A human cry

Part 1: The self in society

Particularly in his later works, Nietzsche is notorious for placing society, or the herd, and the individual in opposition and viewing the former as damaging to the latter, but we also know that his attitude towards society is more complex and ambivalent than this simple opposition suggests. Nietzsche describes the development of language, consciousness and various forms of culture as social events that changed human life and the human psyche. He values the sophistication and ingenuity that prevailing social systems of interpretation allow. Furthermore, particular forms of awareness and selfhood that have emerged within society provide the conditions of possibility for the contemporary human encounter with life: they are what we have to work with. His approach is not, therefore, to advocate escaping the constitution of the individual through social forms of language and consciousness or systems of morals and metaphysics; rather, we should take these up as individuals, appropriating and changing them to create new systems of constraint for ourselves in order to develop and express our own drives. ¹

While in theory this should allow the individual to affirm himself or herself, it does not foster escape from the alienation from the self, other human beings and social mores that Nietzsche sees as underlying nihilism. Indeed, the attempt is itself alienating. In the first place, it requires taking up tools (moral systems, consciousness, language) and a form of life (the conscious individual) that Nietzsche describes as alienating for the individual. Living on the basis of an interpretation created by others is alienating for Nietzsche, in part because instead of reflecting one’s own experiences and creative power this interpretation reflects the experiences and creative power of others. ² As such, it promotes the flourishing not of one’s own way of life but of its creators’ – and of the group, not the individual. ³ On the other hand, the alternative that Nietzsche suggests – using these tools as much as possible in isolation from the social context in which they developed – additionally alienates oneself from others and the way of life in which one has lived. Creating in isolation of one’s social milieu is itself alienating, and in any case not really possible. Becoming aware that the way that one encounters the world, even oneself, is socially mediated alienates from these forms without necessarily reconciling one either to this loss or to another way of being. Nietzsche recognizes that one cannot simply break free of the worldview in which one is steeped, even having realized that it is alien. The self is inescapably conditioned by its experiences, which, whether epistemological, moral, perceptual, or affective, are permeated by social interpretations.

As a result, the need to create oneself and one’s worldview is in tension with one’s situatedness in a socially mediated way of life. One commentator claims that for Nietzsche ‘the drive for autonomy is always a refusal of community and mediation, a refusal of dependency on the will of another’, ⁴ and it is true that Nietzsche repudiates a straightforward adoption of or immersion in communal perspectives. However, he does not demand complete escape from this context. The influence of others’ interpretations on our way of being is an infecting presence that we may strive to throw off, but this process is as much an appropriation of these alien tendencies as a rejection of them. Nietzsche holds that freedom always takes place in a social context, and even the attempt to refuse dependency depends on the conditions of possibility presented by one’s socially mediated experiences. As David Owen points out, part of Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism is that liberalism fails to recognize the extent to which thinking and acting depend on communal practices: for Nietzsche ‘our capacities are socially constituted’. ⁵ For example, Nietzsche states that ‘It is quite impossible that a man should not have in his body the qualities and preferences of his parents and forefathers’, and, in the case of the philosophical individual in particular, ‘Many generations must have worked to prepare for the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been individually acquired, tended, inherited, incorporated’. ⁶ A passage from his 1881 Nachlaß describes the emergence of the individual by appropriating the social drives through which she or he was originally constituted as such:

[T]he state does not originally oppress individuals: these do not yet exist! It makes existence possible for human beings, as herd animals. Our drives, affects, are first taught us there: they are nothing original! There is no ‘state of nature’ for them!…These come into struggle and relation with each other later, when the bonds of society degenerate: [the individual] must suffer through the aftereffects of the social organism, he must expiate the judgments and experiences that are inappropriate existence conditions, which were fitting for a whole, and eventually he manages to create in himself his possibility of existence as an individual through reordering and assimilation, excretion of drives. ⁷

