6
Willow Verkerk
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche discusses retrospectively some of his personal struggles during the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of which included a profound lack of understanding from his friends.1 Nietzsche’s protagonist, Zarathustra, a man of “great health,”2 faces a similar experience during his narrative journey: he seeks companions who will understand and join him in agonistic interrelation, but instead finds only followers and disciples. Although Zarathustra hesitates to order his disciples toward one specific direction, he does accept the role of educator and offers his teachings to his prospective friends as a gift with which they may eventually do as they like.
In this article, I explore Nietzsche’s treatment of friendship in Zarathustra as an extension of his own hope—a hope perhaps never fulfilled—that he might some day know other strivers, like-minded companions to share his ideas on the great health with. These are the individuals he calls free spirits (freie Geister)3 and philosophers of the future, friends who would be worthy of his “truths,” even if only after his death. Nietzsche employs Zarathustra as seducer and through him initiates his readers into the kind of self-questioning that one might ordinarily hesitate before, but suddenly finds oneself enmeshed in: a conversation with a cruel, but loving and provocative friend. In this respect, Nietzsche composes Zarathustra as a literary gift of friendship, a performance of hard generosity that champions the virtues of the warrior.
At first glance, what are most difficult to reconcile in Zarathustra on the topic of friendship are Zarathustra’s seemingly contradictory claims: at one point, he advices generosity and rejoicing between friends, at another, he advocates enmity and competition. It is tempting to choose exclusively one approach over the other. Alternatively, we may assume that Nietzsche is strategically undermining our sociohistorical notions of friendship, only to show us that no such notions exist. This is certainly one thread that he follows in a number of different places in Zarathustra. For example, Nietzsche critiques our inability to be friends through our poor character traits, either being too slavish or too tyrannical4; elsewhere he attacks the Christian notion of neighborly love5 for being merely a distraction from self-awareness, a kind of escapism from the self. In such instances, he is asserting that our modern notions of “friendship” bear very little resemblance to our lived interpersonal relationships. However, it is important not to therefore conclude he is also asserting that friendship should be altogether abandoned or that it is impossible. Rather, Nietzsche is taking it apart so that it can be rebuilt.
In the first part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes,
I teach you the friend and his overfull heart. But one must know how to be a sponge if one would be loved by hearts that are overfull. I teach you the friend, in whom the world stands complete, a vessel of goodness—the creating friend, who always has a complete world to bestow.6
Zarathustra, and Nietzsche through him, is advocating the rebuilding of friendship, a new understanding of friendship that is connected to our own therapeutic self-overcoming and a striving toward the Overhuman. It may remain difficult to envision such a kind of friend, especially in light of what Zarathustra points out, namely, that we are in a state of lack. We may wonder, for example, how effective it is to replace former ideals with new ones, if we have failed so utterly in the past to live up to them. But, it is precisely such questioning, I would claim, that Nietzsche attempts to provoke in us through Zarathustra. The above quote is only one aspect of the polyvalent friend that Nietzsche gives to us. Through the narrative journey of Zarathustra and Zarathustra’s teachings on these types, we may learn to influence the kind of relationships we have, to select and shape those relationships that are the healthiest.
As Nietzsche later proclaims in Beyond Good and Evil, his concept of friendship is difficult for his readers to understand, for it is situated within a framework unfamiliar to us.7 According to Nietzsche, in modernity we have lost sight of the noble concept of suffering related to the tragic culture of Greek antiquity and with it a capacity for having human relationships that promote self-overcoming through contest, enmity, and hard generosity. We have collapsed a much richer notion of friendship in which spiritual cruelty was tolerated and even promoted, in favor of a notion that is definable and comfortable, but in doing so we have robbed friendship of its transformative powers. In fact, Nietzsche claims that many friendships that are worthwhile involve discomfort, competition, and even, at times, duplicity.
