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The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 45, Issue 2, Summer 2014,pp. 134-146 (Article)

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JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2014.

Copyright 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

134

Nietzsche, Drives, Selves, and Leonard Bernstein: A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin

AlexAnder nehAmAs

AbstrAct: In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsches drives. They are not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the subject and try to get the rest to follow their lead. Such subjugation, whether within one or between different persons (the will to power), often results not in the others destruction but in its improvement. Moreover, no drives are immune to change. Nietzsche likens their unification, which results in ones becoming an individual, to the unity of works of art. Aesthetic values being essentially social, unification depends not just on its agent but also on its reception by an audience. I end by arguing that the eternal recurrence forbids our imagining that our life could ever have been different in any significant respect.

Keywords: drives, self, will to power, individual

Ours is a discipline in which agreement is often a form of discourtesy, and so I must thank Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin for doing me the courtesy of disagreeing with several issues in my book, most of which I will not be able to discuss here. Both are kind and generous friends, which is why they both begin by saying some very nice things about Nietzsche: Life as Literature.1 Or are they? Yes, they are, but that is not to say they do so simply because they are kind and generous. Mindful of Pippins understanding of Hegel on the impor-tance of a social and cultural context for meaningful human action, I would say that their attitude is channeled through the almost ironclad social practiceor conventionthat governs the philosophical symposium: you begin by saying how great, insightful, and significant the book is and, having said that, you go on to criticize it.

The laws that conventions impose are, well, conventionalwe might say, capriciousand sometimes stiflingwe might say, tyrannical. Dave Hickey, for example, recalls how the liberating rule, Its OK to drip paint, which Jackson Pollock established through his later paintings, was soon

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A reply to christopher JAnAwAy And robert pippin 135

transformed into the repressive, Its bad not to drip.2 And yet, as Nietzsche insists, the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the tyranny of such capricious laws (BGE 188).3 We must not imagine Janaway and Pippin on one side and the convention they both followed on the other, deliberating about whether to begin with something nice. I know that doing so came naturally to them as the obvious thing to do. And since the probability is by no means small that precisely this [tyranny of such capricious laws] is nature and natural (BGE 188), the convention, it seems, has become part of their nature: it is a (small) part of what they have becomebut not less so than their collegial kindness, which is no less natural because it depends on the same convention.

Someone else, however, less committed to conventions of propriety, might have had to struggle in order to decide how to proceed: Didnt Nehamas, after all, carelessly truncate Nietzsches texts when it suited him, saddle us with a trendy, poststructuralist and anachronistic Nietzsche? Why be nice? Such a fictional commentator would have been faced with a choice between honesty (or should I say cruelty [BGE 230]) and kindness and would have had to opt for one or the other.

Nietzsche calls things like kindness and honesty drives. They are two among a group of relatively enduring dispositions, as Janaway puts it, to behave in certain ways, which are not within the full rational control of the agent (11112), the agent being, he suggests (somewhat tentatively), a composite of drives (113). But since, as all three of us agree, Nietzsche thinks of the self as an achievement that depends on unifying and harmonizing these drives, we must ask, with Pippin, Who does the achieving? [If] being a subject is a matter of being subject to, rather than a subject of, dominant . . . drives, which group, arise and subside as something like . . . subject-less events . . . any unity (subordination of counter instincts and drives) would be in effect something that contingently happens, not so much something I could be said to do or achieve (127). Who, in my description of my two commentators, is the person to whom kindness has become second nature? And who is the fictional person who vacillates between cruelty and kindness and finally chooses the first over the second?

My answer to such questions in Life as Literature, I have realized, was incon-sistent. Sometimes, I took the person, the self, the subject to be simply a group of drives and affects, experiences, and actions. Sometimes I took it to be an independent agent, capable of distancing itself from all its drives and affects and of inspecting them, so to speak, from above. I take it that the three of us agree that Nietzsches rejection of a subject that is beyond or behind its deeds, a neutral substratum that can choose between strength and weakness, good and evil, his insistence that the doer is a fiction added to the deed: the deed


136 AlexAnder nehAmAs

is everything (GM I:13) suggests that he rejects the notion of such a subject. So, among other things, does his contempt for the related idea of freedom in the superlative metaphysical sense (BGE 21), which he actually considers an invention of the slave revolt in morality. But then, if I am nothing but my drives and affects, if there is not an additional subject to which they all belong, why do they belong together at all? How can they be my drives in the first place, rather than subject-less events? Do drives have drives of their own?

