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Nietzsche and Eros

between the devil and God’s deep blue sea

The problem of the artist as actor—Jew—woman

By Babette E. Babich

Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, NYC, NY 10023, USA

The aesthetic significance of Nietzsche’s teaching of love or joy may be found in the tragic insight as the becoming which, again, in Nietzsche’s words, postulates pain. Thus it is because the erotic is consummately, irredeemably wrong feeling—gluko-pikron as the oldest song of erotic love—that a tragically erotic aesthetic necessarily avoids the focus on ‘right feeling’ so prominent in recent readings of the politics of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Against this radically wrong feeling, more than one specialist has proffered the same profoundly simplistic solution to the moral quandary underscored by Bernd Magnus as the irreducible danger of thinking Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return of the same as affirmation.(24) Nietzsche wishes to teach the will to will backward—that is amor fati. But would such an ambition be morally justifiable? Ought one, as Nietzsche seems to suggest, affirm what has been as it was exactly as it was? Strong readings of Nietzsche’s teaching of the eternal return of the same, like that of Karl Löwith or Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, or even Alexander Nehamas’s benignly exact rendering of the eternal return, tend to a universally affirmative, unreservedly positive response. Scholars like Bernd Magnus (and, more simplistically, Julian Young)(25) have perfectly analytic scruples regarding such a literal reading. The thought query that is the moralizing problem of the eternal return asks whether one ought to (without minding here about how one ever could) affirm what has been (as the test case of retrospective amor fati)? Would one have to be able to will exactly everything—great and, what was Nietzsche’s word?—unutterably small—or could one not simply limit one’s affirmation to the ‘good parts’? Young thinks it reasonable enough to dispense with a ticket fluttering to the ground in Red Square; Magnus would like to make a sharp (and politically impeccable) exception for the case or historical fact of the Holocaust.

Arguing thus in good analytic fashion—that is to say employing a philosophic interpretive style that could not be more antipathic to Nietzsche’s spirit—Magnus critiques and Young corrects Nietzsche’s (aesthetic) account to find (at least in Young’s case) a more plausible middle way. For Magnus, seeking to catch but ultimately missing Adorno, ‘post-Auschwitz,’ one may not creditably countenance the moral insensitivity of a doctrine like the eternal return of the same. Young, for his part, thinks the issue a matter of the purely aesthetic justification of suffering.(26) It is to Young’s considerable credit that he has (bothered to) read (or to pretend to have read) Schopenhauer in order to catch the full sense of the riddle Nietzsche poses here. Where Young goes wrong is where he converts Nietzsche’s joyful scientist into the unhappy Cavellian image of a properly New England Emersonian. Thus Young declares: “there is, in fact, no such suffering at all.”(27) This claim may accord with Emerson’s Brahmin blindness, but despite a Cantabridgean tendency (originating in the Cambridge in the US and disseminated by way of Pittsburgh) to read Nietzsche as a Saxon Emerson, it is foreign to Nietzsche. For the Nietzsche who observed that naming suffering illusory eliminated no part of it, suffering is much more than merely real.

For Nietzsche, as for other contemporary philosophers otherwise unrelated to him, such as Levinas and Theunissen but also such as Adorno, philosophy can hardly do better than to begin (and to end) with the problem of suffering.(28) This, yet once again, is what Karl Reinhardt in his reflection on the legacy of ancient Greece meant when he took pains to qualify Nietzsche’s conception of life (precisely contra Winckelmann and Goethe) as “disagreeable” and uncompromising. This is, once again, the very same enduring question of every theodicy, here reworked as the question of difficulty, pain, banality. In the wake of the death of God (i.e., in modern, postmodern times), it is a question Nietzsche poses not to theologians but artists. The key to Nietzsche’s thinking, early and late, is his understanding of the tragic as suffering but no less as a poetic or musical (archically Greek) understanding.

To teach the love of the world or life, love must first be learned. And learning love is not an exercise in the mindlessness of a platitude, be it the result of new age thinking or the insular postmodern academicism that seems to have so much in common with it, especially as disguised as a conservative (exactly) right, positive style of thinking. To affirm what was, to love the past, and to call it good is to see that everything of what was and is, is all necessary, equally needful, and that one is oneself not apart from but a part of, an intrinsic piece of the whole.

