because we are men of knowledge, i.e. that we are trying to locate where we find ourselves by means of knowledge. Humans may seek to know, but they do not look and see. They find nothing in the space of human activity. And thus they are blinded by illusions of which it has been forgotten that they are illusions. Thus his famous claim from "Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense" is a claim that what we need to be human does not depend on knowing. 36 It is not precisely that we have too much knowledge, but that what we have keeps us from being. Existence cannot be built on a foundation of knowledge, indeed, it cannot be built at all. "How do we find ourselves"? Empedocles, who would have provided the alternative to Socratic rationalist knowledge, is quietly recog- nized by Nietzsche to be a "democrat, who has social reform up his sleeve." He is identified with "love, democracy and l t "37 communa proper y. The discussion of Erziehung has taken us to that of the self (how does one find oneself), to that oflove, and, in a quiet way, to politics, a politics that has elements of democrac_Y in it, in that the possibility of finding oneself in an exemplar IS open to all. Nietzsche is quietly transforming or revealing the task of education to involve love of others in the world (and thus of the world). Later in Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche writes as follows: Everyone who recognizes himself as of a culture expresses himself on it in this manner: I see something higher and more human than I am above me; help me, Learning to Love 83 all of you, to reach it, just as I will help everyone who recot,rnizes the same thing and suffers the same thing. By thus, at last, may again spring up the person who feels himself infinite in knowing and loving, in seeing and capacity, and who is completely of and in nature, as the judge and criterion of that which is. 3 x Note the Empedoclean democracy: "Everyone ... all of you ... I will help everyone." The kind of being who can do this must be one who loves. Nietzsche goes on to say that it is hard to place someone in this kind of fearless self-knowledge because, as we have seen, it is impossible to teach love. In" love alone does the soul win for itself not only the clear, analytical (zerteilended} and contemptuous view of itself but also gains the passion to overlook (iiberschauen) itself and to seek with all its might a higher self that is still hidden somewhere." Here again the argument parallels the consideration of the same question in the Protagoras. Socrates holds, after many twists and turns, all of which are essential to the complexity of his position, that virtue cannot be taught as a skill but that once acquired it becomes part of what one is. Here, Nietzsche's investigation of love is an investigation of what it means to be able to find something or someone to be an education. It is thus an explo- ration of what was not made explicit in the Protagoras. Love conjoins clarity, analysis and contemptuousness; these are combined with or lead to the passion to overlook itself and thereby seek that which it is not. 39 In love, for Nietzsche, one finds oneself not in oneself, but in overlooking oneself. Overlooking oneself is a combination of the qualities mentioned. As Nietzsche notes in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, love is what produces is a transformation and the freedom of the self from the self to a life "set among the stars." 40 If it is the case that the Birth of Tragedy was intended by Nietzsche as a critique of Aristotle and thus of the notion of identity as something that one has but does not know and comes to recognize, how is Verwandlung achieved? What are the dynamics that Nietzsche found in tragedy other than the Aristotelian positing of i I 84 Tracy B. Strong anagnorisis. In the eight chapter of the Birth he had tried give some account of the kind of audience that a Greek was for his theatre. He will again use the notion of "overlooking" to describe this possibility. A public of spectators as we know it was unknown to the Greeks: in their theatres, the terraced structure of the concentric arcs of the place of spectatorship (Zuschauerraumes) made it possible for everyone actu- ally to overlook the whole world of culture around him and imagine in sated contemplation that he was a choristY The word for overlook here is iibersehen, and it permits the same sense, I think, as the iiberschauen of the Schopenhauer as Educator text. Both words allow the double meaning of "sur- vey" and "fail to see." The audience is in "sated contempla- tion," that is, there is nothing missing from what it is the audience for. During this time it finds itself in the place of spectatorship. It knows that there is everything occurring be- fore it cannot be affected by its actions. (As Shakespeare had noted: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.") This is what Nietzsche means by a Dionysian state- the erotic origins of Dionysus are key. The spectator will not therefore, Nietzsche indicates, "run up on stage and free the God from its torments." The rel2.tions of audience and r:l.rama are somewhat like the love relations to an
As characters, the actors on