In BGE 19, Nietzsche, in a Platonist (or anti-Platonist) mood, offers a politi-cal metaphor for the self. It is, he writes, a structure of many under-wills or undersouls: Leffet cest moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class identi-fies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. And in my book I wrote, Dominant habits and traits, as long as they are dominant, assume the role of the subject; in terms of our metaphor, they assume the role of the leader. It is such traits that speak with the voice of the self when they are manifested in action.4 In other words, it is the traits that are dominant, whichever they are and so long as they are dominant, that assume the role of the subject and say I.

That may sound mysteriousbut it is not. It is exactly what Dave Hickey, again, was driving at when, referring to the saga of [Susan] Sontags purported struggle with lesbianism, he wrote that it was really a struggle between Sontags lesbianism and her ambition.5 In Hickeys terms, Sontags lesbianism had to accommodate itself to her ambitions demands; in ours, her ambition, which was to be not a Lesbian author but simply an author, finally dominated her lesbianism: it spoke and led to action more often. We must take care here, heeding Nietzsches own warnings, not to be misled by the structure of language into thinking that Sontags ambition refers to two thingsSontag on the one hand and her ambition on the other: the phrase is equivalent to the ambitious Sontag. In addition to the ambitious and the lesbian Sontag, there are several others: the hip Sontag, the imperious Sontag, the activist Sontag, and who knows how many more: these are, precisely, the undersouls to which Nietzsche referred. Each one of them, provided it gains the ascendancy at some point, speaks with the voice of Sontag herself, like the governing class that identifies itself with the commonwealth of which it is in charge.

We must still ask how we came to take them all to belong to Sontag in the first place, and here I will revert to the rudimentary answer I gave in Life as Literature, fortified now by having noticed that in this passage it is the body that Nietzsche describes as a social structure composed of many souls: It is because these undersouls are struggling for control of a single body, whose identity is generated by the unity of its basic needs (drives), that provides the common ground where these struggles occur in the first place and for whose control they are fought.

It was, then, Janaways and Pippins kindness that spoke with the voice of Janaway and Pippin: their kindness (at least within this particular, professional



context) has become, in Nietzsches sense, instinctive. Neither one had to force himself to express it; it is part of, as we say, their naturethough we must keep in mind Nietzsches view that every first nature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first (HL 3). But when it comes to my fictional case, which involves a vacillation between kindness and honesty, the question who exactly it is who vacillates becomes quite urgent. Here it really seems as if there is a third participant in, or perhaps an observer of, the conflict. And indeed there is, but it is a participant of the right sort: not a subject distinct from all its features, as the moral subject, privy to freedom in the superlative metaphysical sense is supposed to be, but some other drive that is part of that hypothetical person: it could be, for example, that persons will to truth. And who this person turns out to bekind or honestwill depend on the relative strength of the two conflicting drives, a strength manifested in great part in the other drives that each is capable of mustering in its traincaution perhaps on the side of kindness, the urge to appear independent and the will to truth on the side of honesty.

It is, then, always some drive or other (or some group of drives or other) that speaks with the voice of the self. And although I know that what I have said so far is terribly sketchy and incomplete, I want to ask whether some of these drives are in one way or another more basic than others. Janaway thinks so, and argues that I too am committed to such a view. He quotes a passage from Life as Literature to the effect that the body (a point I also made above) provides us with a single object that the various drives that constitute a person are aiming to control, and infers from it that there is at least a real, relatively persisting, dispositional bedrock to the self that can submit or resist unification (112). My problem here is that this statement attributes to the self something that is both a bedrock and a relatively persisting set of dispositions. But it cannot be both. A bedrock, like a foundation, cannot change without toppling the edifice that is built upon it: it is, so to speak, permanently unchanging. By contrast, to say that someor even manyof our drives are relatively persisting is to say no more than that we cannot change ourselves in every respect at any one time, not that radicalor even completechange is impossible over a longer period. I am perfectly willing to agree that some of our drives persist longer than others, but I see no reason to go so far as to believe that a group of such drives is forever given.6