Rather than friendship, Nietzsche is often presumed to polemically advocate a radical individuality. However, careful attention to his texts show that this is not the case: we assume that he stands against friendship because we are limited by our own definitions of what friendship is, idealizing and oversimplifying it within the context of our modern paradigms of humanism, science, and Christianity. The modern conception of friendship is one that belies itself, according to Nietzsche, whereas his own understanding of friendship allows for a number of therapeutic possibilities, depending upon both the character of the person(s) in question and the stage that they are in their lives.
Still, we are left with a question mark. Between Nietzsche’s biting remarks about erotic love and the herd, and a counseling to his disciples and free spirits to flee from others into solitude, it remains difficult to accept that he is proposing new kind(s) of friendship. Moreover, if Nietzsche associates creativity, self-overcoming, and his ultimate goal, the Overhuman, with solitude, what place does friendship have? It is tempting to conclude that Nietzsche’s valuation of friendship is only secondary to his understanding of the self, in that he advocates the capacity of the great individual over and above any notion of “the good” between friends. Does he reject the traditional virtues of friendship and replace them with one of contest in which friends become merely means to another, higher end? In order to respond to such questions, the interplay between friendship and solitude and the role of the bestowing virtue in personal development and human relationships need to be examined in Zarathustra.
After some initial consideration of Zarathustra, we find two praiseworthy threads on friendship: one of the warrior of the agonistic, lion-hearted, and the other of the master, of the nobler type of self-affirming, bestowing person. These two threads do overlap and it can be difficult to decipher if they are actually separate types, or are just different aspects of a more complex understanding of friendship. The third and lower category of human relationships (which is also called friendship at times by Nietzsche) is allocated to usury, comradeship, and erotic love and involves relations of convenience, servitude, and tyranny. A fair amount of the provocative voice that Nietzsche employs in discussing friendship is for critiquing this third group. However, his provocative tone is also used to incite struggle between himself and his warrior spirited readers. In doing so, he hopes to foster friendships of loving cruelty between himself and his readers.
In the prologue, Zarathustra comes out of his many years of solitude in order to search out companions with whom he can share the wisdom he gained from spending time alone in contemplation. Here and throughout the narrative, Zarathustra is looking for friends to help him facilitate and ultimately fulfill the creative vision that he developed during his solitary days in the mountains. At the beginning of the second part of the book, Zarathustra proclaims,
‘My Wild Wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; on roughest rocks she bore her young, her youngest. Now she runs foolishly through the harsh desert, and seeks and seeks for a soft greensward—my old Wild Wisdom! On the soft greensward of your hearts, my friends!—on your love she would like to bed down her dearest!’8
From this quote and others, Nietzsche expresses his view that, although wisdom and self-contemplation require solitude, friendship with one’s equals9 and the reflective gaze of the other,10 are necessary parts of a healthy and creatively engaged life.
The idea that a good friend is a facilitator to one’s own creative vision is essential to understanding Nietzsche’s concept of friendship. It is not that friendship is at odds with solitude, but rather that there are times for both. Zarathustra portrays an attempt at the kind of self-awareness that is necessary for spiritual self-intelligence in that he moves in and out of solitude in the story, in order to assist his own self-overcoming and the self-overcoming of his disciple-friends.
For Nietzsche, being a facilitator does not only consist in the typical inclinations of kindness, generosity, or support that we might suppose. It more precisely has to do with the warrior friendship that is mentioned above, namely, one of agon, which mixes enmity with friendship and benefits itself most through openly combative relationships. Sometimes, being a good friend, according to Nietzsche, requires that we abandon the other, directly contradict him or force him to doubt his own suppositions (Zarathustra does all of these things and more with his companions).
