Michael Platt
(“René Girard and Nietzsche Struggling,” Proceedings of the Nietzsche Congress of 2006, ed. Clemens Pornschlegel & Martin Stingelin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009) pp. 351-375.)
I. The French, essayist, historian, anthropologist, and professor of literature, René Girard, has had his eye on Nietzsche for a long time, all his intellectual life one would guess,[1] and has had his critical eye on fellow French Nietzscheans too.[2] Instead of running with one of Nietzsche’s ideas and ignoring the rest as epigones do, with more rivalry than gratitude, Girard has homed-in, like a hound, on the contradictions and underlying struggles in Nietzsche, and he has done so not to show Nietzsche up as the effect of causes other than himself (such as the times, milieu, nation, race, class, sex, genes, etc.), but with respect for all Nietzsche’s thinking and struggling life, and on topics deeply interesting to humanity.
These interesting things, may be restated, somewhat more broadly, for the sake of philosophy, as questions.
Why do we do what we do? Why do we desire what we desire? And how do we become who we are? Why as we grow up, do we imitate, then emulate, soon rival, and finally slay the person we admire most, all to become who we are? And, who, then, are we?
What is it about us humans that our cities, countries, civilizations, and religions seem always to begin with a violent deed —think of Romulus killing Remus, Cain killing Abel— and why is it that we, collective we, seem so ready to persecute the best of us, Dreyfus, Joan of Arc, and Christ, scapegoats all?
What is the deepest representation of our strange condition, so violent and rivalous? Is it tragedy or Christianity? Is it the Bachae, in which the intoxicating god of tragedy, Dionysus, drives mad the city, especially its women, and then the madding city tears Dionysus apart, even as he affirms suffering life, as Nietzsche claims. Or is it the Gospel representation of Christ stirring up the people, yet refusing to rule, and then suffering judicial lynching by the people? Is the Crucifixion but an instance of the same mythic pattern as Dionysus, or is it singularly different because Christ accepts suffering so as to teach us to pity the innocent victim not the mighty mob? And why was it just in our time, after Nietzsche, that a movement arose filled with hatred of the pitiful?
With these questions in mind, let us look at the three important matters that René Girard has attended to in Nietzsche.
II. Desires, Weak and Strong
First, according to Girard, it is interesting that Nietzsche more than once made proposals of marriage through another man and in both cases that man was interested in the girl, something Nietzsche either knew or suspected. In the case of Mathilde Trampedach, the man Nietzsche entrusted with his proposal, Hugo von Sender, later made his own proposal, which was accepted. In the case of the proposal to Lou von Salomé, conveyed by Paul Reé, who must have praised Lou to Nietzsche with a warmth Nietzsche surely noticed, the proposal was also rejected, and later Reé and Lou made a pair for a time (if an unusual pair, even as the “pair” Lou made with her husband Prof. Andreas was unusual too). About such proposing to women through other men, Girard claims that no theory, not Freud’s Oedipal one, not Lacan’s, not Levi-Strauss’, but only his own theory of imitative desire can give an adequate account.
For myself, never having been enchanted with the claims of Freud, Lacan, or Levi-Strauss to understand human beings very well, especially such a deep, noble, and self-knowing human being as Nietzsche, I find René Girard’s theory plausible, but not more. Its apparent basis, the conviction that all human desires lack natural goals is dubious, and even dubious on Girard’s own evidence, for Girard supposes the person moved by imitation to desire anything (a person, a mate, a thing, an achievement) is imitating someone who has an un-imitative desire for that thing — unless Girard supposes that that prime person too was prompted by imitation, but then there would be an infinite regress, each person’s desire dependent on seeing someone else’s desire, ad infinitum, with no first, unimitative, pure desire founding the series.
Surely, contra Girard, we do have good evidence that there are prime human desires, however various in their objects, however different their intensity, and however few humans are influenced solely by their own desires. And some human desires, for someone beautiful, for someone who returns one’s love, for a mate, a fellow parent, and for children —such desires so well represented in literature, especially Shakespeare and in their greatest range and elevation in Plato’s Symposium — seem rooted in nature, pretty constant and general, again however various in quality. Would Girard have us believe that a boy’s desire for a girl only arises because he saw an older boy desire one? I have heard of a father who wished to shelter his boy and so when they first saw a girl, the father told the boy “That’s a goose” but the boy merely replied “I like that goose.”