Janaway quotes BGE 225 in order to support his view: In human beings, creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abun-dance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator divinity and seventh day:do you understand this contrast? (BGE 225) But what Nietzsche writes here is perfectly compatible with thinking of the creature part of our nature as the relatively persisting dispositions with which, at any time, we are faced. Nothing here implies that these dispositions are unchangeable or even that they are the only material on



which the creator can impose form. I agree that, at any time, there is a group of drives that provides the creature that another group of drives, the creator in man, must work on and unify. But these need not be the same dispositions throughout, and which among them, in particular, is the creature and which is the creator can be determined only after they have reached an accommodation, depending on which drives have gained the upper handan accommodation that may itself come to change with time.

Janaway then cites GS 290, where Nietzsche writes of characters who survey all the strengths and weaknesses their nature has to offer. Having asked what that nature is, he answers that it is something that metaphorically comes in masses and pieces, and that can be amenable to or resist shaping. It seems to be something that one is prior to the acts of styling, forming and subduing that may be performed upon it. Hence ones nature here is a relatively enduring character rather than a set of episodic occurrences such as experiences and actions (111). I find nothing wrong with this statement, precisely because it too refers only to features that are only relatively enduring and not in principle unchangeable. I also agree that there must be some material to be shaped before the shaping begins and constituting what one is prior to its being shaped and formed in the effort, as Nietzsche puts it, to give style to ones character. But the fact that some drives come first does not imply that they are also basic in the sense that they can never change. It makes perfect sense to think that we receive a rela-tively haphazardmotley [bunt]set of drives, attitudes, and values from our parents, peers, and pedagogues and that some of them are among the first that come to receive shape, form and style. And although the creature part of our nature may consist of such drives, so does the creator within us: where else could it have come from? It is true that Nietzsche writes that a philosophers morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he iswhich means in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to one another (BGE 6). But this too says nothing about a bedrock of drivesin fact, it suggests the opposite: who a philosopher is is something that one becomes, not something one is from the day one is born.7

But how do the drives accommodate each other? How do the unity and harmony that stylization requires come about? Is it simply a matter of the sheer strengthforce or violenceof the drives that acquire the voice of the com-monwealth or is it the result of a process of greater complexity? Is its ultimate end the drives unificationa real peace treaty, as Pippin wants, and not simply a truce, as he suspectsassuming that it is not an all-out civil war? If unification is, in fact, the end of this process, by what standards are we to interpret and evaluate it? And, if unification is reached, is it possible to imagine another life for such a unified character?

Some time ago, I happened to watch tapes of Leonard Bernstein rehears-ing, with different orchestras, Stravinskys Rite of Spring, Elgars Enigma Variations, and several works by Mahler. Throughout, Bernstein explains,



sings, cajoles, praises, repeats, shouts, and whispers until he gets the orchestra to sound just as he wants it to sound. In one sense, he imposes his will upon them and, as Nietzsche might have put it, turns the musicians into instruments of his own, subordinating them to his vision of the music. When he succeeds, the orchestra plays with one voice and the musicians, having submitted to him, are themselves at their very best. Far from hav-ing been oppressed, they have been given the opportunity to sound about as good as they possibly can: they are using their abilities to their fullest extent. Neither pure persuasion nor naked force, Bernsteins behavior struck me as the perfect model for the exercise of the will to power between but also withinindividuals. There is, of course, something deeply egoistic about Bernsteins behavior: it is his sound that the orchestra produces. But it is the sort of egoism that results in everyone becoming better than they were beforeand not just the musicians: Bernstein himself benefits from their playing.