Nietzsche indicates the difficulty of this process, going on to state: ‘Usually these experimental individuals go under.’ When these individuals first start to emerge, their various drives strive without measure to assert themselves, fragmenting the individual or tearing each other apart, and are not brought into ordered relation to each other – which for Nietzsche is the essence of ‘style’ and necessary for greatness. ⁸ Consequently, there may seem to be only two options: conformity to social mores on the one hand or, on the other, the uncontrolled, violent and destructive expression of drives and the resulting fragmentation and dissolution of the self and society. ⁹

Nietzsche contends that there is a third option: establishing one’s own systems for ordering one’s drives. ¹⁰ Free creativity is the individualized appropriation and use of the tools, capacities, needs, motivations, beliefs, judgments and perceptions provided by one’s social context. Even one’s means of forming interpretations are socially conditioned, as Nietzsche’s genealogies of language, consciousness and the individual show. The latter are ingrained with presuppositions that constrain and shape the self, including concepts of substance, atomism, agency, free will and objectivity. ¹¹ Individual self-affirmation must subvert these categories of consciousness and culture, which constrain the individual within an interpretation that suits the purposes of the group; but, since they are the means by which the individual encounters the world, she or he also cannot proceed without them.

This limits the extent to which human beings can be free in the way that matters to Nietzsche – that is, free to create themselves in a way that promotes their maximal affirmation of life. Although for Nietzsche the self and the world it experiences are changeable, they are so only within limits – some aspects of our conditioning are too embedded to be modified realistically: ‘at the bottom of us, “right down deep”, there is, to be sure, something unteachable, a granite stratum of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions.’ ¹² Sheridan Hough has argued plausibly that although for Nietzsche this foundation is in principle changeable, in practice total change is impossible for any individual, taking too much time to gain the necessary distance from the most central beliefs, urges and perceptions that one inherits. ¹³ In other words, while socially constructed meanings do not provide absolute boundaries to self-creation, they provide practical limits as well as a framework upon which to build new ways of being. Older, more widely held and well-established interpretations or ‘prejudices’ – such as the soul, or the body – are more difficult to discard or alter than more recent inventions. The freedom of the individual to create herself or himself is thus always constrained.

Hough claims that Nietzsche celebrates rather than bemoans these limits: ‘the person living what Nietzsche describes as the highest life understands and celebrates the narrow scope of human autonomy’. ¹⁴ However, while Nietzsche acknowledges the constraints of social life on the individual and accepts that individuals can only work through these constraints, his attitude towards these limits is at least ambivalent: he sees social practices as creating the individual and constituting her or him as enabled in certain ways, but also, famously, as stifling, weakening, repressing, falsifying, and/or leveling human beings, and eventually leading to nihilism. The conditions of possibility that social life provides are necessary, but must also be struggled against.

Like Hough, Aaron Ridley stresses Nietzsche’s positive claims about the social construction of the individual, using an analogy to argue that Nietzsche sees these as not only conditions of possibility for action, but not even real constraints:

A person who insisted, for example, that ‘submitting abjectly’ to the ‘capricious’ rules of grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguistic expression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was.…[I]t is only by working with and through those rules…that effective linguistic expression is so much as possible.…[O]n this picture, clearly enough, ‘constraint’, ‘law’ or ‘compulsion’ feature, not as limits on our powers of acting, but as their sine qua non. ¹⁵

The linguistic analogy should already make us suspicious of Ridley’s claim as an interpretation of Nietzsche. Nietzsche views language as particularly problematic for the exercise of freedom, trapping its users in metaphysical categories that miscommunicate experiences and enforce similarity and deceit, and furthering the damaging myths of atomism and subjecthood. ¹⁶ Although language enables new forms of self-realization, its adoption also mobilizes these characteristics, which the individual must struggle to subvert.

Robert Guay shares Ridley’s position, going so far as to argue that the need for a social context in order to make meaning entails that ‘There is no contest in Nietzsche between the lonely individual and the tyrannical crowd’. ¹⁷ Ridley and Guay claim that the conventions through which one acts and realizes one’s freedom are, for Nietzsche, necessarily public, but this is not the whole story. For Nietzsche, we need social practices for our actions to make sense, but in order to be free we also need in some sense to set ourselves outside them, creating our own, individual practices and ways of giving meaning. In other words, the fact that we need a public praxis in order to act and understand our actions does not mean that this practice does not inhibit our freedom. While Nietzsche does maintain that constituting the self as free depends on rules and conventions, this requires not rules and conventions that are shared by society, but rather the establishment of one’s own: ‘[E]ach one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative’; ‘[W]hat is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility.’ ¹⁸ Freedom is not absence of constraint, but neither is it the constraint of the self by others; it is self-constraint, or self-mastery.