In truth, Girard’s theory of imitative desire is only a theory of weak desires, of desires that would not arise except the person notices someone else desiring something, who would lose interest if the other does, and has not the strength to express this desire except through the other.[3] There are such persons. Think of the wretched Teenagers, their anxious alertness to what others think is “cool,” but also all of us potentially, and aren’t some speakers at congresses imitating speakers they once heard? Perhaps Girard’s theory describes the souls prevalent in a weak era such as our own, but such weakness is surely inseparable from our very imitative human nature. As Aristotle might say, the child who imitates no one must grow up a beast or a god.[4]
As to Nietzsche, it ought to have been remarked by Girard that after Lou refused Nietzsche’s offer of marriage through Reé, Nietzsche renewed the proposal himself. On their long walk up Monte Sacro they may have kissed — she once said she couldn’t remember (which in woman means “yes,” as Werner Ross observes in The Most Anxious Eagle[5]), but still she rejected the offer. So Nietzsche was not always entirely “imitative” or weak. And with rival Reé, Nietzsche did not struggle at all. Nor, after it was all over, did Nietzsche struggle with Lou. Suffer he undoubtedly did, but he put it behind him, as we see in his calm respect for her in Ecce Homo.
Where Girard’s theory strikes some pay-dirt is in Nietzsche’s relations with Wagner. Here we really do have signs of a never completed struggle. A critic can hold a considerable range of judgments of something; to do justice to some rich complex thing, he will have to. Wagner is that and was that for Nietzsche, but in all the things Nietzsche says of Wagner and his music, there is extra intensity, both heated and cold. After all, as Nietzsche attested, meeting Wagner was an event in his life. Early, he almost adored Wagner; later he nearly reviled him; yet in both seasons, we can detect something of the other. Between the two, the needle never settles for long. And of the two postscripts and one epilogue to Der Fall Wagner and then of the retrospective Nietzsche Contra Wagner, that great psychologist, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, might well exclaim “The man doth epilogue too much.” And what rich pay dirt Girard’s similar observation struck when he discovered the passage in the Nachlass in which Nietzsche positively adores the Prelude to Parsifal and for its Christian answers to his abiding questions; the passage begins:
Vorspiel des P <arsifal>, grösste Wohlthat, die mir seit langem erwiesen ist. Die Macht und Strenge des Gefühls, unbeschreiblich, ich kenne nichts, was das Christenthum so in der Tiefe nähme und so scharf zum Mitgefühl brächte. Ganz erhoben and ergriffen — kein Maler hat einen so unbeschreiblich schwermüthigen and zärtlichen B l i c k gemalt wie Wagner
die Grösse Erfassen einer furchtbaren Gewissheit, aus der etwas wie Mitleiden quillt:
das Grösste Meisterstück des Erhabenen, das ich kenne, die Macht und Strenge im Erfassen einer furchtbaren Gewissheit, ein unbeschreiblicher Ausdruck von Grösse i m Mitleiden darüber; kein Maler hat einen solchen dunklen, schwermüthigen Blick gemalt wie Wagner in dem letzten Theile des Vorspiels. Auch Dante nicht, auch Lionardo nicht.
Prelude to Parsifal, the greatest gift I have received in a long time. The power and the rigor of the feeling, indescribable, I do not know anything that apprehends Christianity at such depth, and that generates compassion so powerfully. I am completely transported and moved–no painter ever managed to render as Wagner does a vision so indescribably melancholy and tender.