We may provide a preliminary description of the type of character that is well-disposed toward warrior type friendships by examining Chapter 10 in the first part of Zarathustra, “On War and Warrior Peoples.”11 Here, Zarathustra describes the human characteristics of the people who will allow for the transformation of society through their agonistic natures. He underlines courage, honesty, strength, and respectful competition as the virtues of the warrior and claims that the contest of overcoming makes life and existence on earth more meaningful. Zarathustra not only empathizes with the warrior, he also expresses his affection for them through an attitude of brotherhood and cruel generosity: “I do not spare you; I love you from the ground up, my brothers in war!”12
The warrior represents a human type, or stage of development in the psychological disposition of the human being, that hungers for agonistic relationships. With those who are our “best enemies,” our warrior friends, we should be truthful, even if it is cruel, according to Zarathustra. Zarathustra attempts to do precisely this with his disciple-friends, and Nietzsche with his readers. Zarathustra’s advice to his warrior friends, who look for an enemy to strive against is: “You shall seek your enemy, you shall wage war—and for your own thoughts! And should you be defeated, your honesty shall still proclaim its triumph in that!”13 Zarathustra exclaims that, if one cannot be a bestower of wisdom, then one should strive toward it and fight for it. He attempts to educate those with warrior-type personalities or those who are at the warrior-spirited lion stage of their life by proclaiming the heroic nature of their dispositions, praising their noble strength, and encouraging them toward spiritual and intellectual battle.
The warrior-spirited person is distinguished as living within the no-saying lion stage (as opposed to the camel or child).14 He aspires toward greatness and is a knowledge-seeker, but is nevertheless angry, hateful, and envious of the “saints of understanding” (those capable of masterful friendships that have acquired greater wisdom). At their root, warriors lack in self-understanding and self-mastery: struggle and contest dominate their spirits, but they continue to strive on. Zarathustra urges these warriors of understanding to pursue their own path (not the one of the “Uni-form”) and to seek out enemies, namely, those on whom they can test the adequacy of their own understanding.
In this chapter, Zarathustra states, “I am and have been of your kind.” In stating this, not only does Zarathustra reassert that his warrior friends are his equals, he also suggests that the warrior type is a stage, a persona, or an aspect that one might reside or take part in, but that it should not generally be assumed as a complete picture of the self. It is fair to assume that the warrior friendship may also have a temporary quality, whether it is as a short-lived relationship that exists purely for the mutual facilitation of a particular goal, or as an aspect within a more complex relationship (which does mean that it can have an instrumental quality). Such a friendship may benefit from solitude in that the alone time allows for the integration of the new levels of reflection gained from the oppositional attitude of the agonistic friend. Thus, we return to the observation that friendship and solitude are not topics of tension or conflict within Nietzsche’s work, but rather complimentary therapeutic devices that assist in self-intelligence and practical well-being.
The First Book of Zarathustra, “On the Friend” (Chapter 14) reasserts the necessity of agon in human relationships with an emphasis on the therapeutic powers of friendship, as well as its potential disadvantages. Zarathustra begins by addressing some of the challenges that the solitary person grapples with when it comes to relating to other people: for he already lives, at minimum, as a duality within himself.15 Zarathustra contends that the contemplative and introverted nature of the solitary lends itself to internal conversation and strife. He lives as both a friend and an enemy with himself.16
The friend allows for an outside voice in the life of the solitary: for one can become lost and deluded in his conversation with himself, the friend provides a “third” voice. However, it is not certain that the friend will be helpful to the solitary, for in certain circumstances, “our belief in others betrays wherein we should like to believe in ourselves. Our yearning for a friend is our betrayer.”17 In other words, although the friend may provide another point of view that has the potential to be helpful, his perspective may also be deficient and/or have the potential of interrupting the solitary person’s creative process and taking him away from his work.
Zarathustra proposes that one begins by requesting an enemy for intellectual combat, before presuming friendship, for in order to be a friend one must first be capable of being an enemy-friend. According to Zarathustra, one needs to be able to “honour even the enemy in one’s friend.” His suggestion for the avoidance of distracting and/or unhealthy relationships is to approach friendship with a sense of enmity, to consider the friend someone worth fighting with and subsequently worth fighting for. Characteristic of agonistic friendship, Zarathustra declares: “if one would have a friend, one must also want to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be able to be an enemy.” He adds, “In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in your heart when you strive against him.”18 Friendship has the potential of allowing for growth and change through mutual striving and competition, assuming that the friends are not too preoccupied by envy or jealousy of the other’s characteristics.
