Nietzsche and Friendship

Abstract

This book proposes a novel interpretation of Nietzsche's thinking about friendship, a topic that remains understudied. Verkerk's project takes its point of departure from questions about the nature of friendship and its relation to other themes in Nietzsche. Primary among these are the intellectual conscience, the ubiquity of the agon, the project of “becoming who you are,” the relation (and distinction) between ego and self, the free spirit, the critique of pity, the multiplicity and (un)knowability of the drives, the will to power, and relations between men and women.How successful is Verkerk's elucidation of Nietzsche's thinking about friendship? At one level, the book does admirably what it sets out to do. It persuasively makes any number of connections between Nietzsche's thinking about friendship and the themes mentioned above. To give three examples that must stand for many others: (1) Verkerk's keen sense that many human associations that appear to be friendships are actually modes of self-escape that betray a lack of what GS 21 calls “noble selfishness”; (2) her insight that the development of the intellectual conscience does not happen in the void, but requires engagement with others, at least some of whom should be friends (104); (3) her acute awareness of the ways that pity (Mitleid) can damage friendship, since pity tends so often to be a “largely disabling and reductive perspective that fails to adequately acknowledge the situation and feelings of the suffering friend” (63).Because it abounds in particular insights, Verkerk's book is worthwhile for any reader of Nietzsche. Regarding its main interpretive proposal, however, some questions arise. Verkerk holds that if one attends to the full range of Nietzsche's texts (and not just the “middle period” works in which the treatment of friendship is most visibly thematic), one will discover a clear distinction among three different kinds of friendship: joyful friendships, agonistic friendships, and bestowing friendships. “Like Aristotle's three kinds of friendship: of utility, pleasure, and virtue, Nietzsche delineates friendship into three kinds, albeit much less explicitly” (2). That Nietzsche does many things implicitly is true. It is therefore possible that he intends to imply a distinction between three kinds of friendship, even if he never states it outright. But in order to convince the reader of this interpretive proposal, Verkerk assumes the burden of demonstrating that Nietzsche actually does this.Building on previous treatments, Verkerk establishes that Nietzsche describes and commends an agonistic conception of friendship. Such friendships, she argues, correspond to the relation of two people in whom an initial desire to possess one another yields to a “shared higher thirst for an ideal above them”—a thirst that strengthens the capacity for self-reflection and the tenacious posing of hard questions. Even if the goal of agonistic friendships is not “concrete truth” (43), it remains plausible that truth (or truthfulness) pertains to the higher ideal. As Verkerk acknowledges, the subject of an agonistic friendship is “an imagined, very possible self that rigorously pursues open-ended truth in conjunction with the intellectual conscience and, through an accumulation of knowledge, learns how to overcome its burdens and become a creating human being, a transvaluator” (60). One may distinguish between the passion for knowledge (which Nietzsche values highly) on the one hand, and a general or “metaphysical” conception of truth (about which Nietzsche is skeptical) on the other hand—so long as one avoids suppressing his sense that our relation to particular truths (or “open-ended truth,” as Verkerk puts it) remains important.If agonistic friendships are difficult for many to sustain, does it follow for Nietzsche that most people lack the capacity for real friendship? This question Verkerk answers in the negative: “he has other concepts of friendship that are appropriate for a greater number of people and do not involve the practice of agonistics, but instead focus on joy and giving or receiving” (51). Verkerk detects a second kind of friendship in the Nietzschean corpus, one signaled by the declaration that “shared joy, not pity, makes the friend” (HH 499; cf. GS 338). Are friendships cemented by shared joy really as common as Verkerk suggests? On this question, Verkerk's own exposition is not entirely stable. In one place, she assimilates such friendship to Aristotelian pleasure friendship, readily available to most people and resembling “many of the friendships that are culturally predominant today” (51). But elsewhere she implies that friendships based on shared joy are relatively uncommon. As a reading of Nietzsche, the second possibility is far more plausible. Shaped by public opinion and determined