His greatness in apprehending a dreadful certainty, from which something like compassion emanates:
the greatest masterpiece of the sublime that I know, power and rigor in apprehending a dreadful certainty, an indescribably expression of greatness in the compassion towards it, whatever it means. No artist has ever been able to express as magnificently as Wagner does such a somber and melancholy vision as in the last part of the Prelude. Not even Dante, not even Leonardo.[6]
Like nothing in the published works, this passage exposes how profound Nietzsche’s ambivalence was to Wagner (and also to Christianity and even Christ, of which more soon). Here is Nietzsche praising what he elsewhere reviles. Nietzsche lauded the quest for truth; he presents himself as honest to a fault; and often gives the impression of holding nothing back. To be sure, he also characterizes lies as life-protecting and he lauds masks. Still, the passage, or more exactly his never saying something similar in print, mars his reputation for integrity, as his plagiarism of an essay at Schulpforta might not, being excused as a youthful offense never repeated. As Girard asserts, this is a passage that many Nietzscheans, especially French Nietzscheans, do not want to confront. Upon discovering the passage well might Girard have exulted like Hamlet “Oh my prophetic soul!” And be forgiven for scorning all the intellectuals in the rotten French court who do not want to admit that their Emperor is naked.
Perhaps Girard might not have discovered this remarkable passage without his interest in his imitative theory. Yet even if his theory be superior to all the post WWII French and German intellectuals he scorns, still is his insight into Nietzsche relation to Wagner remarkable? Is it an insight no one else makes, none of Nietzsche’s biographers, the comprehensive Curt Paul Janz or the vivacious Werner Ross? Girard even passes up evidence his theory should have pointed him to. By noting the mad postcard Nietzsche wrote to Cosima declaring his love, by remarking that Nietzsche did not write Der Fall Wagner until after Wagner was dead for five years, we may conjecture that Nietzsche hoped that upon reading Der Fall Wagner Cosima would get in touch with him.[7] Girard’s attachment to his theory, his indefatigable promotion of it, seems to have blinded him to other things in Nietzsche. Thus, even in Nietzsche’s writings on Wagner, Girard never hears how fine the criticism is. To its music he is deaf. And he never listens to the argument. Nor does Girard attend to the wonderful range of Nietzsche’s thoughts, his singular teachings, and his fine appreciations of all beautiful and noble things. And Nietzsche’s remarkable self-knowledge, including remarks on his contradictions, *do not register with Girard. There is more in Nietzsche than Girard kens of.[8]
Surely the man who would understand Nietzsche would have to be remarkable. Who could understand struggling Nietzsche? Perhaps the man who told the story of Telemachus growing up alone with only stories of his father, till he joins him in setting Ithaka right, yes wouldn’t Homer understand Nietzsche, who grew up without a father and came to think he alone was called to redeem the history of humanity alone. Or even more the man who wrote of Hamlet worshipping his heroic father, struggling with his dread commands, and who while becoming the rough-hewn minister of those commands, nevertheless succeeded in becoming himself, yes wouldn’t it take Shakespeare to understand Nietzsche’s spiritual struggle with Wagner; after all he understood what moved Brutus to slay Caesar. In fairness to Girard, we must, however, observe that he might agree, that it would take a Homer or a Shakespeare to understand Nietzsche, for Girard often stresses the wisdom in great literature, and not in the hollow and condescending way of Freud.[9]
III. Dionysus versus Christus Crucifixus
In mentioning the passage in Nietzsche’s Nachlass in which Nietzsche positively adores Parsifal and for its Christian depth, we have already touched upon the fundamental struggle Girard discovers in Nietzsche.
According to Girard, in his published writings Nietzsche distorts the truth about Wagner’s relation to Christianity; features of Christianity do appear in Wagner’s early work; if lesser minds can see that, so could Nietzsche; moreover, during his time of intimate conversation with Wagner at Tribschen, Nietzsche knew a version of Parsifal. No, Nietzsche fabricates the notion that Wagner suddenly became Christian, or more receptive to Christian themes. Parsifal is not a sudden turn away from and thus betrayal of what Nietzsche and Wagner shared when they were friends. Girard believes Nietzsche knew this but could not face it. To be himself, Nietzsche felt he had to overcome Wagner, and to do that he had to deny things he knew. So claims Girard.