To love something, to call something good, to bless it or to be astonished by and grateful for its being as such, is not to teach an other than Sophoclean lesson. Joy is spoken exactly as the cruelest draught of tragic suffering, as Hölderlin reminds us with sustained amazement.(29) This does not make tragic suffering any less tragic and it is not supposed that there is ‘no’ suffering—or that suffering is an illusion. This is the unconquerable, lasting difference between Nietzsche’s Greek sensibility and Eastern sensibilities.

What is to be loved is life, as it is, as it was and as it must inevitably be in what is to come. What is to be loved is the disappointment of the ideal, star-cursed. That is, the task is to learn to love everything nearest to you. And it is that affection for what lies closest to us, in Nietzsche’s telling of the Syrian gospel, that remains hard to gain, not automatic, and not already accomplished. What Christianity’s teachers remanded to the paradisiacal heights of the after-life, Nietzsche returns to the realm that is mortal immortality: the heaven all about us. That is: immediacy and memory, that is: the spare domain between blessing and curse in the human heart.

Young, Magnus, Strong, et al., are unified in their contention that what Nietzsche wants (and that what he should want) is to teach right feeling. By contrast, what Nietzsche offers in place of merely right feeling is the affirmation of the great and of the utterably small as the kind of yes-saying or blessing shedding an aura of shining gold on even the poorest fisherman, exceeding such a spectator’s aesthetics.(30) For this and other reasons, it is ultimately fatal that Young’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of art turns out to be neither an artist’s nor (more critically) a musician’s view. And if Nietzsche advocated music as the ultimate redemption from the perception of life as error, he also distinguished between the music of the theater or mass-culture—the hysteric or melodramatic music of high society—and the heart’s music: an ingenious resonance which transforms the hearer and makes of him too a musician. This answering resonance is the esoteric key to Nietzsche’s resolution of the problem of actor, artist, and it is also key to the problem of the other as such, the problem of the Jew and the problem of woman. What is transformed is the reactive spirit, rendered, and for the first time, in artibus, echoing the song of life in its own desire.

Thus Nietzsche simply never abandons the problem of tragedy (blindness, stupidity, cursedness, injustice, extra-human pain and ordinary sorrow) as music, as art, as life. Nor may one render the tripartite division of Nietzsche’s life in four installments (as Young claims), exactly because Nietzsche always comes round again to his own beginnings. It is as mistaken to divide Nietzsche into three as it is to break him down into four parts because Nietzsche has never left his starting point. And what is more, with the poets, with Heidegger, Nietzsche claims that none of us ever do. Every advance consists in coming to own what one is, in winning and in losing the self, as Nietzsche teaches, with Pindar, with Hölderlin.(31)

It will not do to redeem Nietzsche’s ‘wrongness,’ neither the wrongness of his feeling (the erotic as royally wrong) nor the wrongness of his doctrine of amor fati. This is not only because it involves an injustice to Nietzsche’s thinking but because what is of lasting importance in his thinking turns exactly on the redemption not of right feeling or beauty but of wrong feeling and the transformative power of art in the question of “how we can make things beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not” (GS §299) as what it is that can ultimately best be learned from art. This is the meaning of what we name Nietzsche’s aesthetic gnomon as it is variously expressed: “Art is worth more than truth” (KSA 13, 522) or, “We have art so that we do not perish of the truth” (KSA 13, 500) or, as Nietzsche writes in the last of his Untimely Meditations, where Wagner’s Schopenhauerian Bayreuth is rendered beyond itself with a quintessentially and sweetly Hölderlinian insight—“Art exists so that the bow shall not break.”(32) Bent by life, alive, we are the bow, lancing forth. Nietzsche continues in this context to explain the meaning of tragedy: “The individual must be consecrated to something higher than himself . . . he must be free of the terrible anxiety which death and time evoke in the individual: for at any moment, in the briefest atom of his life’s course he may encounter something holy that endlessly outweighs all his struggle and all his distress—this is what it means to have a sense of the tragic.” Or, “There is only one hope and one guarantee for the future of humanity: it consists in his retention of the sense for the tragic” (UM, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” §4).

Yet and again it is crucial to emphasize that Nietzsche supposes that the ideal of the tragic is not simply ‘the sense of’ greater (militarily Jesuit or Protestant) glory added to one’s actions. As Nietzsche reflects on Shakespeare (and indeed Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as the quintessential morality play on ambition thereby catching an obvious riff between Wagner and Aeschylus), “Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head.”(33) In this wise, exactly embracing or pushing the tragic envelope (to use today’s metaphor) the tragic poet celebrates life’s Saturnalia: “Not so as to get rid of pity and terror . . . but beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself, the eternal joy of becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction” (TI, “What I Owe the Ancients” §5).