stage are in the presence of the audience but the audience is not in their presence. There is no way in which the audience can, as audience, compel the action on stage to acknowledge it- indeed the educator who makes philosophy possible is in Nietzsche's words "let loose" on the planet, as if on a great stage. (Nietzsche quotes here from Emerson's Circles). Throughout Sclwpenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche seeks to make available a position in which one might actually look at Schopenhauer. But it is precisely not a relation to another. The theatre of philosophy is made possible by love and oversight. Learning to Love 85 The audience, in the Birth, is in a Dionysian state; so also is the chorus. Through the chorus the audience is swept up onto the stage to contemplate the action but not to affect it. (The chorus never does anything in Aeschylea.n tragedy.) Nietzsche writes: "The proceeding of the tragic chorus is the dramatic protophenomenon: to see oneself [as embodied in the chorus] transforn:ed before ones very eyes [as spectator] and to begin to act as If one had actually entered into another character." 1 3 My suggestion here is that what Nietzsche means by love in Schopenhauer as Educator is descriptive of same state of affairs as is his o.f the true spectators relation to tragedy. It mvolves bemg besides oneself and being brought to acknowl- edge, while besides oneself (hence the call for analytical clar- ity) that experience as ones own experience. Being besides oneself is, I remind you, the literal meaning of ecstasy. This is why one can trace a pattern from Eros to love and why educa- tion exemplifies both. With this, we have, I hope, a bet,rinning of the answer to the task Nietzsche sets us in the Gay Science: "we must learn to love." The reason that we must learn to love is not just that like all other human qualities, love is acquired rather than innate, but also that love is lost from the world (and hence are also education, freedom, philosophy, and politics) and for these qualities to be available again we must learn to love. Our gates are t,'llarded by fierce eunuchs. But: is this to love not what Christianity commands us to do? There are two great commandments: to love God and one's neighbour. I shall have more to say about the command- ments to love but for now we must look at the question of love 111 the context of what Nietzsche says about Christianity and the person of Christ. III I begin with two texts: ''Wl 1atever Is done out of love is done beyond good and cviJ."l4 8() Tracy B. Strong Jesus said to hisJews: "The law was for servants -love God as I love him, as his son! What are morals to us sons of God ? 4 " 5 These two passages are from the central section of Beyond Good and Evil. That book is Nietzsche's most extended investi- gation of a kind of transcendental deduction of knowledge. More precisely it is an investigation of what occurs to a person who makes claims of knowledge. It starts by raising the ques- 4(i 1 tion of what would be the case were truth a woman. t notes that philosophers are not expert around women. One might conclude from this that philosophy has little to do with truth. It is, however, more natural to conclude that philosophers do not know h ... love women - or truth. Love is, one might say, a quality that one must manifest in order to raise the question if something be true or false. Insofar as love IS a form of cognition - and we saw at the beginning of this essay that for Nietzsche it is- the consideration oflove here is a con- sideration of what happens to us when we encounter the world in love, that is as philosophersY The first question the passages point at is what it would mean to be or go "beyond good and evil," beyond, I take it, the realm in which moral categories apply to ones actions. More bluntly, when one has gone beyond good and evil (who can do this? How is it done?) where does one find oneself? The sec- ond passage raises a question about the difference love and law. It suggests that for Nietzsche the figure of Jesus IS a kind of immoralist or amoralist and that he knows something about love that entitles him to claim that he is liberated from the realm of law and perhaps that of morality. The notion that love stands in a dangerous or perhaps antagonistic relation to morality is not new to Nietzsche. Kant makes a distinction between pathological and practical love and suggests (both in the Doctrine of Virtue and the Critique of Practical Reason) that will-governed practical love (as opposed to what he calls pathological love) only is consonant with moral behaviour. 