The deeper matter, upon which this struggle with Wagner rests, however, is Nietzsche’s relation to Christianity. Here is how the passage in the Nachlass on Parsifal continues:
Wie als ob seit vielen Jahren endlich einmal Jemand zu mir über die Probleme redete, die mich bekümmern, nicht natürlich mit den Antworten, die ich eben dafür bereit halte, sondern mit den christlichen — welche zuletzt die Antwort stärkerer Seelen gewesen ist als unsere letzten beiden Jahrhunderte hervorgebracht haben. Man legt allerdings beim Hören dieser Musik den Protestant wie ein Missverständnis bei Seite…. Sonderbar! Als Knabe hatte ich mir die Mission zugedacht, das Mysterium auf die Bühne zu bringen.
**As if, after many years, someone finally addressed the problems that truly concern me, not to echo once again the answer that I always have ready at hand, but to provide the Christian answers, which have been the answers of souls stronger than those produced by the last two centuries. Yes, when this music is heard, we brush aside Protestantism as if it were a misunderstanding …. Strange! As a lad I intended for myself the mission of bringing the Eucharist to the stage; – – –
**as ft 10 (KSA XII, Sommer 1886 — Herbst 1887 5 [41])
What were those problems? How we wish Nietzsche had written what they were. We can only guess that they were about *resentiment, about pity, about slave morality, about redemption, and about the curse on nature and life that Nietzsche was always ready to accuse Christianity of in what he published. But wait, in this entry Nietzsche writes of “the problems that truly concern me” and he thinks of stronger Christian answers to questions than he always had ready answers to. What were those deeper questions he was truly concerned with? Were these questions not treated, let alone even asked, in what he published? Could Nietzsche, then, be unsure of the truth of his critical curses upon Christianity? Were they just answers “that I always have ready at hand”?
What wonderful self-examination is in that phrase. (Reading it, we might whisper “how true” of us, with our stock of points, stories, and opinions, our tics and our idée fixes, which we too always have ready to hand and to hand out. And would we be as willing as Nietzsche to question them when we meet stronger souls. Nietzsche did publish some “self-criticisms.” One wishes there were more like this one he left behind in his notebook. It seems, then, that the vehemence of his published curses must be a sign not of certainty, either calm or resolute, but an attempt to crush an uncertainty ever tumultuous and now grown unbearable, and thus a sign of struggle not victory. What did Nietzsche really think of Christianity and of Christ?
Romano Guardini once observed:
Wenn N. vom Christentum spricht, dann kommt es wie ein Paroxysmus über ihn und er, der in seiner Natur vornehme und zarte Mensch, verliert jeden Masstab der Wahrheit, ja der Anständigkeit. Dass aber sein Angriff so viel Richtiges sieht, macht das Unwahre darin um so heftiger. Ein Buch, wie den “Antichrist” zu lesen, ist nicht nur quälend, sondern beschämend. Dabei geht durch N’s ganzen Kampf gegen Christus und das Christliche ein solcher Hauch der Nähe, dass man nicht anders kann als denken, er wende sich gegen etwas, von dem sein innerstes Herz weiss, es ist gut. So wie N. das Christliche hasst, kann man es nur mit schlechtem Gewissen tun. Es wirkt wie eine Enthüllung, wenn er sein letztes Buch “Ecce Homo” nennt und einen Brief aus der Wahnsinnszeit mit “Der Gekreuzigte” unterzeichnet.”
When N. speaks about Christianity it is as if a paroxysm came over him. Although he is in his nature noble and sensitive, he loses all measure of truth and even decency. The untruth of his attack is all the more vehement because he sees so much that is right. Reading a book like the Antichrist is not only a torture, but an embarrassment. At the same time, such a breath of closeness blows through all of N’s struggle against Christ and Christianity that one cannot avoid the conclusion: he is turning against something which—he knows in his innermost heart—is good. The manner in which N. hates Christianity is only possible for one who hates it with a bad conscience. One has the impression of a revelation when he calls his last book Ecce Homo and when he signs a letter written after he became insane, “The Crucified.”[10]
Deeper still then, perhaps Nietzsche may wonder about the love Christ offers him. And may even resent it terribly, as an offense, or worse, a temptation. As Nietzsche so acutely observes in Menschliches, Allzunenschliches I, 603 (Human, All Too Human), men who very much want to be honored, to be justly honored, do not like being loved, not loved as a free gift, an affirmation that it is merely “good that you exist.” In Ecce Homo Nietzsche wants to say something like that to his whole existence, to achieve and to exhibit the virtue of amor fati. He wants to say it, not hear it. That Christ is always saying to him, to every person, and to every creature in Creation, “It is good that you exist,” Nietzsche shunned. Indeed, Nietzsche wants more than amor fati; in Ecce Homo he honors himself as the greatest man who has ever lived. Such is the perfection of this self-love that he wants no love from another. Mon moi est aimable.[11]
Certainly Girard in bringing forward this passage from the Nachlass is right to think that it points to Nietzsche’s struggle with Christianity (with it, not as in the published works just against it) and to Nietzsche’s struggle with Christ (with Him, not just against him).
