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The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 45, Issue 2, Summer 2014,

pp. 134-146 (Article)
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v045/45.2.nehamas.html

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Nietzsche, Drives, Selves, and Leonard Bernstein:

A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin
Alexander Nehamas
Abstract: In response to criticisms advanced by Christopher Janaway and
Robert Pippin, I offer a rudimentary account of Nietzsches drives. They are
not mysterious: they stand for the different sets of motives, often in conflict, with
which we are all faced. The strongest among them speak with the voice of the
subject and try to get the rest to follow their lead. Such subjugation, whether
within one or between different persons (the will to power), often results not in
the others destruction but in its improvement. Moreover, no drives are immune
to change. Nietzsche likens their unification, which results in ones becoming
an individual, to the unity of works of art. Aesthetic values being essentially
social, unification depends not just on its agent but also on its reception by an
audience. I end by arguing that the eternal recurrence forbids our imagining
that our life could ever have been different in any significant respect.
Keywords: drives, self, will to power, individual

urs is a discipline in which agreement is often a form of discourtesy, and

so I must thank Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin for doing me the
courtesy of disagreeing with several issues in my book, most of which I will not
be able to discuss here. Both are kind and generous friends, which is why they
both begin by saying some very nice things about Nietzsche: Life as Literature.1
Or are they? Yes, they are, but that is not to say they do so simply because they
are kind and generous. Mindful of Pippins understanding of Hegel on the importance of a social and cultural context for meaningful human action, I would say
that their attitude is channeled through the almost ironclad social practiceor
conventionthat governs the philosophical symposium: you begin by saying
how great, insightful, and significant the book is and, having said that, you go
on to criticize it.
The laws that conventions impose are, well, conventionalwe might say,
capriciousand sometimes stiflingwe might say, tyrannical. Dave
Hickey, for example, recalls how the liberating rule, Its OK to drip paint,
which Jackson Pollock established through his later paintings, was soon

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2014.

Copyright 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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transformed into the repressive, Its bad not to drip.2 And yet, as Nietzsche
insists, the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom,
subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or
in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has
developed only owing to the tyranny of such capricious laws (BGE 188).3
We must not imagine Janaway and Pippin on one side and the convention they
both followed on the other, deliberating about whether to begin with something
nice. I know that doing so came naturally to them as the obvious thing to do.
And since the probability is by no means small that precisely this [tyranny of
such capricious laws] is nature and natural (BGE 188), the convention, it
seems, has become part of their nature: it is a (small) part of what they have
becomebut not less so than their collegial kindness, which is no less natural
because it depends on the same convention.
Someone else, however, less committed to conventions of propriety, might
have had to struggle in order to decide how to proceed: Didnt Nehamas, after
all, carelessly truncate Nietzsches texts when it suited him, saddle us with a
trendy, poststructuralist and anachronistic Nietzsche? Why be nice? Such a
fictional commentator would have been faced with a choice between honesty
(or should I say cruelty [BGE 230]) and kindness and would have had to opt
for one or the other.
Nietzsche calls things like kindness and honesty drives. They are two among
a group of relatively enduring dispositions, as Janaway puts it, to behave
in certain ways, which are not within the full rational control of the agent
(11112), the agent being, he suggests (somewhat tentatively), a composite of
drives (113). But since, as all three of us agree, Nietzsche thinks of the self as
an achievement that depends on unifying and harmonizing these drives, we must
ask, with Pippin, Who does the achieving? [If] being a subject is a matter of being
subject to, rather than a subject of, dominant . . . drives, which group, arise and
subside as something like . . . subject-less events . . . any unity (subordination
of counter instincts and drives) would be in effect something that contingently
happens, not so much something I could be said to do or achieve (127). Who,
in my description of my two commentators, is the person to whom kindness has
become second nature? And who is the fictional person who vacillates between
cruelty and kindness and finally chooses the first over the second?
My answer to such questions in Life as Literature, I have realized, was inconsistent. Sometimes, I took the person, the self, the subject to be simply a group
of drives and affects, experiences, and actions. Sometimes I took it to be an
independent agent, capable of distancing itself from all its drives and affects and
of inspecting them, so to speak, from above. I take it that the three of us agree
that Nietzsches rejection of a subject that is beyond or behind its deeds,
a neutral substratum that can choose between strength and weakness, good
and evil, his insistence that the doer is a fiction added to the deed: the deed