Of course, Bernsteins authority in these cases is unquestioned. But this was not always so. On April 6, 1962, before conducting Brahmss Piano Concerto in D-minor with Glenn Gould and the New York Philharmonic, he confessed to the audience that he had a series of profound disagreements with Gould. Nevertheless, he realized that Goulds interpretation was a sustainable version of the work by a serious artist and, yielding to Gould, he told them that he would conduct the music as his soloist wanted, adding: But the age old question still remains: In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor? The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persua-sion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance.8 Here, then, we have an instance of the struggle that Nietzsche locates both in our relations with others and in our souls. In this case, the struggle ended in at least a temporary accommodation: the orchestra spoke again with a single voice, though that time the voice was Goulds and not Bernsteins.

In a slightly different context, Andrew Huddleston makes a similar point through the building of an immense cathedralit could be St. Pauls in London or the Duomo in Florence. Most of the workers in such a project engage in heavy and exhausting labor and are essential to its success, but the credit goes to Christopher Wren or Brunelleschi: it is their vision that the workers made a reality. In the process, though, they exercised their abilities in pursuit of a great accomplishment and, one could argue, lived a better and more meaningful life.9

These examples seem to me to fit well with a whole family of Nietzsches views, a characteristic example of which we find in GS 290: When the work of giving style to ones character is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste is good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! In this way, we can see that speaking with a single voicethe



unified voice of the drivesis what Nietzsche is after. An individual is like an orchestra whose conductor is not already appointed and whose musicians compete for the position, like a society whose leadership is in question. Often, as different musicians succeed one another without much rhyme or reason, what we have is fragmentation and inconsistency. But in some cases these roles are occupied by forces that are strong enough to persist over time and organize the rest according to their own plans and purposes. When that happens, the group of drives, like a commonwealth, is well-constructed and happy (BGE 19) and its rulers speak for it: its voice is, in fact, the voice of its rulers.

In Life as Literature, I noted an uncanny parallel between Nietzsches and Platos political metaphors for the self; what I did not notice at the time was that both were equally repelled by tyranny. Plato thinks of the tyrant as someone in whom lots of terrible appetites sprout up day and night, tortured by the violent crowd of appetites that have nested within him.10 But Nietzsche, too, has nothing good to say about harboring in oneself all the bad vices and appetites, which he connects primarily with decadence.11 But tyranny is very much a part of his picture: The impulses want to play the tyrant, he writes, and mentions one solution to the problem: One must invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger (TI Socrates 9). But although, like Plato, he connects this with the anarchy of instincts, he finds such anarchy not in Platos tyranni-cal character but, ironically, in Socrates himself, who turned reason into that counter-tyrant, and took his (and everyones) goal to be rationality at any price (TI Socrates 11).

The overvaluation of reason, though, is to decadence what the scientific overvaluation of truth is to the religious picture of the world according to GM: not a way to extricate oneself from religion or the tyranny of decadence but a new expression of it, perpetuating it in a new guise (GM III:2327). In a healthy soul, there is no need for tyranny, and so no need for the brute force with which Nietzsche imagines Socrates trying to control his impulses. It is one thing to try to outdo your opponents, another to convert them to your cause, and yet another to try to destroy them: you cannot simply silence or eliminate the string section if it proves hard to make them sound as you want. I agree with Pippin that Nietzsches heroesPippin mentions Shakespeare and Goethe, and I would add Julius Caesarcontained . . . contradictions and evaluations that they did not reconcile but in some way mastered (124), but this is not the mastery that Nietzsche has in mind when, in the same section of Twilight of the Idols, he asks, How did Socrates become master over himself ? We should rather think of mastery on the model the conductor, who constantly has to keep the musi-cians within the constraints of his interpretation: In summa: domination of the passions, not their weakening or extirpation!The greater the dominating power of a will, the more freedom may the passions be allowed. The great man is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press those magnificent monsters into service (KSA 12:9[139]).12