4 s He suggests that marriage is a valuable institution because it provides a moral framework for a Learning to Love 87 relationship that threatens always to transform one between b t b" t 4 V persons to one e ween o Jec s. Yet Nietzsche is unlikely to share with Kant the same valu- ation oflove as potentially harmful to morality. In understand- ing this, it is important to remember the intimate link between morality and law. For Kant, we find the moral realm only as a law - that is the only way we can experience morality. This tells him something about the relation of human beings to morality: as we are not perfect beings we must experience the moral realm (which Kant acknowledges as the realm of free- dom) as an imperative, i.e. as law. Nietzsche shares much of this understanding of morality; but he is less likely to worry about calling into question the status of morality. Kant, on the other hand, must at some level devalue that which cannot be experienced as law, as imperative. Is love commensurable with morality as law? An additional question is raised by the comparison of Nietzsche with Kant, as would be with most moral philoso- phers. Typically moral philosophers have argued that the validity of morality depended on the universalism of the claim of reason (or utility, or whatever). That is, the principles on which a true morality (as opposed to historically codified social practices) rested must be able to evaluate every relevant human act. (Exceptions were made, of course, for the realm of Naturwissenschaft as well as for analytical statements). There was, in other words a moral imperative that underlay morality itself. Nietzsche's questions here open the possibility that there may be occasions when we might choose as valued actions which would not, however, be judged morally correct. We must thus also determine how and who determines what is and is not moral. 50 Does Christ do this? Clearly. Thus we must ask about Him- how does he and who is he to determine what is moral. Jesus stands for Nietzsche as the example of the man who knows more and loves more than anyone else has - he is the human being who has "flown highest yet and gone astray the most beautifully." 51 Thus the investigation of Nietzsche on love properly goes through an investigation of Nietzsche on Christ. 88 Tracy B. Strong Nietzsche's relation to Christ, as that to Socrates, is multi- ple and complex. Nothing can be more wrong or more mis- leading than a facile conclusion that he was "against" either of them. (This is not to say that he was not, only that the conclu- sion cannot be facile.) Even a book like Der Antichrist is much of the time better translated The Antichristian. There is throughout Nietzsche's writing about Christ a distinct note of admiration, not to say sometimes jealousy. 52 Christ, says Nietzsche, is "the noblest man;" he wanted to "take the notion of punishment and judgment out of the world;" he was "the destroyer of the law." Nietzsche focuses on Christ's life, not really on his teach- ings. Christ taught, a "new praxis" 53 by which Nietzsche means that what Christ was was exemplified by his life and actions. Der einverfleischte Gott - God made flesh - is what Nietzsche's attention is drawn to. And, as the importance is what Christ did, not what he urged, what we might call Christ's identity was for Nietzsche never fixed. Indeed, much of Nietzsche's analysis of Christ sounds at times like all that which we normally associated with Nietzsche seems to value. Christ is "a free spirit: he has nothing to do with that which is fixed (allem Festen) ... he believes only in life and the living- and such 'is' not, such becomes." 54 But one may respond, Nietzsche clearly is not preaching for Christ. And surely he curses Christianity. Some commen- tators have here sought a tempting distinction between the founder and the institutionalization - a sort of sophomore reading of the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov- and argued that Nietzsche distinguishes the gen- ius and the institutionalizing rationalist, in this case between Christ and St. Paul (about whom Nietzsche has almost nothing favourable to say). This will not quite do. There has to be something in the manner in which Christ approached the world that is responsible for what happened. If Christ is presented so favourably- so Dionysianly- something has to go wrong. The Dionysian prototype is Hamlet, the person who knows that there is no good reason for anything to have Learning to Love 89 permanence. Nietzsche considers Christ_ to have attacked all form. Christ "denies Church, state, soCiety, art, knowledge, culture, civilization;" Nietzsche associates this attack with what all wise ones (aile Weisen) have done: 55 Christ's life, His praxis, is for Nietzsche a life of complete and p e r ~ e c t e d interiority, abandoning all relations to others, almost a kmd of self-referential solipsism. A consequence and an indication of this for Nietzsche is that the life of Christ is only possible in iso- lation from society. At the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra encounters an old man who has not yet heard that God is dead. Zarathustra hurries on, without telling the old man. The reason is not simply to spare him the bad news - Nietzsche rarely refrained from public pronouncements of this nature. The reason is that the life the old man lives - imitatio Christi- is in fact possible, but only as a hermit, only in isolation from society. From this it follows that the import and significance of the actuality of God's death has to do with its consequences for our relations with other beings. For Nietzsche, God is impor- tant in terms of human interaction, not just as a "belief." Along these lines Nietzsche's discussion of Christ is resolutely non world-historical. The significance Christ assumes is not as the head of the great social movement which we know as Christi- anity, but as a particular being, unique in the history of the world. In fact, Nietzsche declares that there "has been only one Christian and he died on the cross." Such a life, he contin- ues, is still possible, not "as a faith but as a doing." 