3. The problem of the actor-artist

The problem of the artist is yoked to the problem of art and life. Because the problem of the artist (and the problem of art) exceeds the artist—if only via the actor, Jew, diplomat, woman—more is at stake than a turn to an active, or virile, or creative aesthetics in Nietzsche’s artist’s aesthetics. More than a matter of understanding the provenance of the rare or exceptional or consummate human being—which is the nineteenth century and still ordinal vision of the artist as genius—the problem of the artist is much rather the problem of education or culture, and the problem of culture is again mass culture.(34) The political space of this problem is the theatre: a doomed place where tragedy once perished at its own hand and whose decline has been traced throughout the course of Western civilization to Wagnerian opera in Nietzsche’s day and the music video delights of our era.(35)

If Nietzsche defines the problem of the actor as “falseness with a good conscience” he does not simply excoriate deceit from the moral standpoint of truth and lie. That is, contrary to current analytic unreadings of the cogency of Nietzsche’s ‘cognitive’ claims, Nietzsche does not merely praise the lie of art as an honest lie (it is that, to be sure, but that is only the beginning). Instead where the truth itself must be justified (there is no truth as such for Nietzsche) illusion, the mask, or appearance, lays claim to much more than a negative provenance. That is, it is not because Punch and Judy declare themselves invulnerable as puppets that the violence represented is ameliorated or redeemed: Nietzsche’s philosophy of art is not a theory of cathartic, Aristotelian, or even Freudian honesty. Art, as the art of illusion, is the quintessential achievement of human intuition and only from its origins in sense perception can it move to the free invention of the imagination or of cognition. This epistemological nisus or intentionality reducing the claims of truth to the conventions of art does not suffice to make every human perspective the achievement of a poet. For the most part, the human artist is less an inspired genius than a dreaming savage, incapable of naming the dream as such, and ultimately unequal to it, even where the course of therapy (or philosophic insight) can lay claim to the dream in words: the “lying truth” as Lacan names it. “That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is” (EH, “Why I am so Clever” §4). With a word of praise for “even the blunders of life,” for its wrong turns and “wastes of time,” Nietzsche speaks of the “great sagacity” below the “surface” of consciousness itself. “One is,” Nietzsche explains, “much more of an artist than one knows” (BGE §192). The archaic pathos of Nietzsche’s reminder that “we are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be” (GS §301) suggests that precisely in the absence of such self-knowledge or consciousness of ourselves as artists, Nietzsche’s programmatic teaching is meant to recall us to ourselves.

Thus the task of Pindarian becoming is “an act of supreme coming-to-oneself” (EH, “Why I am a Destiny” §1), but that will mean that it can be won or it can be lost. One can equal oneself, becoming what one is, or one can indeed fail one’s own measure. Here we must remember the distinguishing importance of the difference between higher and lower human beings, a difference Nietzsche—anti-democratic to the core of a supremely democratic sensibility, as a very esoteric move affording the first foundational possibility for democracy as such—never failed to emphasize.

For the early Nietzsche, reflecting on truth and lie, not only are we “eternally condemned to untruth” but resistance to the truth of untruth is quintessentially human: “only the belief in an attainable truth, a trustworthy, self-confirming illusion is proper to humanity. Doesn’t mankind actually live by virtue of being progressively deceived?” (KSA 1,760).(36) Throughout his creative life, Nietzsche would maintain that art is the only way to live with the truth that it is impossible to live with the truth. The truth of art is that there is no ideal of ‘truth’ There is no truth, no justice, goodness, beauty: “The truth is ugly: we have art so that we not undone by truth [damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehn]” (KSA 13, 500).

In this way, art or illusion or indeed the actor’s ‘falseness’ will be the basic instinct of human society. In particular, we should note the genealogy of illusion or the lie is its utility for life, its indispensability for those who cannot do without it. An instinct for deception and illusion will translate to a practical prowess in seeming, and such a capacity for appearing to be what one is not will be developed by the vulgar, by the base or “lower classes who had to survive under changing pressures and coercions in deep dependency, who had to cut their coat according to the cloth, always adapting themselves again to new circumstances, . . . until they learned gradually to turn their coat with every wind” (GS §361). As it turns out, the lower classes in society resemble Jews, but I hardly need emphasize that we can substitute any ethnic other we choose and of course, and above all, we may substitute women of any social ranking whatever. The claim that “Woman is so artistic” now turns on the miracles of couture, cosmetics, and romance novels (love songs, movies, magazine advertisements). ‘Woman’ is ingenious at turning her coat with the wind of impossible fashion and the equally impossible aspiration of love.