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136 Alexander Nehamas

is everything (GM I:13) suggests that he rejects the notion of such a subject.
So, among other things, does his contempt for the related idea of freedom in
the superlative metaphysical sense (BGE 21), which he actually considers an
invention of the slave revolt in morality. But then, if I am nothing but my drives
and affects, if there is not an additional subject to which they all belong, why do
they belong together at all? How can they be my drives in the first place, rather
than subject-less events? Do drives have drives of their own?
In BGE 19, Nietzsche, in a Platonist (or anti-Platonist) mood, offers a political metaphor for the self. It is, he writes, a structure of many under-wills or
undersouls: Leffet cest moi: what happens here is what happens in every
well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. And in my book I wrote,
Dominant habits and traits, as long as they are dominant, assume the role of the
subject; in terms of our metaphor, they assume the role of the leader. It is such
traits that speak with the voice of the self when they are manifested in action.4
In other words, it is the traits that are dominant, whichever they are and so long
as they are dominant, that assume the role of the subject and say I.
That may sound mysteriousbut it is not. It is exactly what Dave Hickey,
again, was driving at when, referring to the saga of [Susan] Sontags
purported struggle with lesbianism, he wrote that it was really a struggle
between Sontags lesbianism and her ambition.5 In Hickeys terms, Sontags
lesbianism had to accommodate itself to her ambitions demands; in ours, her
ambition, which was to be not a Lesbian author but simply an author, finally
dominated her lesbianism: it spoke and led to action more often. We must take
care here, heeding Nietzsches own warnings, not to be misled by the structureof
language into thinking that Sontags ambition refers to two thingsSontag
on the one hand and her ambition on the other: the phrase is equivalent to
the ambitious Sontag. In addition to the ambitious and the lesbian Sontag, there
are several others: the hip Sontag, the imperious Sontag, the activist Sontag,
and who knows how many more: these are, precisely, the undersouls to which
Nietzsche referred. Each one of them, provided it gains the ascendancy at some
point, speaks with the voice of Sontag herself, like the governing class that
identifies itself with the commonwealth of which it is in charge.
We must still ask how we came to take them all to belong to Sontag in the
first place, and here I will revert to the rudimentary answer I gave in Life as
Literature, fortified now by having noticed that in this passage it is the body
that Nietzsche describes as a social structure composed of many souls: It is
because these undersouls are struggling for control of a single body, whose
identity is generated by the unity of its basic needs (drives), that provides
the common ground where these struggles occur in the first place and for whose
control they are fought.
It was, then, Janaways and Pippins kindness that spoke with the voice of
Janaway and Pippin: their kindness (at least within this particular, professional

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A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin 137

context) has become, in Nietzsches sense, instinctive. Neither one had to force
himself to express it; it is part of, as we say, their naturethough we must
keep in mind Nietzsches view that every first nature was once a second nature
and that every victorious second nature will become a first (HL 3). But when
it comes to my fictional case, which involves a vacillation between kindness
and honesty, the question who exactly it is who vacillates becomes quite urgent.
Here it really seems as if there is a third participant in, or perhaps an observer
of, the conflict. And indeed there is, but it is a participant of the right sort: not a
subject distinct from all its features, as the moral subject, privy to freedom in
the superlative metaphysical sense is supposed to be, but some other drive that
is part of that hypothetical person: it could be, for example, that persons will
to truth. And who this person turns out to bekind or honestwill depend on
the relative strength of the two conflicting drives, a strength manifested in great
part in the other drives that each is capable of mustering in its traincaution
perhaps on the side of kindness, the urge to appear independent and the will to
truth on the side of honesty.
It is, then, always some drive or other (or some group of drives or other) that
speaks with the voice of the self. And although I know that what I have said
so far is terribly sketchy and incomplete, I want to ask whether some of these
drives are in one way or another more basic than others. Janaway thinks so, and
argues that I too am committed to such a view. He quotes a passage from Life
as Literature to the effect that the body (a point I also made above) provides us
with a single object that the various drives that constitute a person are aiming
to control, and infers from it that there is at least a real, relatively persisting,
dispositional bedrock to the self that can submit or resist unification (112). My
problem here is that this statement attributes to the self something that is both
a bedrock and a relatively persisting set of dispositions. But it cannot be
both. A bedrock, like a foundation, cannot change without toppling the edifice
that is built upon it: it is, so to speak, permanently unchanging. By contrast, to
say that someor even manyof our drives are relatively persisting is to
say no more than that we cannot change ourselves in every respect at any one
time, not that radicalor even completechange is impossible over a longer
period. I am perfectly willing to agree that some of our drives persist longer
than others, but I see no reason to go so far as to believe that a group of such
drives is forever given.6
Janaway quotes BGE 225 in order to support his view: In human beings,
creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker,
hammer-hardness, spectator divinity and seventh day:do you understand this
contrast? (BGE 225) But what Nietzsche writes here is perfectly compatible
with thinking of the creature part of our nature as the relatively persisting
dispositions with which, at any time, we are faced. Nothing here implies that
these dispositions are unchangeable or even that they are the only material on