Honesty may be a virtue of the warrior as well as the friend, but Zarathustra emphasizes that friendship is not about transparency. One must not attempt to disclose, or share everything about oneself with the friend, mutual respect demands some distance. “Whoever makes no secret of himself incenses others: you have that much reason to fear nakedness!”19 For, in order to inspire another person, which is one of the greatest merits of friendship, you must be admirable. Although some disclosure is necessary to engage dialectically, too much creates an aura of weakness upon the other and encroaches upon the capacity for noble combat between equals.20 As Zarathustra speaks, “You cannot adorn yourself well enough for your friend: for you shall be to him an arrow and yearning for the Overhuman.”21 In this respect, the friend who is esteemed makes for a respectable adversary.
Another commendable quality of friendship is that is allows for self-reflection and can assist one in the avoidance of self-deception and delusional behavior. Self-reflection can occur quite simply through spending time with the friend, for the face of our friend, “is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror.”22 Zarathustra teaches that the reactions of one friend to another has much to disclose about their interiority, their personal weaknesses and strengths, and through observance of this, friendship can assist self-understanding. Although the possibility that we are deceiving ourselves can never be completely eliminated, friendship which incorporates the cruel honesty of the warrior allows for another level of critical analysis to reflect on the possibility of delusion and self-deception.
Zarathustra may have just stressed that self-disclosure can be a vice in interpersonal relationships which attempt to nourish self-overcoming, but raw honesty, mediated by the particular needs of the friend in question, is deemed an integral characteristic of those friendships that he considers healthy.23 As is apparent in the whole of Chapter 14, Zarathustra places a high value on the potentialities of friendship at the individual level for coping with self-deception, narcissism, and weakness of will. Yet, it is also apparent that Zarathustra is reluctant to make sure rules about friendship; he advices caution in many respects and emphasizes the development of particular character traits or virtues over prescriptive rules of behavior.
In Chapters 10 and 14, Zarathustra teaches his companions to look for relationships that cultivate the warrior virtues of strength, honesty, courage, and respectful competition between equals. In Chapter 16, “On Love of One’s Neighbour,” he maintains the import of these attributes for the development of self-love and healthy human relationships and then introduces another level of friendship, that of the bestower.24 Here, Zarathustra offers his listeners a subtle and telling warning on the bestower and the challenges of being on the receptive side of such a person.25 He speaks of the kind of friendship that implies the need for a sophisticated sense of vulnerability on the side of the giver and the receiver; he introduces an attitude toward reception, which seems quite different from the agonistic friendship of the warrior. At minimum, there is one common link between the virtues of the warrior friend and the bestower: both encourage striving for that which is higher through the admiration of the other, a striving above one’s current reach.26
For Nietzsche, the bestowing or gift-giving virtue is expressed from a place of abundance, a healthy selfishness that out of its own fullness and self-mastery seeks others to express this fullness toward. As he writes in Zarathustra, being virtuous in the sense of the bestowing virtue specifies a particular approach toward both reception and offering.27 Zarathustra exclaims that out of self-love, the one who masters the bestowing virtue offers his love to the world by affirming the earth (as opposed to the otherworldly) and sharing his wisdom without seeking a return. Thus, the action of giving itself is supposed to be motivated from a position without any expectation of calculated reward or benefit to the giver.