Invoking the actor and the artist to get to woman, Nietzsche addresses every member of the excluded grouping of disenfranchised others. All coyness, flirtation, dissembling, delight in the mask, like the depths of all love, must be understood in terms of its origins. As psychologist, using the biological metaphor of pulsion, Nietzsche always traces the genealogy of need. But Nietzsche never traces a genealogy just to leave it there. Instead he uncovers the frisson at the heart of every basic need. And in this fashion, he captures the desperation of a god.

In a reading that is anything but anti-Christian, Nietzsche reads the life of Jesus as “one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love” (BGE §269 cf. §270).(37) To negotiate the inadequacy of our human ability to love and the deiform infinity of desire (Cartesian, Augustinian “will”), Nietzsche dares an extraordinary question as he asks in a strained query poised within a painful series of reflections and therewith raises the hardest of questions posed within and thus apart from all mockery or reproach, what it is that a god who comes to be the very God of love, would be condemned to know about love? What echoes in Nietzsche’s question here is a shattering sensitivity to the divine, forsaken and abandoned, a divine indigence. As the non-erotic god of love, the God of the Jews fell from nomadic jealousy and a thunder or sky-god’s vengeance to the cloying nuzzling of Christian need. Love becomes the supreme characteristic of God, thus, the need for love becomes the supreme passion, agony, or suffering of the divine. And because, this is the catch, the banal and ordinary run of humanity is anything but divine when it comes to the matter of passionate (that is the works of) love, human love has never deserved its name. Nevertheless, in the economy of seduction omni-present in eros, it will be this infinitesimal mite of human love which is to be transfigured as the measure of redemptive potential or salvation. Thus it seems—and this will be the key to Milton’s twist on the same Hesiodic eros, from Lucifer’s light to God’s deep blue sea, moving over the waters of Genesis—the somehow always embarrassing sentiment of the 1968 generation ideal that repeats in its enduring disappointment that the world needs love is a foregoing and foregone point of departure for Nietzsche and for every theogony and for every story of love.

Everyone needs love. But that is, i.e., quite literally, and just as a woman might long to be or as a child demands to be loved, and likewise every (male) porter, Nietzsche cheerfully reminds us, confidently expects an admirer. And, just as it takes a pastor’s son to teach us a lesson about Christian love—most protestations of love are like the cries of a child: demands for love. Even God’s love is such a demand, a claim for affection, exchange, or requital, a chit for being as such. The ideal of love is the ideal of just deserts: purely deserved love or ‘free’ love. The law of love is the exchange of justice as love. Thus and again: the hardest question Nietzsche asks in his book-long reflection on what can be learned from the artist (“la gaya scienza”), cuts to the core of the paradox of the banal and everyday condition of life beyond both exultation and pain: “How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?” (GS §299)

Where things are not beautiful, attractive, desirable (when what is to be loved is not the friend, but exactly what is unlovable), what Nietzsche has called The Gay Science turns to art (techne, scienza), not to sound an invective or lament but for the erotic transfiguration that is love. The lowest or bass tone is the note sounding between the antique (and not only Aristotelian) commonplace that one loves and one can only love what is lovable (with its terminus or paradigmatic idea in love of the self) and the Judeao-Christian transformation of love in the image ideal of charity (both socialist and communist, including as well the occidental ideal of the deus ex machina of the free market).(38) The Judeao-Christian qua Enlightenment qua Smith-Weberian or Protestant ideal of love is the infinite (disinterested) favour that would be the love of the world as a free choice to love everyone as one’s nearest and dearest just as one is oneself unconditionally—unaccountably—loved (and this too will be a demand for the sake of the self). It is an important complication that Nietzsche’s cruelest comments turn on the pagan indefensibility and, still more critically, the classic ignobility of such love. Any God, even the almighty, the supreme, than which no greater can be conceived, seeking a human response or answer to creation is forsaken indeed. Human beings want God’s love, but the love of God has to be genitive through and through. Raising the question of love in Christianity, Nietzsche also poses the problem of the neediness of human desire in our own lives.