What is valuable in Guay’s and Ridley’s accounts is their identification of the tension that Nietzsche perceives between establishing one’s own rule and the dependence of the ability to do so on one’s social nature. However, Nietzsche does not see the social recognition of individual enterprise as resolving this tension. Rather, this remains an irreconcilable opposition that must be continually negotiated. The inescapable embeddedness of activity in social praxis and the alienation that this engenders are in an unavoidable conflict that forms the basis of repeated attempts by the individual to reformulate himself or herself.

Nietzsche plausibly identifies a tension between the experience of ourselves and the universe as given in certain socially mediated forms and the need and capacity to re-create these as individuals, but it is a productive, as well as an alienating, tension. He sees this tension as the starting point for constructing oneself as a great individual. Consistently with his account of the self that creates itself by imposing direction and order on diverse and conflicting drives and needs, the tension between the need for individual development and the constraints of society can be integrated in – and indeed provide a stimulating impetus to – the creation of dramatic, grand and beautiful forms:

There is no necessary contrast between sensuality and chastity.…This, at least, ought to hold good of all well-constituted and good-spirited mortals, who are not in the least inclined to reckon their unstable equilibrium between angel and petite bête, without further ado, among the objections to existence, the more refined and more intelligent like Hafis and Goethe even regarded it as an additional attraction. It is precisely contradictions of this kind which lure us to life. ¹⁹

The self-affirming individual must negotiate and learn to endorse this tension and the alienation it engenders: something Nietzsche envisions as a painful struggle. ²⁰ Some commentators have interpreted the painfulness of this isolation as showing that it cannot succeed as a means to self-affirmation. Jay Bernstein argues that, since for Nietzsche ‘[a]utonomy is a work of solitude’, it is an alienating, life-negating project, which ‘terminates in the worldless, death-in-life solitude of the philosopher-legislator’. ²¹ Daniel Conway claims that the painfulness and ultimate failure of Zarathustra’s solitude suggests that the goal of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is to critique such a voluntaristic and individualistic response to social alienation rather than to promote it. ²² Both these interpretations are misleading, although they make useful points. Bernstein is right that the outcome of Nietzsche’s project of self-creation appears as an alienated and lonely existence that tends to strike the reader as difficult to affirm, and that the rejection of community as a positive contribution to this project is problematic. Conway is right, too, that Nietzsche himself points up the difficulty and incompleteness of this task, considered as a solution to nihilism. However, Nietzsche’s awareness of these difficulties does not dissuade him from demanding that we embrace our capacity to struggle against social constraints in order to re-create ourselves according to our own values. As is well known, Nietzsche not only accepts suffering but endorses it, meaning that the discomfort of isolation does not count against it, and moreover he is clear that creativity and freedom require the unleashing of powers that, as social beings, we tend to feel should be suppressed. The fact that we currently cannot see the appeal of the isolated existence of the creative individual does not mean that this way of being is not a valid means of responding to alienation, but rather that we need to change in order to take joy in such a way of being. It is the painfulness and isolation of the individual who affirms herself or himself that prompts Nietzsche to claim not only that creators are hard, but that they must become hard. ²³ In other words, while Nietzsche recognizes that individuals are inescapably embedded in a social context, he nonetheless encourages an individualistic response to this context – which is never satisfied and so always striving and productive and which requires a skepticism towards one’s inherited way of being that is honest and liberating but also painful and lonely.