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138 Alexander Nehamas

which the creator can impose form. I agree that, at any time, there is a group
of drives that provides the creature that another group of drives, the creator
in man, must work on and unify. But these need not be the same dispositions
throughout, and which among them, in particular, is the creature and which is
the creator can be determined only after they have reached an accommodation,
depending on which drives have gained the upper handan accommodation
that may itself come to change with time.
Janaway then cites GS 290, where Nietzsche writes of characters who survey
all the strengths and weaknesses their nature has to offer. Having asked what
that nature is, he answers that it is something that metaphorically comes in
masses and pieces, and that can be amenable to or resist shaping. It seems to be
something that one is prior to the acts of styling, forming and subduing that may
be performed upon it. Hence ones nature here is a relatively enduring character
rather than a set of episodic occurrences such as experiences and actions (111).
I find nothing wrong with this statement, precisely because it too refers only to
features that are only relatively enduring and not in principle unchangeable.
I also agree that there must be some material to be shaped before the shaping
begins and constituting what one is prior to its being shaped and formed in
the effort, as Nietzsche puts it, to give style to ones character. But the fact that
some drives come first does not imply that they are also basic in the sense that
they can never change. It makes perfect sense to think that we receive a relatively haphazardmotley [bunt]set of drives, attitudes, and values from our
parents, peers, and pedagogues and that some of them are among the first that
come to receive shape, form and style. And although the creature part of our
nature may consist of such drives, so does the creator within us: where else
could it have come from? It is true that Nietzsche writes that a philosophers
morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he iswhich means in what
order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to one another
(BGE 6). But this too says nothing about a bedrock of drivesin fact, it
suggests the opposite: who a philosopher is is something that one becomes, not
something one is from the day one is born.7
But how do the drives accommodate each other? How do the unity and
harmony that stylization requires come about? Is it simply a matter of the sheer
strengthforce or violenceof the drives that acquire the voice of the commonwealth or is it the result of a process of greater complexity? Is its ultimate
end the drives unificationa real peace treaty, as Pippin wants, and not
simply a truce, as he suspectsassuming that it is not an all-out civil war?
If unification is, in fact, the end of this process, by what standards are we to
interpret and evaluate it? And, if unification is reached, is it possible to imagine
another life for such a unified character?
Some time ago, I happened to watch tapes of Leonard Bernstein rehearsing, with different orchestras, Stravinskys Rite of Spring, Elgars Enigma
Variations, and several works by Mahler. Throughout, Bernstein explains,

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A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin 139