The dialectic of love requires love and this virtuosity excludes even the God of love (though not the commands of eros). This is the erotic point at issue in the valence of art. The context of the satyr dance which framed the development of (served as prelude to) the play of tragedy, suggests a connection between the eros of antiquity and Christian love in the excess eroticism of ritual. Beyond Christian and Greek, beyond ancient and modern, experience affirms that in passion, particularly (if not exactly) orgiastic passion—which Nietzsche reads as the key to the Dionysian transformation of the tragic—one simply does love the world, without the least self-denial and yet without self-absorption, presuming, for the moment, a sufficient measure of ecstasy. However, in order for such a passionate moment to count as such one really has to be beside oneself. Thus the answer to Nietzsche’s transfiguring question will depend upon the intoxication of desire or the framed veiling of artistry.(39)

Base desire, however, that is to say, womanly desire, that is to say: a slave’s desire to be loved, is a semblance, feigning love, offered to win love: “it is ‘the slave’ in the blood of the vain person, a residue of the slave’s craftiness—and how much ‘slave’ is still residual in woman for example—that seeks to seduce one’s neighbor to good opinions about oneself; it is also the slave who afterwards immediately prostrates himself before these opinions as if he had not called them forth” (BGE §261). Or as Nietzsche expresses the same point more pithily if no less convolutedly, “Seducing one’s neighbor to a good opinion and afterwards believing piously in this opinion—who could equal woman in this art?—” (BGE §148). For Nietzsche, for Aristotle, as for all antiquity, including the flattering and whining Catullus and the other Latin love poets, this ambition is not merely ignoble but impotent: it can only mimic success. “Woman is so artistic.”

Contrary to the simple cult ideal of genius, the artist as such (or more evidently the fool, buffoon, or mime), is exactly not what Nietzsche would name the noble in his genealogical polemic on morality or in his reflections Beyond Good and Evil. Much rather and like his closest relative, the criminal, the artist is hard pressed for everything that he or she becomes and, at the most basic level, this includes the artist’s own survival. What is more, the womanly ideal of the artist—as this includes Nietzsche (as philosopher, poet, author), together with actors, buffoons, rhetoricians, and Jews—is always an artist who is never an artist by choice. In Nietzsche’s unmasking of the masks of seduction, a divine or daemonic and furtive neediness unifies actor, artist, Jew, and woman. The urgency of disguise is predicated upon the absence of a sure or secure place in society except on the conditions and terms of that same dissembling and assuming just such a disguise. And yet, and this can be seen in the passions to which all humans are susceptible (in sexual desire above all), one can be driven to distraction, as we say, and in such a state or compulsion, we are the mask and no one, not women, not artists, not Nietzsche himself, has ever had any choice. It is Nietzsche’s merit to have traced the appearance of the mask/artist back to the need that gave it birth.

If the mask is common, general as it must be, it is so for the success of the ruse. Thus the problem of the theater is not the lie as such. The problem of Wagner (or Schopenhauer or any one of Nietzsche’s “educators”) as the problem of the actor is not that the effect of truth must never be true. Rather the rub is the backwards and forwards vulgarity of display. The paedagogic ideal of the theater always lags behind its practice which in its turn absorbs and reflects the standards of the theater’s own public and that always remains mass culture. Thus the conceit of the artist is to imagine that the public for which he plays can be led by his art.(40)

The confusion between the artist and the “artist of one’s own ideal” is due to the inconsummate genius of the artist except and only as it achieves an exactly vulgar expression. For there is only vulgar genius. “Success has always been the greatest liar—and the ‘work’ itself is a success; the great statesmen, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the ‘work’ whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it; ‘great men’ as they are venerated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction; in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules” (BGE §269). Hence, Nietzsche writes, for higher men, for artists, “ruination is the rule.”

We cannot communicate except, Nietzsche reminds us, on the precise condition that we make ourselves common. This commonality or communion is the condition of democratic sublimation. The artist in reality (in ‘truth’) must play to the public in order to be an artist. This is the classic standard of artistic success. In this context, the artistic culture of ancient Greece is not an exception but an exception of exceptions out of sequence and to it we cannot return. Preserved within Christianity, the strength of Hebrew culture is the clue but not the answer. For this reason Nietzsche’s project was the task of a revaluation of values, values themselves once transformed. But I suspect that after two thousand years we need much more than just a new god.

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