Part 2: Pity as affect and relation

Nietzsche often describes a need to harden oneself to suffering in order to become strong, beautiful, and/or noble – for example, he claims ‘how deeply human beings can suffer almost determines their order of rank’ ²⁴ and

I have often asked myself whether I am not much more deeply indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others. …. And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it! ²⁵

However, there is a difference in the kind of hardening that Nietzsche advocates towards one’s own painful experiences and towards those of others. Neither should be allowed to undermine joy in life, but whereas we should embrace our own pain and affirm it, Nietzsche proposes a different response to the experience of others’ pain, rejecting empathic connections with others as detrimental to the ability to affirm life. I suggest that this is an inadequacy of his account in two respects: first, it denies important experiences a place in the project of self-affirmation; and second, it excludes possibilities for ways of being together that could help affirm life. I argue that Nietzsche may allow experiences regarding others’ suffering to form part of one’s self-affirmation in a certain sense, but that this is based on a self-directed revaluation of one’s experience of pity and does not genuinely engage with the other and the other’s pain as such.

Nietzsche finds problematic for individual self-affirmation values that he associates with social groups and in particular with Christianity and democracy. These include pity, care for the weak, altruism, and the suppression of vigorous and vital drives, which these moral systems present as egoistic and dangerous. Social values, he claims, promote a life-denying worldview: ‘To consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the niaiserie par excellence and, on a large scale, a veritable disaster in its consequences, a nemesis of stupidity – almost as stupid as would be the desire to abolish bad weather – say, from pity for poor people.’ ²⁶

Nietzsche views empathy with others’ suffering as life-negating for many reasons. His account of pity is, as is typical of him, complex and sophisticated, and describes a wide variety of motivations and emotions as mingled in the affect of pity, some of which are valued negatively even by the social moralities that he derides (these form the core of his immanent critique of a value system that extols pity). ²⁷ But the fundamental problem with pity for Nietzsche, I argue, is not that it is, as he claims it sometimes is, in fact often selfish or a play for power, or that it is likely to provoke resentment or promote weakness in others. The first two of these are not seen by Nietzsche as intrinsically negative, while, I suggest, the third and fourth are only secondary considerations. The most important problem with pity, for Nietzsche, results from its implications for the goal of self-affirmation and lies in its basic nature as an affect: the feeling of pity at others’ suffering makes the world seem a wretched place, leads to the devaluation of life, and undermines our attempt to affirm ourselves and our power to shape the world: pity ‘has a depressive effect. One loses force when one pities.’ ²⁸ Thus we not only must behave differently, so as no longer to deny our more selfish urges or help others to help themselves; we must develop defenses against the affect of pity itself. Rather than allowing oneself to feel others’ pain, Nietzsche suggests that one should harden oneself to it, even excise it, ²⁹ famously maintaining that those who cannot affirm their lives, including their suffering, should be abandoned to their self-destructive nihilism: ‘The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.’ ³⁰ The sight of the miserable should not be allowed to drag down the joyful life-affirmation of the strong.

The gut reaction of the reader to these claims is likely to be negative, but Nietzsche’s account allows for this intuition, suggesting that it results from social conditioning according to the values he rejects. The desire to help those weaker than ourselves is an example of the kind of feeling against which he thinks we need to harden ourselves. He presents the break from the social moralities to which we are accustomed and the move to an individual morality as extremely painful and an obstacle to be overcome in becoming free: it ‘demands a certain severity of us, especially a certain mistrust of “first impulses”’. ³¹ However, although Nietzsche’s response to the inevitability of pain and death seems to dismiss the suffering of others, his insistence that affirmation must not minimize or explain away suffering and evil does at least urge honesty about what one endorses when one endorses life. As such, it involves a kind of recognition of the pain and despair of others. Nietzsche claims, not that this pain is deserved, illusory, or ultimately all for the best, but that we should not take the reality and meaninglessness of this pain to count against the affirmation of ourselves and life in general. ³²