by pressures to conform, the masses do not in Nietzsche's judgment experience anything like true joy. Instead, they tend anxiously to seek the approval of others. If they take some pleasure in gaining it, such pleasure nonetheless differs from the state of “joyously being oneself” (SE 1)—a state that, for Nietzsche, is as difficult as it is rare.This particular tension in Verkerk's exposition is instructive. It suggests that the relationship between agonism and shared joy does not establish a stark divide between two different kinds of friendship. It indicates, rather, that agonism and joy are two characteristics of higher friendship as such. Agonism arises from the courage to pose hard questions in spirited dialogue with a friend. Such courage produces what SE 2 calls the “cheerfulness that really cheers,” as distinct from a superficial cheerfulness that avoids facing the real difficulties. The former cheerfulness is the joy shared by those who embrace Blake's dictum, “Opposition is true friendship.” It may be that in some higher friendships, agonism is the predominant element, whereas others revolve more directly around shared joy. Even so, the relative prominence of one characteristic or another does not justify a sharp taxonomical division between two distinct types of friendship.What, then, of the third member of the trichotomy that Verkerk attributes to Nietzsche, the “bestowing” friendship? Is this a third kind of friendship? Here Verkerk leans heavily on Z I: “On the Bestowing Virtue.” In this speech, Zarathustra insinuates a strong connection between overflowing strength and the capacity for a giving that differs from the more familiar giving that springs from deficiency—a need to gain something in return. That the giving that occurs within higher friendships would spring from Zarathustra's “bestowing virtue” is eminently plausible. But where does Nietzsche suggest that such giving individuates the friendships that display it, marking a difference in kind from friendships that involve agonism or friendships that share joy? It is easy enough to imagine a friendship in which all three characteristics are present. A friend might bestow upon another the gift of her disposition to raise hard questions and pursue them doggedly—a pursuit that (if the recipient is up to it) generates shared joy for both. Though agonism, bestowing, and shared joy may be characteristics of higher friendships, they are not on that account individuators. Verkerk gives neither a conceptual argument that obliges us to regard them as such, nor a reading of the texts sufficiently penetrating to warrant the ascription of her proposed trichotomy to Nietzsche.More successful, I think, is Verkerk's juxtaposition of Nietzsche's texts with the concept of wonder as deployed by Luce Irigaray. Drawing upon selected Nietzschean texts (particularly the notorious GS 363), Verkerk persuasively argues that the failure of men to attain genuine friendship with women is often rooted in a desire to turn women into their possessions. Verkerk effectively documents the way Nietzsche alternately (or simultaneously) regards male possessive desire as inevitable and questionable. But since the instability of Nietzsche's thinking about this matter does not enable him to show a clear way out of the patriarchal structures that enable the possessing/possessed dynamic, she suggests that one might move beyond Nietzsche on the point and consider Irigaray's concept of wonder. Those who love with a vibrant sense of wonder will be less likely to assume the desirability (or even possibility) of possessing the other. Men who can learn to replace the will to dominate with the cultivation of wonder will experience greater intimacy. They will be more likely to enjoy real friendship with women. Even as Verkerk commends Irigaray's wonder, however, she also wonders about it. By focusing on heterosexual relationships as “the source for gaining greater insight into difference, recognition through wonder, and female subjectivity,” Irigaray “de-legitimizes the importance of female friendship and reinstates heteronormative values” (148).About the condition of women under patriarchy (and the power of Nietzsche's texts to simultaneously illuminate and infuriate), I find much of what Verkerk says persuasive. I am, however, less confident than she is about ascribing to Nietzsche the view that friendship is impossible for women. As textual evidence for this interpretation, Verkerk cites Z I: “Of the Friend”: “Woman is not yet capable of friendship” (126). That Nietzsche puts these words in Zarathustra's mouth is clear. But does Nietzsche himself endorse all that Zarathustra says? “It is also important to see that Nietzsche is problematizing Zarathustra's bestowing need to be like the star,” Verkerk writes at one point (176 n. 10). If Nietzsche can “problematize” Zarathustra