sings, cajoles, praises, repeats, shouts, and whispers until he gets the
orchestra to sound just as he wants it to sound. In one sense, he imposes
his will upon them and, as Nietzsche might have put it, turns the musicians
into instruments of his own, subordinating them to his vision of the music.
When he succeeds, the orchestra plays with one voice and the musicians,
having submitted to him, are themselves at their very best. Far from having been oppressed, they have been given the opportunity to sound about
as good as they possibly can: they are using their abilities to their fullest
extent. Neither pure persuasion nor naked force, Bernsteins behavior struck
me as the perfect model for the exercise of the will to power between
but also withinindividuals. There is, of course, something deeply egoistic
about Bernsteins behavior: it is his sound that the orchestra produces. But
it is the sort of egoism that results in everyone becoming better than they
were beforeand not just the musicians: Bernstein himself benefits from
their playing.
Of course, Bernsteins authority in these cases is unquestioned. But this was
not always so. On April 6, 1962, before conducting Brahmss Piano Concerto
in D-minor with Glenn Gould and the New York Philharmonic, he confessed
to the audience that he had a series of profound disagreements with Gould.
Nevertheless, he realized that Goulds interpretation was a sustainable version
of the work by a serious artist and, yielding to Gould, he told them that he would
conduct the music as his soloist wanted, adding: But the age old question still
remains: In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor? The
answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the
people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance.8 Here, then, we
have an instance of the struggle that Nietzsche locates both in our relations with
others and in our souls. In this case, the struggle ended in at least a temporary
accommodation: the orchestra spoke again with a single voice, though that time
the voice was Goulds and not Bernsteins.
In a slightly different context, Andrew Huddleston makes a similar point
through the building of an immense cathedralit could be St. Pauls in London
or the Duomo in Florence. Most of the workers in such a project engage in
heavy and exhausting labor and are essential to its success, but the credit goes
to Christopher Wren or Brunelleschi: it is their vision that the workers made a
reality. In the process, though, they exercised their abilities in pursuit of a great
accomplishment and, one could argue, lived a better and more meaningful life.9
These examples seem to me to fit well with a whole family of Nietzsches
views, a characteristic example of which we find in GS 290: When the work of
giving style to ones character is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint
of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this
taste is good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a
single taste! In this way, we can see that speaking with a single voicethe

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140 Alexander Nehamas

unified voice of the drivesis what Nietzsche is after. An individual is like

an orchestra whose conductor is not already appointed and whose musicians
compete for the position, like a society whose leadership is in question. Often,
as different musicians succeed one another without much rhyme or reason, what
we have is fragmentation and inconsistency. But in some cases these roles are
occupied by forces that are strong enough to persist over time and organize the
rest according to their own plans and purposes. When that happens, the group
of drives, like a commonwealth, is well-constructed and happy (BGE 19) and
its rulers speak for it: its voice is, in fact, the voice of its rulers.
In Life as Literature, I noted an uncanny parallel between Nietzsches and
Platos political metaphors for the self; what I did not notice at the time was that
both were equally repelled by tyranny. Plato thinks of the tyrant as someone
in whom lots of terrible appetites sprout up day and night, tortured by the
violent crowd of appetites that have nested within him.10 But Nietzsche, too,
has nothing good to say about harboring in oneself all the bad vices and
appetites, which he connects primarily with decadence.11 But tyranny is very
much a part of his picture: The impulses want to play the tyrant, he writes,
and mentions one solution to the problem: One must invent a counter-tyrant
who is stronger (TI Socrates 9). But although, like Plato, he connects this
with the anarchy of instincts, he finds such anarchy not in Platos tyrannical character but, ironically, in Socrates himself, who turned reason into that
counter-tyrant, and took his (and everyones) goal to be rationality at any
price (TI Socrates 11).
The overvaluation of reason, though, is to decadence what the scientific
overvaluation of truth is to the religious picture of the world according to GM:
not a way to extricate oneself from religion or the tyranny of decadence but a
new expression of it, perpetuating it in a new guise (GM III:2327). In a healthy
soul, there is no need for tyranny, and so no need for the brute force with which
Nietzsche imagines Socrates trying to control his impulses. It is one thing to
try to outdo your opponents, another to convert them to your cause, and yet
another to try to destroy them: you cannot simply silence or eliminate the string
section if it proves hard to make them sound as you want. I agree with Pippin
that Nietzsches heroesPippin mentions Shakespeare and Goethe, and I would
add Julius Caesarcontained . . . contradictions and evaluations that they did
not reconcile but in some way mastered (124), but this is not the mastery
that Nietzsche has in mind when, in the same section of Twilight of the Idols, he
asks, How did Socrates become master over himself ? We should rather think
of mastery on the model the conductor, who constantly has to keep the musicians within the constraints of his interpretation: In summa: domination of the
passions, not their weakening or extirpation!The greater the dominating
power of a will, the more freedom may the passions be allowed. The great
man is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet
greater power that knows how to press those magnificent monsters into service
(KSA 12:9[139]).12