Nonetheless, even on this charitable interpretation the result is problematic. In the first place, the demand for hardness towards others’ suffering excludes an important aspect of human experience that, I suggest, should be incorporated in an affirmation of life in all its richness and difficulty. That is, the experiences we must affirm include not only our own perceptions, desires, needs and urges, but also those of others. Hardening oneself against others’ experiences denies a real and valuable part of one’s experience: the sharing of others’ pain (and indeed happiness). If there is something valuable for Nietzsche in the strengthening of the self that can result from suffering, then a similar strengthening should be possible through experiencing pain together with someone else who suffers; for example, when caring for someone with a serious illness. In fact it seems that a lot of the suffering we have to overcome is a result of our care for and involvement with others. Rather than excluding this experience from the life we affirm – denying, suppressing and rejecting empathic experiences of others, as Nietzsche often seems to advocate – we should incorporate them as part of experience, to be re-created as part of something we endorse, as with our own pain. Suffering with people need not count against life any more than suffering on one’s own account. Incorporating the second-hand experiences available through empathy should allow a richer, more powerful affirmation of life and the self, even if it is more difficult to do so than to affirm only one’s own suffering.

One might well be uncomfortable affirming another’s pain in the way one affirms one’s own, deciding it is desirable in itself and as part of a life we love. It is one thing to endorse one’s own tragedy; another to do the same for someone else. To be clear, I am not advocating reducing the suffering of one person to a means to the self-improvement of another, suggesting that one person’s suffering is or can be a good on the basis of its implications for someone else. It is a strength of Nietzsche’s account that he insists that the affirmation of someone’s life must be performed by that individual in person – no one else can decide for her whether life is worth living – and I think we need to retain this refusal to decide for another about the value of that person’s suffering. In affirming my life, inclusive of your pain, I need not insist that you share my evaluation, nor that my affirmation is objective or should be accepted universally. This means that for my life to be joyful I need neither deny the reality and seriousness of your pain nor demand that you overcome it. In this way, it becomes possible both to work towards overcoming the suffering we feel as the result of our involvement with others and to respond to another’s suffering attentively and attempt to help her or him alleviate it. I argue that it is a mistake to think that affirming the self in light of other people’s suffering requires refusing to feel it, as Nietzsche often seems to suggest. Rather, like one’s own pain, one should feel the pain of others and still desire life; like one’s own, it should be an impetus to creativity and overcoming. This approach acknowledges that it is difficult to affirm life in light of pain, including, perhaps especially, that of others, but denies that realizing the profundity of another’s pain and trying to help him or her cope with it needs to weaken us or lead to despair.

In places, Nietzsche’s work seems amenable to interpretation along these lines. Although he sometimes claims that pity should be excised (for example, he lauds Aristotle for recognizing that pity must periodically be ‘purged’ and claims we must be physicians who ‘wield the knife’ against pity), ³³ Michael Frazer and Loralea Michaelis have argued that Nietzsche calls for including others’ suffering in one’s project of self-overcoming. Both claim that, rather than demanding that others’ suffering be rejected from one’s experience, Nietzsche requires experiencing, but changing one’s attitude towards, this suffering as part of a project of self-overcoming. ³⁴ Frazer draws attention to the passage ‘The Cry of Distress’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra must overcome his final weakness: pity. Against those, such as Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin and Stanley Rosen, who argue that Zarathustra’s victory over compassion is accomplished by deciding to no longer feel sorry for others, ³⁵ Frazer maintains that it requires continuing to feel this pity but harnessing the misery that it brings in order to be creative, in much the same way as, on Nietzsche’s account, one can harness any other form of suffering. ³⁶ Similarly, Michaelis claims that Nietzsche does not argue against suffering on another’s behalf – he presupposes that we do so – but for sublimating this pain into something productive, that is, using it to increase one’s power. ³⁷

If it is the case that Nietzsche sometimes demands, not a rejection of pity, but its transformation into something life-affirming, there is still the question of what it means to incorporate another’s suffering in an affirming reconstruction of one’s life. Is it to allow oneself to experience and reorient oneself towards another’s pain, or is it to reorient oneself towards one’s own feelings of pity – to a particular form of suffering that we ourselves undergo? ³⁸ The latter would be a self-directed mastering of an effect that others have on us – an acknowledgement that we cannot help but be influenced by others and a demand to take possession of these influences. In other words, it is an attempt to break free of or overcome one’s inevitable herd background, not an endorsement of it. This response to pity is indeed compatible with Nietzsche’s account.