As with orchestras, so with individuals: the standards for evaluating them are aesthetic. Pippin takes me to task on that account, but I think he understands the aesthetic more narrowly than Nietzsche and I do and underestimates the importance Nietzsche assigns to it: I want to learn more and more how to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall become one of those who make things beautiful (GS 276). Aesthetic values are not found only in the arts, as Pippin claims, nor is beauty the same as looking or sounding goodwhich may be what Pippin has in mind when he writes of a distinctly aesthetic register or purely aesthetic values (122). I think that beauty, which can be found in every aspect of life, is essentially connected with individuality, with distinction, with standing out among things and turning them into mere back-ground.13 It is not a purely aesthetic quality, as aesthetic qualities have so far been understood; that is, it is not confined to the arts and it is not exhausted by the tired lists of elegance, power, and depth that we so often find in our aesthetics textbooks. The aesthetic depends not on a special range of features but on a particular instance of any sort of feature whatsoever: an instance that is shared only by things that are indiscernible from the object that the feature qualifies in that manner.14

So understood, beauty can perfectly well include the disruptive, the sub-lime, and the intoxicating (122), which Pippin rightly wants to place among Nietzsches values. The values of aesthetics depend on the differences between people and things, on what distinguishes one from another, features that no two distinct objects can both possess.15 In this respect, aesthetic values contrast with the values of morality, which presuppose essential similarities among people features we have in common with everyone else and through which we are joined to one another. But there can be no difference of the sort that beauty requires without identity: nothing can be different from other things unless it has its own discernible structurean organization, a coherence, and a unity that give its possessor its own distinct character within the range of the many things to which in other relevant respects it is like. That unity, moreover, cannot be the outcome of the violent suppression of conflicting drivesthe instincts turned against each other (TI Socrates 9)through their subordination to reason, which, according to Nietzsche, Socrates resorted to in order to control them. It requires acknowledging and making use of the complexity Nietzsche so often praises in his heroes: the ambition of the grand style is to become master of the chaos one is; to compel ones chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law (KSA 13:14[61]).16 But, Nietzsche insists, neither Socrates nor the Christian church were ever able to accommodate that thought: The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its cure, is castratism. It never asks: How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving? It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation. But, he writes, We no longer admire dentists who pluck out teeth so that they will not hurt any more (TI Morality 1). No wonder Nietzsche called Christianity Platonism for the people (BGE P).



Aesthetic values are not purely objective properties of things, which is why different people find beauty in such different places. But that does not make them subjective. Beauty requires an audience who will not recognize it unless it conforms to some of the accepted conventions that characterize it asin its originality and distinctionit flouts others at the same time. The social aspect of beautythat it must be recognizable by some audiencemay give us a way to attribute to Nietzsche the advantages Pippin attributes to Hegelsand only to Hegelshistoricized social practice view of . . . practical reason (124). There is always a reason why things are as they are when they form part of a unified wholean aesthetic reason, in the broad sense I just introduced. But, as we said, aesthetic features are based on our differences rather than our similari-ties and what is aesthetic depends not only on the object it qualifies but also on those who interact with it. As a result, no such reason can be generalized in a way that applies universally, guaranteeing in some way that whatever manifests a similar structure will also be beautiful. There are no rules by following which one can create or become something beautiful, both new and worthy of love or admiration. To try to create beauty by following any sort of general rules can lead only to a variation on something that has already been doneto something that is, at best, mediocre.

Its reliance on such rules, which Nietzsche (rightly or wrongly) finds essen-tial to morality, is one of the reasons Nietzsche rejects it (BGE 43). It is also why he writes that when they are at their best, at the moment of inspiration, artists (to whom, I believe, he gives much greater credit that Pippin allows) follow laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination [their particularity] defy all formulation through concepts (BGE 188). To formulate those laws through concepts in this context would be to state them in such a way they could apply to a wide variety of different cases, accessible to anyone who plans to create something beautiful. But that is impossible. As Aaron Ridley has written, these rules cannot be formulated that way because they are internal to the project, conditions that cannot . . . be non-trivially specified in advance and independently of some particular way of meeting them.17 Anyone, for example, who determines the laws that Picasso followed in creating his analytical cubist works would at the very best create nothing but an imitation of Picassos style, notunless Picassos rules are also modified and transcendeda beautiful work in its own right.