once, he can do so again. Unfortunately, Verkerk often ignores her own insight that Nietzsche and Zarathustra are not identical. Frequently she writes sentences that begin with “Nietzsche believes that …” and proceeds to specify the content of the alleged belief by quoting words that Zarathustra speaks. Such a procedure ignores the formidable interpretive difficulties of a text like Z, which unfolds dramatically and symphonically, and whose overtly poetic qualities make it especially resistant to assertoric interpretation.To return to the question: Does Nietzsche assert in propria persona women's incapacity for friendship? Consider GS 14's conclusion: “Here and there on earth we may encounter a continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession—a shared thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.” If at least one of the “two people” named by GS 14 is a woman, then Nietzsche would seem to think that women can enter into friendship. A still more direct route to the same conclusion is given by HH 378: “The best friend will probably have the best wife, because a good marriage is based on a talent for friendship.” (That Nietzsche remained interested in the topic is clear from a question he poses for the “industrious” in GS 7: “Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship ever been explicated?”) What, then, does Nietzsche actually think about the matter? There are conflicting indications, along with multiple strategies for resolving (or refusing to resolve) the conflicts. One must try to resist the temptation of moving rapidly from words that Nietzsche writes to confident claims of the form “Nietzsche believes that….” To that end, one might apply to Nietzsche the words of a writer whom he greatly admired: “I who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting of it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust, but I let them run at a venture” (Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Art of Discussion,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965], 720–21).Precisely because the interpretive issues are so complex, some interpreters have been slow to turn to later texts for insight into Nietzsche's thinking about friendship. Noting that both Ruth Abbey and I have tended to privilege the middle period texts, Verkerk asserts that “later books such as Z and BGE should not be overlooked” (171). In one sense, the assertion is clearly correct; everything in the Nietzschean corpus deserves due attention. But one might de-emphasize Z, BGE, and other later texts not only on account of the real challenges of interpreting Z as a whole (and therefore its parts), but also from a suspicion that Nietzsche's aphorisms about male–female friendships are simply more profound (more subtle, nuanced, and just) in the texts he composes prior to the collapse of his friendship with Lou Salomé at the end of 1882. To corroborate this suspicion, one need only compare GS 14 and GS 60–74 (published in the 1882 GS) with the silly generalizations about men and women that appear in GS 363—an aphorism that belongs to Book V, which was published in the 1887 GS, after both Z and BGE.Notwithstanding my hesitations about aspects of Verkerk's approach to Z and GS V, her book is genuinely helpful in reminding us that Nietzsche's later works say much about friendship. I would be interested in reading another book by Verkerk that investigates more deeply the relations between Nietzsche's thinking about friendship and ancient authors that he regards as more important than Aristotle and his “whitening bones” (KSA 8:5[6]). I mean not only Plato and Thucydides, but also Seneca and Lucretius—and Cynics and Skeptics. One excellence of Verkerk's book is that it inspires further questions about the link between Nietzsche's thinking and his actual practice of friendship. Her occasional asides to Nietzsche's human relationships are invariably helpful—indeed, so helpful that they leave the reader wanting more in this vein. One might systematically interrogate Nietzsche's relationships that ended as broken friendships (Richard Wagner, Lou Salomé, Paul Rée), his less intense but more enduring friendships (Heinrich Köselitz, Franz Overbeck, Malwida von Meysenbug), and finally his exchanges with those whose friendship he seems to have desired, but who responded to his overtures with something other than warm reciprocation (Hans von Bülow, Jacob Burckhardt). But that would be another project, with a different emphasis from the conceptually driven treatment that Verkerk has undertaken. Were Verkerk to pursue this inquiry, building on the ground she lays in Nietzsche and Friendship, she would deepen our appreciation of Nietzsche's sense that every great philosophy so far has been “the personal confession of its author and a kind of unconscious or involuntary memoir” (BGE 6).