Both Frazer and Michaelis claim that the revaluation of pity in Nietzsche’s work is based on a genuine empathic connection with others, not a merely self-directed means of coping with one’s weakness for experiencing pity. That is, they claim that Nietzsche wants to take into account the reality of others’ experiences of suffering, not just the effects of these on oneself. Although Frazer uses ‘The Cry of Distress’ in support of his position, in fact Nietzsche’s account of Zarathustra’s temptation suggests that he advocates revalorizing one’s own pity, not another’s suffering – there is no attempt to engage with the other who is in pain, let alone to help overcome this pain, either by reducing it or aiding the other to re-evaluate it. Indeed, the higher men whom Zarathustra pities do not even appear in the passage but are heard in the distance. Despite this, Frazer claims that the pity that Nietzsche describes is itself based on a genuine experience of otherness, as one breaks through the principle of individuation to share another’s suffering: ‘[T]he strength of one’s imagination allows for a bridging of the divide between individuals and the picturing of another’s suffering from his own perspective.’ ³⁹

Frazer’s claim is based on an ontology that Nietzsche presents only in his early work, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, and later repudiates. There are further reasons against extending this position to Nietzsche’s later work. While Nietzsche acknowledges the existence and even the importance for self-overcoming of various forms of otherness, these forms are primarily encountered not on their own terms but as assimilated, interpreted and ideally dominated – as means to our self-overcoming rather than autonomous entities. ⁴⁰ Some commentators have claimed that for Nietzsche, the goal of the self-mastering individual is not to annihilate the other, but to engage with him or her in an open-ended contest, even where this other is weak and unhealthy. ⁴¹ According to Herman Siemens, Nietzsche’s notion of health requires, not denying sickness and suffering, but engaging with these as a continual presence which stimulates to productive dialogue – at least if one is strong. However, while it is true that Nietzsche demands a sustained and affirming relationship with suffering, and indeed with suffering as an encounter with others who are weak and uninspiring, this represents not maintaining a contestatory relationship with the other but the incorporation, domination and reinterpretation of the other. For example, Nietzsche states that, while lambs fear and resent birds of prey, the latter affirm the existence of the lambs: ‘[W]e don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.’ ⁴² But this affirmation of the other is clearly not the affirmation of another individual as a genuine other, as another self, but as food, as something to be used, incorporated and dominated. ⁴³

Will Dudley has argued along similar lines to Siemens, claiming that the highest form of freedom, for Nietzsche, is not an isolating self-justification of one’s way of being, which results in stagnation and constraint of the self by an external other, felt as a limiting, determining presence, but an alternation between such a setting-apart-of-oneself and opening oneself to foreign influences: ‘freedom exists neither in sickness nor in health. Instead, it demands that one become, and feel at home in being, a perpetual cycle of self-infection and self-recuperation, of self-destruction and self-creation.’ ⁴⁴ However, this is just the tension Nietzsche identifies between pollution by external influences – our social context – and the need to create ourselves as free of these influences. The alternation of openness and closedness or sickness and health that Dudley proposes is the continual appropriation and reinterpretation of the public aspects of our experiences – an example of the process I described in part 1. It does not require constituting the other as another subject, respecting the other’s autonomy, or encouraging the other’s development. It is simply the process of interpreting, of overcoming resistances within and beyond the self, that Nietzsche claims characterizes all life as will to power and the freely self-creating individual in particular in the attempt at liberation. ⁴⁵ Nietzsche values otherness, but as something interpreted, appropriated, shaped and made part of the self – as something to be overcome. Incorporation and interpretation are not, for Nietzsche, ways of respecting the otherness of the other, but means of furthering one’s will and being creative in the face of resistance from that other.