A central view of mine, with which both Janaway and Pippin have serious problems, is that the unity of self Nietzsche praises is to be understood on the model of the narrative unity of a literary work or any successful work of art. But I think that at least some of their problems stem from a misunderstanding for which, I must confess, I am responsible. By using Prousts Marcel and Nietzsche himself as exemplaryas figures who actually narrated their life for us I gave the impression that unity is accomplished through and in the narration of



ones life. Janaway denies that the unified representation of self can be identified with any state in which my drives stand to one another. Those states . . . are outside the full conscious control of the agent, can remain unknown to the agent, and can pertain independently of any intentional attitude-taking towards them on the part of the agent (112). But that is not the case. Unity of self is inferred from unity of narrationbetter, from the unity of an interpretation that attributes such unity to a lifes workbut that interpretation need not (and probably could not) be only the work of the agent: it requires others as well, either as co-interpreters or at least as appreciators and evaluators. And that introduces again the social dimensions of these projects that Pippin rightly does not want us to forget.

There is another aspect to Janaways view. He claims that Nietzsche seems to have two attitudes toward unification. One envisages an agent who effects itthat is what he says I am committed to. But another does not: it is not an agency but a chance picture. That is why, according to Janaway, Nietzsche calls excep-tionally powerful individuals strokes of luck among humans (GM III:14) and why he believes that becoming who you are presupposes that you do not have the slightest idea what you are (EH Clever 9) (115). But powerful individuals are not strokes of luck because they unified themselves by chance; luck does not refer to the process by which they became themselves but to the luck of humanity (der Mensch), which manages to include such individuals despite the efforts of the ascetic priest to eliminate them. As to becoming who you are not requiring having the slightest idea of what you are, I have offered an interpretation of the passage that accounts for that statement without implying that the process, if it occurs at all, occurs at an unconscious level for which one is not responsible.18

I must now say a few words about the eternal recurrence, the issue with which my work on Nietzsche began. I agree with Janaway that superessentialism is a problematic view, though I think Nietzsche held something close to it. But the eternal recurrence, as I suggested in Life as Literature, can also be understood, more weakly and more reasonably, as a view to the effect that what I am to imagine recurring is whatever I find significant in my life. Insignificant events are, precisely, events whose occurrence does not make a difference. Why, then, would I want such events not to be there? Why would I even think of them in the first place as I looked over my life? By contrast, significant events are those that do make a differenceevents that have wide implications for the rest of my life and connections to many of its other constituents. Those are the events that I would want (or not want) to recur if I were to live again.

Janaway disagrees with my view that a life that was at least in its significant respects different from mine would not be my own. His own interpretation is that all the thought of the eternal recurrence requires is that I do not want any unactualized possible life more than my own actual life. Nietzsche could face the thought of the eternal recurrence with the attitude I could have had a life



free of chronic debilitating headachesbut my actual life is the one I would crave again. . . . It is because there obtain so many better possibilities of lives for me, Janaway explains, that the temptation not to want my actual life is so strong (109). There is something in this view, since the eternal recurrence always involves affirming our actual life. But why would Nietzsche prefer his actual life to a life that was in every other respect identical with his but without his debilitating headaches? If that is a brute fact, something that those who can affirm the eternal recurrence simply do, their attitude would be simply irrational: they would prefer their painful life without any reason at all.

Why, though, would a life free of migraines represent a better possibility for Nietzsche? Well, other things being equalif the absence of pain were its only salient featureit might. But things are never equal in this context. Nietzsches migraines cannot be what the thought of the eternal recurrence presupposes and, more important, one of his reasons for affirming his actual life in all its detail. That is what Nietzsche is driving at when, in EH he writes: In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialecticians clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough (EH Wise 1). His idea is that his migraines, which debilitated him every few days, were part of the reason he approached philosophy as he did, through short bursts of thought and writing rather than the long and patient treatment that character-izes most philosophical treatises. He makes a similar point in GS: I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not go to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the supersti-tion of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift (GS 381).