Zarathustra’s last speech of the First Part occurs at the crossroads outside the town of The Motley Cow, where he has gained many followers. Zarathustra admits that he has aspired toward the highest virtue in his interactions with his companions, but has still not mastered it. As was the case in his speech on the warrior, Zarathustra attempts to gain the confidence of his disciple-friends through placing himself as a peer to them. He announces, “Verily, I divine you well, my disciples: you are striving, as I am, for the bestowing virtue.”28 Zarathustra states that he holds some knowledge about the bestowing virtue that his disciples are wanting for (which seems to undermine the notion that he is actually their peer) and he then proceeds to educate them on what the bestowing virtue consists in, what aspect of it they may already have, and how they can further come to bring it into their lives. Zarathustra proclaims that in order to give, one must first be overfull, and this fullness in turn must be nurtured by a healthy selfishness. He speaks to his listeners, as if they have already begun this process.29
Here, and very soon more openly, Zarathustra refers to the virtues of the warrior as foundational capacities that allow for one to become a bestower. The warrior spirited person is driven by a selfishness that squanders now to give later; he lives in agon and strives toward the building of his capacities for knowledge and understanding. This kind of “whole and holy” selfishness is distinguished from “a sick selfishness” or a “thieving greed” that is degenerate. Whereas the healthy selfishness of the striver is the enactment of a hunger for the accumulation of strength, wisdom, and self-love, the other kind of “skulking” selfishness attempts to steal, it takes from the bestowing spirit and thinks, “All is for me.”30
Thus, Zarathustra qualifies the bestowing virtue as arising out of a healthy selfishness that stimulates creativity and self-love, which then has a need to express itself to others. But, progressively, as Zarathustra continues in his speech on the bestowing virtue, the wisdom of the bestower begins to catch a cruel light, like the virtues of truth and courage of the warrior: “When you despise what is pleasant and the soft bed, and cannot bed down far enough away from the soft-hearted: there lies the origin of your virtue.” However, Zarathustra also distinguishes the virtue of the bestower from that of the warrior: “When you are elevated above praise and blame, and your will would command all things, as the will of a lover: there lies the origin of your virtue.”31
In the case of his virtue, the bestower appears to be removed from relationships of competition (or at minimum, he is not invested in competitive relationships); although he may seek out inspiration from others and continue to strive toward greatness, he does not suffer from the same degree of envy or operate in the realm of agon. The bestower assists others in self-revelation indirectly in that he communicates allegorically (like the teachings of a sage), but also directly through commanding himself and others (not striving against or obeying others like the warrior). Thus, the bestower is distinguished from the warrior in that he has come to a place of self-mastery, because his inner life is not one of warring wills and strife, but has rather a master drive, set into a firm trajectory.32
With his words on power, the first section of “On the Bestowing Virtue” ends and Zarathustra becomes silent. Now he turns to his companions and speaks to them almost in a sentimental manner, imploring them to “Stay true to the earth” and repeats some of his earlier warnings against other-worldliness and escapism.33 He underlines the import of seeking out knowledge and understanding and of healing oneself so that one can help to heal others. He speaks ambiguously of a new earth and a “new hope” and then draws himself into silence again, this time with greater pause.
When he speaks again, it is for the last time in the First Part and it is to bid farewell to his disciples. He announces that he goes into solitude and tells his disciples that they should do so also. His comportment shifts dramatically here, and we see an expression of the bestowing virtue that Zarathustra has not yet performed in his behavior with his disciples. Zarathustra names it later in the Second Part when he states that the most difficult task as a bestower is, “out of love to close the open hand and to preserve one’s modesty, as a bestower.”34 Zarathustra leaves his disciple-friends and offers them a cruel expression of his love for them on his way out.
Zarathustra speaks provocatively to his followers, so that they will be forced to consider their own thoughts, not only the thoughts of Zarathustra. He recognizes that his disciples have become too loyal; Zarathustra is weary of his teachings being taken as dogma. As such he exclaims, “go away from me and guard yourself against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you.”35 Zarathustra is attempting to foster resistance in his companions, so that they will want to question the teaching of Zarathustra and consider the worth of it for themselves. Although Zarathustra recognizes a fraternity between himself and his companions, and even foresees a future community between them, he finds it imperative that they come to him from their own direction, not as “believers” of “Zarathustra.” Thus, Zarathustra’s abandonment is also a strategy of offering, an expression of love that is hurtful to both himself and his companions, yet concurrently in the interest of a higher goal: to facilitate overcoming. Behind Zarathustra, we can hear Nietzsche cautioning us not to become so enmeshed in the world of Zarathustra and the teachings of self-overcoming therein, that we forget ourselves: who we are and aim to be.