56 What then was wrong with Christ? Christ establishes a new way of life in which only so-called "inner realities" countY The Gospels, claims Nietzsche, totally annihilate the distance between God and humans. This is not a matter of faith or believing in something but of lead a "different" kind of life. Salvation - redemption - is our reality. The problem of Nietzsche is that "inner realities" abandon effectively all crite- ria of judgment. The most interior form of praxis possible is a requirement of and for love. In a important section of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche argues I, ,, 90 Tracy B. Strong It is possible that under the holy fable and dis,t;uise of Jesus' life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge of love: the martyr- dom of the most innocent and desirous heart, never having enough of human love, demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, maniacally (mit Wahnsinn), with terrible eruptions against those who denied him love, the story of an unfortunate person, unsatcd and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell in order to send to it those who did not want to love him - and who finally, having gained knowledge about human love, had to invent a God who is all love, all ability to love - who has mercy on human love because it is utterly so wretched and unknowing. Any- one who feels that way, who knows this about love - seeks death. 5 x This passage occurs in the section of Beyond Good and Evil entitled "what is noble." It is preceded by the claim that one who knows the heart will know that "Even the best and profoundest love" is "more likely destroy than to save." There is an opposition here between godly and human love. The question is why does Christ love require of him that he seek love, to be loved. Key, I think, to this passage is that Christ is seen as "never having enough" of human love. There is no satiation, none of that state which made the ecstasy of love and the actuality of audience possible. The indication in the pas- sage is that Christ's love found or must find human love insuf- ficient. In terms of the analysis of audience and exemplars given above, we might say that Christ could never be an audi- ence for himself. 50 What is it about Christ's life that might make this so? Again, it is His life that must be the problem for Nietzsche. His life is "the road towards a holy mode of existence."(;o It leads him towards death, to what Nietzsche explicitly calls a suicide disguised as a judicial murder, one which Nietzsche thinks is the same in mode as that of Socrates. 61 This happens because in the fulfilment of the teachings of Christ (if we were to live l. f < Learning to Love 91 them) "we understand all, we live all, we no longer retain any hostile feelings." We claim that "all is good- and that it give us pain, to deny anything. We suffer if we were once to be so unintelligent as to take a stand against something." 6 l \Vhat does Christ know about love that leads Him to seek death? I think it is something like this. The exclusivity of love as interiority means that the only way to overcome the exist- ence of evil is to bring it inside you and transform it into one- self. Emerson writes on this topic in "Experience," his essay which be.t,rins with the question of "Where do we find our- selves?", that "conscience must feel sin; as essence, essential evil. That it [i.e. sin) is not: it has an objective existence, but not subjective."(" In other words, evil is not and cannot be subjec- tive. It is only actual or concrete (There is a deep criticism of Hegel here) and one can only take a stand against it. For Nietzsche, what is wrong with Christ's love is that it pushes him to justify his life by requiring that others love Him. Since He is all love, in Him all evil will be redeemed. I cannot replay it here, but Nietzsche is opposed to the very idea of redemp- tion, as an analysis of the "On Redemption" chapter in Zarathustra shows. 64 The centrality of love in Christianity derives from the Scriptures - "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believe in Him would not per- ish but have everlasting life." Oohn 3: lG) Augustine made love central to his understanding of human action, incorporating into it the direction or object of love. Calvin took up Augus- tine's challenge against the apparent legalism of the Catholi- cism he opposed. In the Institutes, he writes that a central part of "Christian liberty" is that one be released from the "yoke of the law" so that God's love may be available as a loving son and not a terrified servant.(' 5 To think then about Christ on love, we have also to think about the status of the law in Nietzsche.G 6 The law, he writes, has been most at home in the realm of the "active strong, spon- taneous, aggressive" individuals.