Acknowledgments
We wish to express our deep gratitude to all the students, colleagues, and friends who have been instrumental in bringing this book to fruition. We could not have done this without you.
Eli Friedland wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous funding for the completion of this project.
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Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland
The human being is, Nietzsche wrote in The Genealogy of Morality, “the sick animal” (Nietzsche’s emphasis).1 That is, inasmuch as we humans are self-conscious, time-conscious, causality-conscious creatures2 who are no longer—and can no longer be—ruled by mere instinct, we are permanently ill (cf. A 14). The way back to an instinct-ruled life, a pre-self-conscious (i.e., “healthy”) life in which the human animal can be imagined as a predatory “blond beast” like a lion—with as little “responsibility” or “blame” or “credit” or “courage” as a lion—is closed to us, though its powerful drives surge up through us from time to time with almost irresistible force. The fact that when this happens, we tend toward seeking answers as to why it happened, not to mention toward regret and anxiety that it happened, bespeaks the rift between the self-conscious human and her predecessors.
Given this, what can therapy mean or do for this permanently sick animal? To understand Nietzsche’s answer(s) to this question, we must first recognize that he did not see himself as the first philosophical therapist, but rather as an inheritor of the work, and the human material, of several powerful philosophers, and in particular Plato—“the most beautiful growth of antiquity,” and “the philosopher with the greatest strength of all time” (BGE Preface and 191). As the heir to Plato and to Platonisms—in particular Christianity—he has inherited human beings (including most especially himself) whose illness has been made deeper, almost to the point of self-annihilation, but whose new depth of illness also contains the capacity for never before possible self-transformations. Nietzsche’s own therapeutic approaches therefore address two major “peaks” of the illness at once, one “the most dire” (furchtbarsten), the other “the most sublime” (sublimsten): the possibility of the illness as lethal, and the possibility of the illness as illness “in the same way that pregnancy is an illness” (GM II, 19).
This volume is composed around the Nietzschean insight, which has its roots in the Hippocratic tradition of ancient medicine, that beliefs, behaviors, ideals, and patterns of striving are not things for which individuals or even cultures are responsible. Rather, they are symptoms of what an individual or culture is, which symptoms require diagnostic interpretation and evaluation; they are manifestations that signify—but do not thereby completely reveal—the vast, subtle, and powerful forces that underlie them, and whose momentum requires their appearance. Two such forces could provisionally be identified as the unfolding of history and the shaping of human souls by unconscious drives.
In this regard, we can isolate three principal approaches, or facets, of Nietzsche’s philosophy: diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic. For Nietzsche, diagnosis does not mean to discover what or who is to blame for a malady, but what is included within it, together with what might be called the functional operation that each aspect has performed and continues to perform. Such a method allows him to honestly (i.e., not just wishfully) assess potential prognoses of that malady, as well as develop therapeutic practices by which to achieve a new health. Only as such can what is self-destructive in it be recognized, and perhaps more importantly, what is fruitful in it explored. Thus, for example, the time and figure of Socrates are not to blame for nihilism, nor is Christianity, but they are certainly to be included within its progression—and so is Nietzsche himself. All contain elements that extend the reach of nihilism, to greater or lesser degrees, but all also contain elements that can be directed toward the self-overcoming of that same nihilism.
Each author contributing to this volume takes up this essential insight of Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy from a different perspective. Many of these perspectives hinge on Nietzsche’s varied relationships with ancient therapeutics, while others explore his keen interest in his contemporary environment and its specific quandaries.
As editors, we have attempted to gather in this volume a wide variety of perspectives on Nietzschean therapy, in the hopes of stimulating broader interest in this approach. Our selection criteria were based largely on the fruitfulness of a perspective, and not, in general, whether or not we completely agreed with it. Indeed, drawing together competing perspectives seemed, in this regard, to be quite necessary, though the reader must therefore keep in mind that the opinions of the authors and the editors are independent and in some cases, diverge to a serious degree. But bringing disagreements into the light of day is particularly appropriate for a volume on Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy, a philosophy that attempted as no other to dig out and retrieve the essential tensions that have been buried both in grand “noble lies” and banal politeness. Certainly, no one knew better than Nietzsche that a deliberately provocative gesture could (which of course does not necessarily mean would) jolt a reader into self-reflection and self-work. We have done our best not to undermine this aspect of a Nietzschean approach to therapy, with our selections for the present compilation: caveat lector.
Notes
1 “Das kranke Thier” (GM III, 13; KSA 5, 367).
2 What is decisive here is the consciousness of self, time, and causality and not whether that experience actually means that such things exist, or exist in the way we experience them to exist (hôs estin, to use Protagoras’ formulation).