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As with orchestras, so with individuals: the standards for evaluating them are
aesthetic. Pippin takes me to task on that account, but I think he understands
the aesthetic more narrowly than Nietzsche and I do and underestimates the
importance Nietzsche assigns to it: I want to learn more and more how to see
as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall become one of those who
make things beautiful (GS 276). Aesthetic values are not found only in the
arts, as Pippin claims, nor is beauty the same as looking or sounding good
which may be what Pippin has in mind when he writes of a distinctly aesthetic
register or purely aesthetic values (122). I think that beauty, which can be
found in every aspect of life, is essentially connected with individuality, with
distinction, with standing out among things and turning them into mere background.13 It is not a purely aesthetic quality, as aesthetic qualities have so far
been understood; that is, it is not confined to the arts and it is not exhausted by
the tired lists of elegance, power, and depth that we so often find in our
aesthetics textbooks. The aesthetic depends not on a special range of features
but on a particular instance of any sort of feature whatsoever: an instance that
is shared only by things that are indiscernible from the object that the feature
qualifies in that manner.14
So understood, beauty can perfectly well include the disruptive, the sublime, and the intoxicating (122), which Pippin rightly wants to place among
Nietzsches values. The values of aesthetics depend on the differences between
people and things, on what distinguishes one from another, features that no two
distinct objects can both possess.15 In this respect, aesthetic values contrast with
the values of morality, which presuppose essential similarities among people
features we have in common with everyone else and through which we are joined
to one another. But there can be no difference of the sort that beauty requires
without identity: nothing can be different from other things unless it has its
own discernible structurean organization, a coherence, and a unity that give
its possessor its own distinct character within the range of the many things to
which in other relevant respects it is like. That unity, moreover, cannot be the
outcome of the violent suppression of conflicting drivesthe instincts turned
against each other (TI Socrates 9)through their subordination to reason,
which, according to Nietzsche, Socrates resorted to in order to control them. It
requires acknowledging and making use of the complexity Nietzsche so often
praises in his heroes: the ambition of the grand style is to become master of the
chaos one is; to compel ones chaos to become form: to become logical, simple,
unambiguous, mathematics, law (KSA 13:14[61]).16 But, Nietzsche insists,
neither Socrates nor the Christian church were ever able to accommodate that
thought: The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice,
its cure, is castratism. It never asks: How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify
a craving? It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation. But,
he writes, We no longer admire dentists who pluck out teeth so that they will
not hurt any more (TI Morality 1). No wonder Nietzsche called Christianity
Platonism for the people (BGE P).

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142 Alexander Nehamas

Aesthetic values are not purely objective properties of things, which is why
different people find beauty in such different places. But that does not make
them subjective. Beauty requires an audience who will not recognize it unless
it conforms to some of the accepted conventions that characterize it asin its
originality and distinctionit flouts others at the same time. The social aspect
of beautythat it must be recognizable by some audiencemay give us a way
to attribute to Nietzsche the advantages Pippin attributes to Hegelsand only
to Hegelshistoricized social practice view of . . . practical reason (124).
There is always a reason why things are as they are when they form part of a
unified wholean aesthetic reason, in the broad sense I just introduced. But, as
we said, aesthetic features are based on our differences rather than our similarities and what is aesthetic depends not only on the object it qualifies but also on
those who interact with it. As a result, no such reason can be generalized in a
way that applies universally, guaranteeing in some way that whatever manifests
a similar structure will also be beautiful. There are no rules by following which
one can create or become something beautiful, both new and worthy of love or
admiration. To try to create beauty by following any sort of general rules can
lead only to a variation on something that has already been doneto something
that is, at best, mediocre.
Its reliance on such rules, which Nietzsche (rightly or wrongly) finds essential to morality, is one of the reasons Nietzsche rejects it (BGE 43). It is also
why he writes that when they are at their best, at the moment of inspiration,
artists (to whom, I believe, he gives much greater credit that Pippin allows)
follow laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination [their
particularity] defy all formulation through concepts (BGE 188). To formulate
those laws through concepts in this context would be to state them in such a way
they could apply to a wide variety of different cases, accessible to anyone who
plans to create something beautiful. But that is impossible. As Aaron Ridley has
written, these rules cannot be formulated that way because they are internal to
the project, conditions that cannot . . . be non-trivially specified in advance and
independently of some particular way of meeting them.17 Anyone, for example,
who determines the laws that Picasso followed in creating his analytical cubist
works would at the very best create nothing but an imitation of Picassos style,
notunless Picassos rules are also modified and transcendeda beautiful
work in its own right.
A central view of mine, with which both Janaway and Pippin have serious
problems, is that the unity of self Nietzsche praises is to be understood on the
model of the narrative unity of a literary work or any successful work of art. But
I think that at least some of their problems stem from a misunderstanding for
which, I must confess, I am responsible. By using Prousts Marcel and Nietzsche
himself as exemplaryas figures who actually narrated their life for us
I gave the impression that unity is accomplished through and in the narration of

