The Compassion of Zarathustra: Nietzsche on Sympathy and Strength

Review of Politics

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 49-78

  Frazer, Michael L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 36049025625     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670506000052     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. For more on Nietzsche as siding with Hume in the battle for domination between reason and passion, see Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 56.
2. Henry Staten, Nietzsche's Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 1.
3. For a brief but wide-ranging review of the recent literature on Nietzsche's critique of compassion, see Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, p. 175. For one of the most extended discussions on the topic, which will serve as an important foil for my own views throughout this essay, see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 139–147. Much of the material in this essay is re-used in chapter 7 of Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought.
4. Jacqueline Stevens, for example, has convincingly argued that Darwinian “genealogists of morals” such as Nietzsche's estranged friend Paul Ree are the “worthless” opponents against which Nietzsche sets his own views in his selfdescribed “polemic” On the Genealogy of Morals. See Jacqueline Stevens, “On the Morals of Genealogy,” Political Theory 31: 4 (2003): 558–588. (Nietzsche calls genealogists of morals “worthless” at GM II:4, p. 498.) The current secondary literature on Nietzsche's alleged method of “genealogy” is, of course, far too vast to review here in its entirety; an excellent starting point are the essays collected in Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, particularly those in Part II, pp. 251 -468.
5. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, p. 6. In searching for an answer here, however, Staten readily admits that he is “not primarily interested in debating the cogency of Nietzsche's doctrines” (p. 129)—that is, as I take it, with making philosophical sense of them. For a more philosophical take on these issues, see Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Morality,” in Morality, Culture and History, pp. 167 – 198, especially pp. 181–185.
6. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes I and II, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1979/1984 / 1991), I:13, I:1, p. 4.
7. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead'” (1943). Collected in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), pp. 53–114. See pp. 53 and 75. Heidegger later explains that “as a mere countermovement” Nietzsche's worldview “necessarily remains, as does everything ‘anti,’ held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves” (p. 61).
8. Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); see pp. 96–99. Stanley Rosen's interpretation of Nietzsche is allied with that of Berkowitz, who clearly concurs with Rosen's claim that commentators such as Delueze and Foucault, with their “emphasis on difference to the neglect of rank-ordering, and on the multiplicity of perspectives to the neglect of Nietzsche's classification of these perspectives into a finite number of [ranked] types” have “led to a vulgarization of his [Nietzsche's] teaching that is unfortunately typical of our time” (Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 151). It is tempting to treat those who read Nietzsche primarily in terms of “genealogy” and “perspectivism” as “leftist,” and those who read Nietzsche along more traditional, Platonic or Aristotelian lines as “conservative,” but I have deliberately avoided such politically loaded labels.
9. Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 68.
10. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-1999), p. 22.
11. A convincing argument that Nietzsche is indeed a virtue ethicist in this sense can be found in Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche's Affirmative Morality: An Ethics of Virtue,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 26 (2003): 64–78.
12. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, p. 169.
13. David Cartwright observes that Nietzsche's conception of compassion as a contagion has its inspiration in Kant, as do several of his more specific arguments regarding the sentiment discussed in this section; see David E. Cartwright, “Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45: 1 (1984): 83–98.
14. Havas correctly rejects any reading of Nietzsche on compassion which interprets his position “as though pity were, in his view, merely one vice among many” (Havas, Nietzsche's Genealogy, p. 211). Havas chides Richard Schacht for putting forward such an interpretation, though this seems to be an unduly harsh reading of Schacht; see Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), especially pp. 359–362, 461.
15. Martha Nussbaum, highlighting her observation of Nietzsche's undeniable debt to the ancient Stoics on this point, places this line of thought at the heart of Nietzsche's opposition to compassion. See Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, chap. 7, esp. pp. 384-85, as well as the essay “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism.” Stanley Rosen concurs, arguing that, for Nietzsche, pity is “the true form of heartlessness” because it “tolerates sickness and cowardice” (Rosen, Mask of Enlightenment, p. 105). This argument is also discussed in Havas, Nietzsche's Genealogy, p. 214. Nussbaum's primary error in her interpretation of Nietzsche, one not shared by Rosen, is that she puts far too great an emphasis on this Stoic line of argument alone. M. Weber has convincingly argued that “insofar as Nussbaum tries to bring Nietzsche into the Stoic fold, she misses or misconstrues much of what he has to say.” While it is true that “there are surely traces of Stoicism to be found in Nietzsche … this should not lead us to interpret all he says in Stoic terms.” See M. Weber, “Compassion and Pity: An Evaluation of Nussbaum's Analysis and Defense,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004): 507.
16. This idea that “pity” leads to “epistemological confusion”—and in its presumptive claim to know another's suffering actually acts against real knowledge of the suffering other—is at the heart of Randall Havas' interpretation of Nietzsche on the subject. See Havas, Nietzsche's Genealogy, esp. pp. 220–223.
17. See, for example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 14.
18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education (1762). Introduction, trans. and notes, Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 222.
19. Staten, Nietzsche's Voice, pp. 154–155.
20. Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism,” pp. 139, 152.
21. Rosen, Mask of Enlightenment, pp. 228, 244.
22. Robert Pippin, “Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 64.
23. Rosen, Mask of Enlightenment, p. 231.
24. Weber, “Compassion and Pity: An Evaluation of Nussbaum's Analysis and Defense,” p. 510.
25. Pippin, “Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” p. 65.
26. Ruth Abbey has also made this point; see Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, pp. 61–63.