To return to our discussion of pity in particular, Michaelis’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s acceptance of empathy is more plausible than Frazer’s, but misses that Nietzsche’s admission of the necessity of our social nature is not an endorsement of it. Michaelis maintains that Nietzsche takes for granted that we have genuine empathic connections with others, and claims that his attack on pity must be taken in the context of a socio-political climate in which these connections have been encouraged to run riot with the detrimental effects he identifies. Thus Nietzsche’s call to reorient oneself to pity – not allowing it to rule one’s behavior, not attempting to alleviate others’ suffering, not deriving from the sight of others’ pain a sense of meaningless and despair – is meant as an antidote to this tendency. In other words, he emphasizes only the latter of the two following elements, which should both be present in a response to others’ suffering: the ability to be moved by others’ pain and the ability to remain in control of oneself as one is so moved. Michaelis admits that, in his concern to undermine the prevailing emphasis on the former, Nietzsche overemphasizes the latter, focusing on the damaging effects of too much pity rather than on our ability to take on board the experiences of others: thus, ‘he falls prey to the temptation to celebrate models of strength and individuation that seem entirely self-referential’. ⁴⁶

Michaelis’ interpretation is useful, but underplays the centrality of the self-referential element in Nietzsche’s account. To continue with the example used by Frazer, the pity Zarathustra feels is, in the first place, a sublimated kind of pity: not empathy for another’s pain, but nausea and horror at the weak and miserable state of another’s existence – pity for higher men is Zarathustra’s ultimate seduction, not pity for sufferers. ⁴⁷ Elsewhere Nietzsche claims that the kind of pity he allows is not for ‘that which has to suffer and should suffer’ but for ‘how man is diminishing’. ⁴⁸ This does not suggest empathy with the other, but that witnessing the other’s unhappy state is damaging for the observer. Second, the revaluation of pity that Nietzsche calls for explicitly rejects acting together with or on behalf of the other, demanding instead an individual and self-directed response: that we harden ourselves to the results of our refusal to act. We should avoid being motivated to act by pity, and accept that suffering means – even ought to mean – downfall for some. Overcoming pity at another’s weakness requires hardness, as one refuses to redeem the other’s pain for him or her by helping the other avoid it or by justifying it. One affirms the other insofar as that other is strong independently, rather than by helping the other to be strong. ⁴⁹

Nietzsche thinks the weak other should be allowed to live out his or her evaluation of life: ‘he’ should be allowed to perish. This entails a certain respect for the other’s autonomy, while protecting the self from being sucked into his or her nihilistic despair and resentful manipulations. On the other hand, it exaggerates the extent to which individuals are best left to themselves in coming to terms with the painfulness of existence, denying the value of engaging in mutual aid in affirming life. As with his account of social conditions generally, Nietzsche emphasizes the constraining effects of pity on the individual and therefore advocates individual escape from this constraint, instead of acknowledging the possibility of communal action.

Nietzsche calls for turning away from the other in order to redeem one’s own existence from the experience of the other’s suffering. Adrian del Caro has pointed out that Zarathustra’s ‘passing by’ of the great city in ‘Of Passing By’ represents, on my interpretation, a lost opportunity to engage with and affirm the contemptible aspects of humanity. In Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth, del Caro rightly argues that it is important to Nietzsche that, in re-creating oneself as a superior human being, one does not succumb to the negative affects that the sight of others can arouse: the question is ‘how to teach enhancement of the human type without becoming bogged down in contempt for humans’. ⁵⁰ Del Caro draws attention to Zarathustra’s reaction to his ‘ape’, the fool whom he encounters outside the great city, who furiously excoriates the citizens within. Zarathustra claims to be disgusted not only by the city, but also by the fool and his ‘contempt’, and tells the fool that ‘Where one can no longer love, one should – pass by!’ ⁵¹ Del Caro claims that this is because ‘one must keep love alive at all costs’ ⁵² – a claim with which I can agree, as long as it is interpreted to mean that love is important for Nietzsche not because of its implications for interpersonal relations, but because of the effects it has on the self. That this ‘passing by’ is oriented to avoiding the affects of anger and contempt experienced by the fool (or, potentially, other affects that worry Nietzsche, such as pity) rather than towards the citizens themselves is underscored by Zarathustra’s fantasy, on the same page, of a ‘pillar of fire in which [the city] will be consumed!’ For Nietzsche, encounters with the contemptible aspects of humanity expose one to the risk of becoming ugly and miserable. While this can provide grounds for self-overcoming, it can also be one’s undoing. In this passage, Nietzsche negotiates this difficulty by advocating ‘passing by’ where one cannot love and, relatedly, refusing to feel pity. Elsewhere, Nietzsche similarly advocates seemingly other-directed emotions and actions, including love, generosity and goodness to others, but describes these as valuable not because they help those who are needy or suffering but because of what they accomplish for and reveal about the self: ‘[T]he noble human being too aids the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity, but more from an urge begotten by superfluity of power.’ ⁵³ My suggestion is that the problem of others’ suffering is better addressed by engaging with others, even those who do not or cannot affirm themselves spontaneously, in order to improve their capacity to affirm as well as one’s own.