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A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin 143

ones life. Janaway denies that the unified representation of self can be
identified with any state in which my drives stand to one another. Those
states . . . are outside the full conscious control of the agent, can remain unknown
to the agent, and can pertain independently of any intentional attitude-taking
towards them on the part of the agent (112). But that is not the case. Unity of
self is inferred from unity of narrationbetter, from the unity of an i nterpretation
that attributes such unity to a lifes workbut that interpretation need not (and
probably could not) be only the work of the agent: it requires others as well,
either as co-interpreters or at least as appreciators and evaluators. And that
introduces again the social dimensions of these projects that Pippin rightly does
not want us to forget.
There is another aspect to Janaways view. He claims that Nietzsche seems to
have two attitudes toward unification. One envisages an agent who effects itthat
is what he says I am committed to. But another does not: it is not an agency but
a chance picture. That is why, according to Janaway, Nietzsche calls exceptionally powerful individuals strokes of luck among humans (GM III:14) and
why he believes that becoming who you are presupposes that you do not have
the slightest idea what you are (EH Clever 9) (115). But powerful individuals
are not strokes of luck because they unified themselves by chance; luck does not
refer to the process by which they became themselves but to the luck of humanity
(der Mensch), which manages to include such individuals despite the efforts of
the ascetic priest to eliminate them. As to becoming who you are not requiring
having the slightest idea of what you are, I have offered an interpretation of
the passage that accounts for that statement without implying that the process, if
it occurs at all, occurs at an unconscious level for which one is not responsible.18
I must now say a few words about the eternal recurrence, the issue with which
my work on Nietzsche began. I agree with Janaway that superessentialism is
a problematic view, though I think Nietzsche held something close to it. But the
eternal recurrence, as I suggested in Life as Literature, can also be understood,
more weakly and more reasonably, as a view to the effect that what I am to
imagine recurring is whatever I find significant in my life. Insignificant events
are, precisely, events whose occurrence does not make a difference. Why, then,
would I want such events not to be there? Why would I even think of them in
the first place as I looked over my life? By contrast, significant events are those
that do make a differenceevents that have wide implications for the rest of
my life and connections to many of its other constituents. Those are the events
that I would want (or not want) to recur if I were to live again.
Janaway disagrees with my view that a life that was at least in its significant
respects different from mine would not be my own. His own interpretation is
that all the thought of the eternal recurrence requires is that I do not want any
unactualized possible life more than my own actual life. Nietzsche could face
the thought of the eternal recurrence with the attitude I could have had a life

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144 Alexander Nehamas

free of chronic debilitating headachesbut my actual life is the one I would

crave again. . . . It is because there obtain so many better possibilities of lives
for me, Janaway explains, that the temptation not to want my actual life is
so strong (109). There is something in this view, since the eternal recurrence
always involves affirming our actual life. But why would Nietzsche prefer his
actual life to a life that was in every other respect identical with his but without
his debilitating headaches? If that is a brute fact, something that those who can
affirm the eternal recurrence simply do, their attitude would be simply irrational:
they would prefer their painful life without any reason at all.
Why, though, would a life free of migraines represent a better possibility for
Nietzsche? Well, other things being equalif the absence of pain were its only
salient featureit might. But things are never equal in this context. Nietzsches
migraines cannot be what the thought of the eternal recurrence presupposes and,
more important, one of his reasons for affirming his actual life in all its detail.
That is what Nietzsche is driving at when, in EH he writes: In the midst of the
torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by
laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialecticians clarity par excellence
and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier
circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough (EH
Wise 1). His idea is that his migraines, which debilitated him every few days,
were part of the reason he approached philosophy as he did, through short bursts
of thought and writing rather than the long and patient treatment that characterizes most philosophical treatises. He makes a similar point in GS: I approach
deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That
one does not go to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without
experience. The freezing cold makes one swift (GS 381).
There is no reason to think that it makes sense to imagine Nietzsche without
his headaches but with the works he actually did produce, and so there is
no reason to think that a life without headaches would have represented a
better possibility for him. Without the headaches, there is no way to know
whether Nietzsche would even have become a philosopher in the first place or
whether he would ever have written anything. A Nietzsche who did not write,
or even a Nietzsche who wrote and thought differentlyhow, by the way? Like
Kant? Wittgenstein? Quine?would no longer be Nietzsche. Despite appearances, this is an empty hypothesis. It is no different from thinking that simply
because a work of art or a human action could be interpreted differently, its
actual interpretation is not the only one it can receive. Perhaps. But how? And
how well? Go try.19
I realize I have addressed only a few of the issues that these two articles have
raised about Life as Literature, and both my commentators and I have ignored
the first part of the book, especially questions connected with perspectivism