In what sense Zarathustra fully enacts or exemplifies the bestowing virtue is a matter of debate. It is questionable whether he (or Nietzsche as the originator of such a gift) is able to accomplish its most challenging tasks: to give without any calculated benefit. It seems that, if we consider Zarathustra as a literary gift of friendship to future philosophers from Nietzsche, or Zarathustra as himself (and his teachings) a performativity expression, or literary example of the bestowing virtue, one that concurrently requests dialectical involvement from the reader, then we are left with a number of questions. For instance, if Nietzsche is a provocative writer and Zarathustra himself is made to act to incite reaction, to both “wound and delight” the reader into self-questioning and self-overcoming, how can we claim that Zarathustra acts (or is made to act) without calculated benefit? If part of Zarathustra’s generosity involves the teachings of eternal recurrence, amor fati and the Overhuman, is there not some expectation that his disciples, or his posthumous friends will learn, or engage with these teachings in a fashion that would be deemed noble by Nietzsche? It seems very problematic to make an offering that claims to lay the foundations for a new way of life, a “great noon,” and a community of free spirits, yet concurrently to state that this gift requests no reciprocity from those who acquire it. Perhaps this is the case. However, I would argue that, when Zarathustra turns away from those that he loves and maintains his modesty as a bestower, he enacts the bestowing virtue in exactly this sense, namely, without expectation of return. After realizing he has nothing left to give, and he is in need of solitude to renew himself, Zarathustra departs. In this moment, Nietzsche’s concept of friendship emerges as the radical expression of a healthy selfishness that overflows, yet does not request a return: a friendship that knows suffering, solitude, and agonistic relationships to be its most fruitful therapies.
In his relationships with his disciples and companions, Zarathustra ventures to act as both an agonistic and a bestowing friend, in order to facilitate them into self-questioning and self-overcoming. Perhaps his companions do not succeed in these tasks, but nevertheless we can recognize that through the speeches of Zarathustra, friendship is proposed as a meeting place from which modern individuals can attempt to, as Horst Hutter writes, “transcend their slavishness in a lasting manner.”36 In order to overcome weakness of will, narcissism, and self-delusion, free spirits need others of like minds, enemy-friends to strive against. Thus, what is suggested is a seeking out of companions who have shared goals: friends to come together for growth and then leave, once the period of growth is over (see the star friendship of GS 279; KSA 3, 523). It is in the same sense that Nietzsche wants us to read his text of Zarathustra as a book for self-overcoming: to accept it as a cruel offering of friendship, a bestowing which, through its teachings, offers us an alternate approach to relating to both ourselves and to the other.
Notes and references
1 “Solitude [die Einsamkeit] has seven skins; nothing penetrates them anymore. One comes to men, one greets friends—more desolation, no eyes offer a greeting. At best, a kind of revolt. Such revolts I experienced, very different in degree but from almost everybody that was close to me. It seems nothing offends more deeply than suddenly letting others feel a distance, those noble natures who do not know how to live without reverence are rare.” EH TSZ 5; KSA 6, 342.
2 GS 382 and EH TSZ 2; KSA 3, 635 and KSA 6, 337.
3 See HAH 225; KSA 2, 189–90 for a description of the free spirit.
4 TSZ I: 14; KSA 4, 72.
5 TSZ I: 16; KSA 4, 77.
6 Ibid.; KSA 4, 78.
7 “The capacity for and the duty of, long gratitude and long revenge—both only among one’s peers [Gleichen]—refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necessity for having enemies (as it were, as drainage ditches for the affects of envy, quarrelsomeness, exuberance—at bottom, in order to be capable of being good friends): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality which, as suggested, is not the morality of ‘modern ideas’ and therefore is hard to empathize with today, also hard to dig up and uncover.” BGE 260; KSA 5, 211.
8 TSZ II: 1; KSA 4, 107–8.
9 BGE 26 and 260; KSA 5, 44 and 211.
10 Nietzsche writes that your friend’s face “is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror.” TSZ I: 14; KSA 4, 72.