(>? The founding of law is thus an opposite of ressentiment; and ressentiment is explicitly linked by Nietzsche with anarchists and anti-Semites. The 92 Tracy B. Strong Christ-like opposition to law as a mode of governing beha- viour is thus complexly linked to Nietzsche's understanding of his relation to the Jews. I cannot explore this at length here. Suffice it to say that the Jews are the people of the law and as such are a people of affirmation and aggression. This is because the law, as under- stood here, is not everyday law, but is rather the establishment of good and evil, a way of organizing the world, a manifesta- tion of a positive will to power. The law is a creation of hori- zons, and horizons are we know from Kant and Nietzsche the condition of life. From this it seems that one way of not being a person of the law is to focus, as does Christ, entirely on inferiority. Christ, however, was the only Christian and "he died on the cross." This imperative towards innerness, towards privacy and away from others has special consequences in the case of Christ. Christ loves everyone, unconditionally. Such a great and unselfish affirmation destroys all horizons, all that might shape the world in his teaching. Christ's love is a kind of absolute freedom and terror - sois mon frere ou je te tue. The universality of Christ's love requires that all love him. "What have we to do with the law?" By demanding a life outside and beyond any structure or organization Christ makes impossible or unnecessary any form of organised human existence. (Christianity, notes Nietzsche in 1888, is the "abolition of the state." 68 ) And this also renders impossible that seeing which is at the same time overlooking that was nec- essary health or love. "The wisest man would be the richest in contradictions; he, as is were, has feelers for all kinds of men; and right among them has his great moments of grandiose har- mony." Nietzsche refers to this state as one ofjustice.li 9 How are humans drawn instead towards the life of Christ a life which dissolves itself? The gospels, in Nietzsche's read: ing, in fact seduce by "means of morality." 70 They promise, that is, that the rewards for moral behaviour will occur by means of redemption. Redemption is, however, the stance that one can by one's own actions (or by no actions at all) find ones being changed. Others are not necessary. The problem Learning to Love 93 with morality thus appears to occur for Nietzsche when humans - especially loving humans - deny that they are in contact with others. Morality is thus a form of the problem of skepticism or of other minds. If this is true, then the Christian need not make any distinctions between those he or she encounters, which means that paradoxically the Christian need encounter no person. This is (of course) disguised. In Human-All-Too-Human, Nietzsche notes the cleverness of Christianity to have focused on love: There is in the word love something so ambiguous and suggestive, something which speaks to the memory and future hope, that even the meanest intelligence and coldest heart still feels something of the lustre of this word. The shrewdest (kliigste) woman and the commonest man think when they hear it of the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has paid them only a passing visit; and those countless numbers who never experience love, of parents of children, or lovers, especially, however, when the women and men of sublimated Christianity, have made their discovery (Fund gemacht) in Christianity. 71 Love can go wrong. This passage is an argument against the use that Christianity makes of Eros, a subject to which Nietzsche occasionally returned.n But it is more interesting as a reflection on love and the status of the self that loves. Com- pare it, for instance, to this passage in Schopenhauer as Educator. Nietzsche has just suggested that the fundamental import of what he calls culture is to "further the production of the phi- losopher, of the artist and the saint within and without us." Three types: the philosopher makes becoming available to us; the artist makes "a clear and distinct image" of what is never seen "in the flux of becoming." The saint is the person whose individual ego has entirely melted away and who feels his suffering life as an identity, affinity, and unity with 94 Tracy B. Strong all that is living .... There is no doubt that we are all related and connected to this saint as we are to the phi- losopher and the artist; there are moments and as it were, sparks of the brightest fire of love in the l i ~ h t of which we no longer understand the word "1" .... 73 Nietzsche goes on to applaud this state as at the root of our hatred of ourselves (thus our ability to be outside ourselves) and thus of the pessimism that Schopenhauer sought to "reteach our age." Love breaks down the Apollonian. Like its parent Eros it is the dissolution of definition the deconstruction of limits. ' But alone it cannot suffice. The problem with Christ is that his knowledge of love leads him to want death. Death is a dis- solution - so much Nietzsche had gotten from Schopenhauer. Love is a form of death in this sense - so much Nietzsche had recognized in Wagner. In fact, should two be in love with each other (which is not the education model) a species of madness results. Nietzsche writes: "Both parties ... consequently aban- don themselves and want to be the same as one another." In