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A Reply to Christopher Janaway and Robert Pippin 145

and the will to power that I now believe I was wrong about. But what can I do?
The book could certainly have been better, but if it were better then it would not
have been written by me: I wrote the best book I could. To have written a better
book, I am afraid, is a wish for the impossiblethough I can certainly hope to
write a better one in the future. Only someone else could have written a better
onefor example, Janaway, who wrote Beyond Selflessness, or Pippin, who
gave us Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy.20 And, since wishing for
future events, despite the strictures of the eternal recurrence, is still possible, I
do have one such wish: I wish I could be there for the twenty-fifth anniversaries
of their own books so that I could return the favor they have done me today by
engaging with mine, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, in such a kind
and generous manner.
Princeton University
nehamas@princeton.edu

Notes
1. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985).
2. Dave Hickey, The Heresy of Zone Defense, in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
(Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 15562.
3. For Nietzsches works in English, I use the following translations: Beyond Good and Evil,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966); Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 43699; Twilight of the
Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954),
463563; The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 60953; The Will to Power, ed.
Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968); Ecce
Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 655791.
4. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 181.
5. Dave Hickey, Una Lesbiana Enamorada! The Reverse Bowdlerization of Susan Sontag,
Harpers, December 2009, 9396, 96.
6. Later in his essay, in his criticism of Brian Leiters denial that the self can change in any
fundamental way, Janaway appears to believe that nothing about the self is in principle immune
from change. If that is his considered view, there is no disagreement between us.
7. An excellent discussion of the way in which something one becomes turns into something
one is can be found in Lanier Anderson, Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,
European Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2005): 185225.
8. Bernsteins speech can be found in several videos on YouTube; so can his rehearsals.
9. Andrew Huddleston, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton University, 2012).
10. Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 573de.
11. See TI Socrates and CW 7.
12. Translated as The Will to Power 932.
13. See my Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010).

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14. More on this in Only a Promise of Happiness, chap. 2.
15. That is in part why we can find, say, that the very same shade of yellow that contributes to
the beauty of one painting can easily destroy the beauty of another; or why, although I may love
you for your sensitivity, I will not abandon you when I meet someone whose sensitivity in some
way or another exceeds yours: it is the particular shade of yellow, as it occurs in a very specific
context, and your particular sensitivity that is in question. Again, more on this in Only a Promise
of Happiness, chap. 2.
16. Translated as The Will to Power 842. We need not worry about the word zwingen,
compel or force: it repeats Platos gesture of referring to the result of persuasion as a kind of
compulsion, as in the case of the philosopher-kings in the Republic (e.g., 519b). As Apology 29a3,
29d2, 31b5, 33c45, 36c5, and 37e6 (among other passages in this work) make clear, the verb
peithein, particularly in its passive and its negative forms, can be translated as both convince
and compel.
17. Aaron Ridley, Autonomy (unpublished manuscript, University of Southampton,
2009), 12.
18. Nietzsche, Intention, Action (unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, 2013). The
main idea is that becoming who you are is not a goal that can be pursued directlyin itself
it is empty and provides no information. One becomes who one is by accomplishing something
concrete that, when successful, constitutes who or what someone is. And that, in turn, like the
laws that artists are supposed to follow (BGE 188), cannot be formulated in concepts: it is
specific to those who succeed in becoming individualsdifferent enough from the rest of the
world to be objects of love (but, for Nietzsche, perhaps also of hatred) and admiration.
19. See Nehamas, Nietzsche, 6265.
20. Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsches Genealogy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007); and Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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