There is no reason to think that it makes sense to imagine Nietzsche without his headaches but with the works he actually did produce, and so there is no reason to think that a life without headaches would have represented a better possibility for him. Without the headaches, there is no way to know whether Nietzsche would even have become a philosopher in the first place or whether he would ever have written anything. A Nietzsche who did not write, or even a Nietzsche who wrote and thought differentlyhow, by the way? Like Kant? Wittgenstein? Quine?would no longer be Nietzsche. Despite appear-ances, this is an empty hypothesis. It is no different from thinking that simply because a work of art or a human action could be interpreted differently, its actual interpretation is not the only one it can receive. Perhaps. But how? And how well? Go try.19

I realize I have addressed only a few of the issues that these two articles have raised about Life as Literature, and both my commentators and I have ignored the first part of the book, especially questions connected with perspectivism



and the will to power that I now believe I was wrong about. But what can I do? The book could certainly have been better, but if it were better then it would not have been written by me: I wrote the best book I could. To have written a better book, I am afraid, is a wish for the impossiblethough I can certainly hope to write a better one in the future. Only someone else could have written a better onefor example, Janaway, who wrote Beyond Selflessness, or Pippin, who gave us Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy.20 And, since wishing for future events, despite the strictures of the eternal recurrence, is still possible, I do have one such wish: I wish I could be there for the twenty-fifth anniversaries of their own books so that I could return the favor they have done me today by engaging with mine, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, in such a kind and generous manner.

Princeton [email protected]

notes

1. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

2. Dave Hickey, The Heresy of Zone Defense, in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 15562.

3. For Nietzsches works in English, I use the following translations: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966); Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 43699; Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 463563; The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 60953; The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968); Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 655791.

4. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 181.5. Dave Hickey, Una Lesbiana Enamorada! The Reverse Bowdlerization of Susan Sontag,

Harpers, December 2009, 9396, 96.6. Later in his essay, in his criticism of Brian Leiters denial that the self can change in any

fundamental way, Janaway appears to believe that nothing about the self is in principle immune from change. If that is his considered view, there is no disagreement between us.

7. An excellent discussion of the way in which something one becomes turns into something one is can be found in Lanier Anderson, Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption, European Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2005): 185225.

8. Bernsteins speech can be found in several videos on YouTube; so can his rehearsals.9. Andrew Huddleston, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (Ph.D.

dissertation, Princeton University, 2012).10. Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 573de.11. See TI Socrates and CW 7.12. Translated as The Will to Power 932.13. See my Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2010).



14. More on this in Only a Promise of Happiness, chap. 2.15. That is in part why we can find, say, that the very same shade of yellow that contributes to

the beauty of one painting can easily destroy the beauty of another; or why, although I may love you for your sensitivity, I will not abandon you when I meet someone whose sensitivity in some way or another exceeds yours: it is the particular shade of yellow, as it occurs in a very specific context, and your particular sensitivity that is in question. Again, more on this in Only a Promise of Happiness, chap. 2.

16. Translated as The Will to Power 842. We need not worry about the word zwingen, compel or force: it repeats Platos gesture of referring to the result of persuasion as a kind of compulsion, as in the case of the philosopher-kings in the Republic (e.g., 519b). As Apology 29a3, 29d2, 31b5, 33c45, 36c5, and 37e6 (among other passages in this work) make clear, the verb peithein, particularly in its passive and its negative forms, can be translated as both convince and compel.

17. Aaron Ridley, Autonomy (unpublished manuscript, University of Southampton, 2009), 12.

18. Nietzsche, Intention, Action (unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, 2013). The main idea is that becoming who you are is not a goal that can be pursued directlyin itself it is empty and provides no information. One becomes who one is by accomplishing something concrete that, when successful, constitutes who or what someone is. And that, in turn, like the laws that artists are supposed to follow (BGE 188), cannot be formulated in concepts: it is specific to those who succeed in becoming individualsdifferent enough from the rest of the world to be objects of love (but, for Nietzsche, perhaps also of hatred) and admiration.

19. See Nehamas, Nietzsche, 6265.20. Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsches Genealogy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007); and Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).


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