the end, neither knows what he or she is supposed to be imitat- ing, what is to be dissimulated, what is pretense. "The beauti- ful madness of this spectacle is too good for this world and too subtle for human eyes." 74 Love in itself produces nothing that can continue in this world. So the question must be what is loved. For Christ and God this is clear. I noted the great commandments before. God loves the world. But whom do humans love? They love God with all their heart and mind and strength; and they love their neighbours as themselves. Do they love themselves? In the way they love God, I suppose. But what is left for our neighbours if we must love them as we love God, uncondition- ally and with the sundering intensity that Nietzsche attributes to Christ. Christ really did love others as he loved himself as he loved God. And that is death. Such love loves not wisely but too well - as Othello discovered and Nietzsche intimates Christ knew. 75 In other words, God and Christ do not function as Learning to Love 95 exemplars, that is, we cannot, in fact, find ourself as not yet ourself in them. Why then the attraction? There are two important lessons here. First, morality is what keeps us from dying on the cross. Morality thus preserves a life that is constantly seeking to deny itself in love. There is an indication in the Antichrist that humanity has become addicted to moraline, that is to a dangerous and destructive drug which, however, one cannot do without. We constantly run towards God and must at the same time make it impossible for us to reach Him. This is a form of nihilism. But it also means that not anyone, as any time, can, for any reason, simply shake off the demands of morality. One cannot go cold turkey on morality without a serious reaction - and the danger that humanity might in this century do so is at the source of Nietzsche's distress about the century he foresaw. This is what sons of God have to do with morals. Second is the lesson that Cordelia tried to teach to her father. To love according to ones bond, that is to what one is (I did not say who - Nietzsche calls on us to become what we are) - is all that can be required and no more should be expected. In the refusal of the acknowledgment of this lesson, there is only silence, or death. Such silence - the still between two soundings, Nietzsche calls is, is the only possible human acknowledgment of the absolute. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche counterposes himself to morality as a "Hyperborean," as, that is, a worshiper of Apollo during the winter months. 76 He suggests that his love of humans is such as to excise the emotion of pity from human beings. In a late note, Nietzsche remarks that the Hyperborean is in fact a particular kind of philosopher: "one who is in no ways a moralist." In fact without not being a moralist there is no other way to bring "philosophy back into respect." 77 In fact: "There is nothing for it; there is no other way to bring philosophy back to honour but to hang all the moralists. " 78 Morality thus keeps philosophy from happening: It trans- forms the human love that allows one to be besides oneself- and thus always with oneself- into one that requires that one 9G Tracy B. Strong be dissolved into another. Christian love was a form of solip- sism, a solipsism only mitigated by morality and the promise of redemption. The costs of the moral point of view, Nietzsche suggests will be "hecatombs." 79 Against this Nietzsche occasionally counterposes what he calls "human love." As he found himself in diagnostic explora- tion of the will to morality he found himself increasingly alone. The denial of the universal applicability of the moral point of view seemed to leave only death open as a way of making contact with others. He indicates, therefore, that he sought form. "I had artificially to enforce, falsify, and invent a suitable fiction for myself." What he needed, he continues, was the belief that he was not alone, that he was not thus iso- lated and not alone in seeing as he did. xo Recognizing that life requires deception, he deceived himself. Recognizing this, he indicates in a letter to Oberbeck on February 3, 1888 that his writing must henceforth find release in attack. "No one would expect a suffering and starving animal to attack its prey grace- fully. The perpetual lack of a really refreshing and healing human love, the absurd isolation it entails, makes almost any residue of a connection with people merely something that wounds one." It is worth noting that Elizabeth forges a letter dated about the time of this one to the effect that Nietzsche is longing for female companionship - her in fact. In her usual perverse way, Elizabeth understood something of her brother. The perversion oflove in Christianity means that we are in danger of seeking an ideal in which to loose ourself. And this is not just on what one might be tempted to call the political level. "We must keep ourselves from becoming an ideal of another," Nietzsche writes around 1880.x 1 At all costs then, we must keep a distance on the other and on ourselves. This, how- ever, can only be done, by living in and of this world. If we run outside of it, we not only will deny tlw actuality of evil (in the name of love) but we will be unable to tolerate the existence of others. We need, he writes in the Preface to Human-All-Too- Human, a "blindness for tvvo.'' Or, as Stevens wrote in "Of Modern Poetry": Learning to Love 97 It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. This is where, and how, we find ourselves. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Citations from Nietzsche are given with reference to the Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin. Gruytcr, 1966-). The work will be cited by book {abbreviated thereafter} and internal subdivision (e.g. para- graph number) then as WKG, Volume number (e.g. VIII 1 = Volume VIII, number 2), then by page number. 2. I am thinking, of course, of works like Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1990); Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge. Cambridge U.P., 1981); Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1990) indeed, of any philosophical thought that draws on literature, as well as those who have sought to revive a theory of moral sentiments (e.g. Annette Baier, A Progression of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (Cam- bridge, Harvard University Press, 1991) and Postures of the Mind {Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985). :-J. Sec Bernard Williams, op. cit., p. 2; Stanley Cavell, op. cit., 108- ll.'l. 1. FW 333 WKG V 1 p. 238. 5. UB-NN 3 WKG III 1 p. 266. One should recall the passage in Twilight of the Idols, What the Germans Lack 3 WKG Vl 3 p. 102: "One has to learn to see; one has to learn to think; one has to learn to speak and write." Sec the discussion (albeit with more oedipal anxiety about sight than I think merited) in Gary Shapiro, "In the Shadows of Philosophy," in David Michael Levin, cd. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (University of California Press, 19), pp. 124-141. 6. JGB 75 WKG VI 1 p. 87. I. VI I I p. 704. 8. For a revealing discussion of Nietzsche as air erotic see the con- tribution by Robert Pippin to this volume. 9. Letter to Rohde, 5/23/76. 10. MAM i 259 WKG IV 1 pp. 217-218. II. MA,\;1 i 2Ci0 WKG IV 1 p. 218. I cannot help hearing here an 98 Tracy B. Strong anticipation of the scene of the cripples at the bridge in Zarathustra. Z ii On Redemption WKG VI, pp. 173-174. 12. For two views see Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, chapter on Symposium; Sarah Monoson, Erastes and Eromenes, POLITI- CAL THEORY last issue. The standard book on pederasty in Greece is Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (). 13. UB-SE 2 WKG III, p. 342. 14. Ibid., p. 345. Bloom (op. cit., p.) notes something of the same in passing. 15. On this general question sec my jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics ofthe Ordinary (SAGE, 1994), pp. 46-50 and Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1984), part IV. 16. Emerson, "Experience," Essays and Lectures (Library of America. New York, 1983), pp. 488, 483. 17. EH why 1 write such good books - The Untimely ones 3 WKG VI 3 pp. 317-318. 18. WKG III, p. 411. 19. UB-SE 5 WKG III, p. 374. 20. Ibid., p. 378; UB-SE 7 WKG III, p. 401 ("The artist and philosopher ... strike only a few and should strike all.") For revelatory discussion of this question in Nietzsche see Stanley Cavell, op. cit., pp. 49-54 and a soon to be published essay by James Conant. See also Steven Mulhall, "Perfectionism, Politics, and the Social Contract," journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 2, Number 3 (September 1994), pp. 222-239. 21. UB-SE 6 WKG III" p. 381. 22. SE-UB iii 4 WKG III, p. 362. 23. SE-UB iii 1 WKG III, p. 336. Nietzsche here is probably echo- ing the opening line of Emerson's "Experience" "Where do we find ourselves?" 24. For a fuller discussion see my "Aesthetic Authority and Tradi- tion: Nietzsche and the Greeks," History of European Ideas, Vol. II, 1989, pp. 989-1007 (1989). 25. GM Preface 1 WKG VI, p. 259. 26. See the discussion in Tracy B. Strong, The Idea of Political Theory (Notre Dame, 1990), Chapter Five; and Stanely Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, (Living Batch Press. Albuquerque, 1989), pp. 24-26. 27. GD-Skirmishcs 7, WKG VI 3 p. 109. 28. "Pulled out" here calls to mind Emerson's discussion of "provo- cation" in The Divinity School Address, op. cit., p. 79. 29. UB-SE 2 WKG III, pp. 340-341. 30. Ibid., p. 341. 31. Hollingdale's translation, which is usually good, falls off badly here. Learning to Love 99 32. UB-SE 3 WKG III, p. J58. 33. UB-RWG 4 WKG Ill, p. 18. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth. cd., Brezeale (Humaniteis Press, New Jersey, 1990), pp. 135-U7. Cf WKG IV, pp. 182 ff. 35. WKG III 3 , p. 34ti. For a discussion of the political clements in the Birth of Tragedy, sec my "Nietzsche's Political Misappropria- tions," in B. Magnus and K. Higt,rins, cds. Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge, 1995) and "Aesthetic Authority and Tra- dition: Nietzsche and the Greeks," History of European Ideas, Vol. II, 1989, pp. 989-1007 ( 1989). 36. WL I WKG III 2 p. : ~ 7 4 - 5 . : ~ 7 . WKG IV 1, p. 189, 195. 38. UB-SE 6 WKG III, p. 381. 39. There is thus a parallel between the clements of love and the clements of the three kinds of history set forth in the preceding Untimely. See UB-NN 2 WKG III, pp. 260-261. 