Michaelis uses the following passage to support her claim that Nietzsche requires a response to the other that incorporates empathy, but the last lines show Nietzsche to advocate an individual, self-directed response to others’ suffering. Nietzsche states: ‘[A]ssociation with people imposes no mean test on my patience: my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them…My humanity is a constant self-overcoming. – But I need solitude, which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air …’ ⁵⁴ The same movement away from others can be found in a passage in which Nietzsche describes sympathy as the third of four virtues, of which the fourth is solitude: ‘For solitude is with us a virtue: it is a sublime urge and inclination for cleanliness which divines that all contact between man and man – “in society” – must inevitably be unclean.’ ⁵⁵ This indicates that the kind of pity Nietzsche sometimes endorses is concerned not with the suffering of others or with helping others, but with the effects on the self of witnessing the weaknesses of others. While it is true that we feel others’ affects, and even that this feeling can be a stimulus to self-overcoming, in order to constitute ourselves as healthy, powerful, independent, etc., we must not only sublimate our response to this fellow-feeling but get away from these others, break free of our entanglement in their affairs. In this regard, the pity that Nietzsche endorses can be seen as an antidote to a pity that suffers with others – an antidote that demands that we isolate ourselves from these others in order to avoid sharing their downfall. For Nietzsche the pity that cares for others’ pain is real, but is a potentially damaging affect resulting from our social nature, which is the nature from which his self-affirming individuals struggle to break free. Nietzsche’s revaluation of pity does not indicate that feeling with others is valuable in itself, but is an instance of the impossible movement away from inevitable involvement with others that is embodied in the struggle for freedom and self-affirmation in general.

Nietzsche’s approach to others’ suffering neglects the potentially enriching and productive side of being with others, even where these others are weak or dependent. Granting a positive place for the co-creation of the self with others would allow reorienting oneself towards others’ pain in a way that focuses, not on the painfulness of one’s own experience of pity, justifying turning away from others, but on both this feeling and the other’s pain, suggesting the need to work together with the other to build a more affirming stance towards life. But, notwithstanding the opportunity to overcome nausea and pity that encountering others provides, Nietzsche sees relationships with others as basically threatening self-affirmation. He does not see these relationships as potentially enabling mutual participation in self-affirmation. It is true that he suggests that while the sight of ugly, weak, miserable, unoriginal people makes it hard to affirm life, encounters with beautiful, powerful, joyful, creative figures are inspiring and can make this easier. ⁵⁶ However, he does not suggest encouraging the development of the latter, except perhaps insofar as our own beauty and grandeur may, incidentally, provide an uplifting example, but rather adjusting our attitude towards the former and leaving them as they are, to stand or fall alone. ⁵⁷

For Nietzsche, the individual relates externally to others, in terms of how they affect her or him, as tools or means or hindrances rather than genuine others. ⁵⁸ Relationships are founded on competition between the urges of individuals to dominate, and others’ well-being is irrelevant to one’s own – or at least, ideally so, as one hardens oneself to their fate. Constructing a way of life that affirms the self as an individual cannot, therefore, be an enterprise in which others participate. Nietzsche’s solution does not allow that one’s desires and drives might be satisfied in part through the fulfillment of the desires and drives of others or through one’s contribution to this fulfillment. The demand to sublimate one’s response to another’s pain is not, therefore, for Nietzsche an acceptance of the value of intersubjective experience for self-affirmation, but a demand to reject it, as far as possible.