11 TSZ 1: 10; KSA 4, 58–60.
12 TSZ 1: 10; KSA 4, 60.
13 Ibid.; KSA 4, 58.
14 In TSZ I: 1 Zarathustra discusses the three transformations of the spirit that come to structure the process of self-overcoming that he teaches as well as his own development during the course of his journey (KSA 4, 29–31).
15 For a detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s concept of the self as a “dividual,” or a multiplicity of divides selves, see Horst Hutter Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 23: “Being human thus means to be alienated from a part of oneself, to be dividual and to bear the inevitable suffering entailed by self-division.”
16 “‘One person is always too many around me’—thus thinks the solitary. ‘Always one times one—that yields in the long run two!’ I and Me are always too zealous in conversation: how could it be endured if there were no friend? For the solitary the friend is always the third one: the third one is the cork that prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depths. Ah, there are too many depths for all solitaries. Therefore they long so much for a friend and for his height.” TSZ I: 14; KSA 4, 71.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.; KSA 4, 71–2.
19 Ibid.; KSA 4, 72.
20 Nietzsche speaks of the necessity of hiding and masking oneself repeatedly. One such instance is in BGE 40; KSA 5, 57–8.
21 TSZ I: 14; KSA 4, 72.
22 Ibid.
23 “May your compassion be a divining: that you might first know whether your friend wants compassion. Perhaps he loves in you the unbroken eye and glance of eternity. May compassion for the friend conceal itself under a hard shell; you shall lose a tooth biting on it. Thus will it have its subtlety and sweetness. Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine for your friend? Many a one is unable to loosen his own chains and yet he is a redeemer for his friend.” Ibid.
24 He foreshadows the bestower in Chapter 10 as the “saint of understanding” but does not explain: “And if you cannot be saints of understanding, then at least be for me its warriors.” TSZ I: 10; KSA 4, 58.
25 “I teach you the friend and his overfull heart. But one must know how to be a sponge if one would be loved by hearts that are overfull.” TSZ I: 16; KSA 4, 78. See also TSZ II: 3; KSA 4, 113–16.
26 “May the future and the farthest be the cause of your today: in your friend shall you love the Overhuman as your own cause.” TSZ I: 16; KSA 4, 78. The differences between the warrior and bestowing friend are as follows: whereas the warrior friendship consists of a striving between peers and resembles the star friendship of The Gay Science, 279, the bestowing friend of the “overfull heart” seems to be already operating from a place of height where he must look below himself to find friendship. There are a number of comments from Zarathustra that suggest the friend cannot have the same significance for the bestower as the warrior: 1. the bestower gives to his “friend” without seeking reciprocity (TSZ I: 22:1; KSA 4, 97–8 and TSZ II: 5; KSA 4, 120–3); 2. the bestower has a greater sense of wisdom and strength than those who receive from him, and for this reason it is questionable whether he can accept those he gives to as his peers and thus his friends.
27 See TSZ II: 3; KSA 4, 114–16.
28 TSZ I: 22: 1; KSA 4, 97.
29 “‘This is your thirst, to become sacrifices and bestowals yourselves: and therefore you thirst to pile up all riches in your souls. ‘Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to bestow.’ ‘You compel all things towards you and into you, that they may flow back out of your wells as gifts of your love. Verily, a predator of all values must such a bestowing love become; but whole and holy do I call such selfishness.’” Ibid; KSA 4, 98.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid; KSA 4, 99.
32 “‘When you are willers of one will, and this turning of all need is for you called necessity: there lies the origin of your virtue. ‘Power it is, this new virtue; a ruling thought it is, and around it a clever soul: a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge.’” Ibid.
33 TSZ I: 22: 2; KSA 4, 99–101.
34 TSZ II: 1; KSA 4, 105.
35 TSZ I: 22: 3; KSA 4, 68.
36 Hutter, p. 76.
Selected bibliography
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Allison, David B. Reading the New Nietzsche. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.
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Benson, Bruce Ellis. Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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