40. UB-RWG II, IV" pp. 79, 81. 41. GT 8 III, pp. 55-56. 42. Augustine, incidentally, uses the same parallel of spectatorship and love to explain the political realm. 43. GT 8 III, p. 56. 44 . .JBG 153 WKG Vl 2 p. 99. 45. JBG 164 WKG VI 2 p. 101. 46. For the best investigation of this sec Sarah Kofman, Baubo in M. Gillespie and T. Strong, cds. Nietzsche's New Seas (Chicago, 1988), pp. 175-202. 47. For a full discussion of the fact that in Nietzsche selfhood is consequent to modes of apprehending the world and does not precede them, see my "Texts and Pretexts: Reflections on Nietzsche's Doctrines of Perspectivism," in Political Theory (May, 1985) reprinted with modifications as Chapter Ten of the expanded edition of my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Trans- figuration. (University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). 48. See I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Babbs Merrill. Indianapolis, 1956), p. 85: "We must not [in love) by an egotis- tical illusion subtract anything for the authority of the law." The Doctrine of Virtue (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 447. For a critique see Annette Baier, "How can Individualists Share Responsibility," Political Theory, 21, 2 (May, 1993), pp. 228-248. I am conscious here of a general influence of Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowl- edge, especially chapters 13 and 14, to which I owe the Kant references. 49. See Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral judgment (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1993). 100 Tracy B. Strong 50. See my "Nietzsche's Political Misappropriations," Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus, forthcoming. Similar considerations are central to the chapter "Knowledge and the Basis of Morality" in Stanley Cavell, The Claim ofReason. Indeed, the final question of this paragraph appears in a sharper form on pp. 269-270, as I rediscovered not to my surprise. 51. JBG 60 WKG V I ~ p. 77. Walter Kaufmann thinks this refers to Moses. 52. Frederick Copleston's Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture (London, 1942) expresses the surprise of a Jesuit who cannot quite figure out why Nietzsche so seems to dislike Christ. See also Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity (Chicago. Gateway, l9GI ). One must resist, as I hope to make clear, the tendency to assert in a more or less sophisticated fashion the claim that Nietzsche never quite got rid of his childhood and that both his rejection and his fascination with Christ are due to that. See Egcn Biser, "Nietzsche's Relation to Jesus," in Claude Jeffre and Jean-Pierre Jossua, eds. Nietzsche and Christianity (Seabury Press. New York, 1981), pp. 58-64; sec also W.L. Hohmann, Zu Nietzsche Fluck auf das Christentum oder Warum Wurde Nietzsche nicht fertig mit dem Christentum? (Die blaue Eule, Essen, 1984): "His existence (Dasein) was a tension between evasion and rebellion" (p. 69). 53. WKG Vlll 2 p. 351. 54. Ibid., p. 406. 55. Ibid., p. 338. 56. AC 39 WKG Vl 3 p. 209. 57. AC 34 WKG Vl 3 p. 204. If this sounds like a strong version of salvation by faith alone, one might note the importance of Lutheranism in Nietzsche. He means that the state of being of the Christian is what counts. Nietzsche docs not mean "spiritual" as opposed to "fleshly" however. 58. JGB 269 WKG V I ~ p. 235. 59. If this is a correct reading of Nietzsche's understanding, then the most difficult moment for Nietzsche to grasp fully must be the scene in Gcthscmane, before the arrest. "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt." (Matthew xxvi, 39). It is the supreme moment of Christ's humanness. For Nietzsche it is a suicide. See below. 60. WKG VIII 1 p. 58. 61. MAM ii VM 94 WKG IY 1 p. 50. 62. WKG V I I I ~ p. 409. 6 ~ ~ - R.W. Emerson, "Experience," Essays and Lectures, p. 489. I owe a debt here to the chapter "On Political Evil" in George Kateb. The Inner Ocean (Cornell U.P., Ithaca, l'\.Y., 1992). Learning to Love 101 (i-1. See my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, pp. 221-237. liS. J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III, 19 (ed. Beveridge), Vol. 2, p. 133). ()(i. Some of the material in the next paragraphs draws from or is prompted by Sarah Kofman, Le mipris desjuifs. Nietzsche, les]uifs, l'antisimitisme (Galilee, Paris 1994). (i7. GM ii II WKG V I ~ p. 327. (i8. WKG V I I I ~ p. 337. (i!J. WKG V I I ~ , pp. 179-180; See Martin Heidcggcr, Nietzsche (l'fiillingen, Neske, 19GI) I, pp. 632ff. See my "Texts and Pre- texts," op. cit. 70. AC 44 WKG Vl3 p. 218. 71. MAM ii VM 95 WKG IV 3 pp. 50-51. 72. e.g. JBG 168 WKG Vll p. 102: "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink>." 73. UB-SE 5 WKG 111 1 p. 378. 74. M 532 WKG VI P 308. 75. See WKG VIII 3 , p. 336. 76. AC 7 WKG V I : ~ p. 172. 77. WKG V I I I : ~ pp. 411-412: "As long as philosophy continues to speak of happiness and virtue only old ladies will be persuaded to go into philosophy." 78. WKG VIII 3 p. 412. 79. Ibid., 413. 80. MAM 1886 Preface I WKG I V ~ p. 8. 81. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Unschuld des Werdens (ed. Baumler) I # 902 (p. 296).