Girard thinks that to uncover that struggle one must go to the following additional passage from the Nachlass, the famous No. 1052 of Wille-zur-Macht, about:
Gegenbewegung: Religion
“Die zwei Typen:
Di o n y s o s und der G e k r e u z i g t e”
Festzuhalten: der typische r e l e g i ö s e Mensch — ob eine décadence-Form?
Die grossen Neuerer sind sammt und sonders krankhaft und epileptisch
: aber lassen wir nichet da einen Typus des religiösen Menschen aus, den h e i d e n i s c h e n? Ist der heidenische Cult nicht eine Form der Danksagung und Behahung des Lebens? Müsste nicht sein höchster Repräsentant eine Apologie und Vergöttlichung des Lebens sein?
Typus eines vollgerathenen und entzückt-überströmenden Geistes . . .
Typus eines die Widersprüche und Fragwürdigkeiten des Daseins in sich hineinnehmenden und erlösenden Typus?
— Hierher stelle ich den D i o n y s o s der Griechen:
die religiöse Bejahung des Lebens, des ganzen, nicht verleugneten und halbirten Lebens
typisch: dass der Geschlechts-Akt Tiefe, Geheimniss, Ehrfurcht erweckt
Dionysos gegen den “Gekreuzigten”: da habt ihr den Gegensatz. Es ist n i c h t eine Differenz hinsichtlich des Martyriums,
— nur hat dasselbe einen andern Sinn. Das Leben selbst, seine ewige Fruchbarkeit and Wiederkehr bedingt die Qual, die Zerstörung, den Willen zur Vernichtung . . .
im andern Fall gilt das Leiden, der “Gekreuzigte als der Unschuldige”, als Einwand gegen dieses Leben, als Formel seiner Verurtheilung.
Man erräth: das Problem ist das vom Sinne des Leidens: ob ein christlicher Sinn, ob ein tragischer Sinn . . . Im ersten Falle soll es der Weg sein zu einem seligen Sein, im letzteren gilt d a s S e i n a l s s e l i g g e n u g, um ein Ungeheures von Leid noch zu rechtfertigen
Der tragische Mensch bejaht noch das herbste Leiden: er ist stark, voll, vergöttlichend genug dazu
Der christliche verneint noch das glücklichste Los auf Erden: er ist schwach, arm, enterbt genug, um in jeder Form noch am Leben zu leiden . . .
“der Gott am Kreuz” ist ein Fluch auf Leben, ein Fingerzeig, sich von ihm zu erlösen
der Stücke geschnittene Dionysos ist eine Verheissung ins Leben: est wird ewig wieder geboren und aus der Zerstörung heimkommen
** becomes ft 12 (KSA XIII [Frühjahr 1888 14 [89])
The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified. — To determine: whether the typical religious man is a form of decadence (the great innovators are one and all morbid and epileptic); but are we not here omitting one type of religious man, the pagan? Is the pagan cult not a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life? Must its highest representative not be an apology for and deification of life? The type of a well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit? The type of a spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence!
It is here I set the Dionysus of the Greeks: the religious affirmation of life, life whole and not denied or in part; (typical — that the sexual act arouse profundity, mystery, reverence). Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom— it is the difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering —the “Crucified as the innocent one” — counts as a objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation. — One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction. **as ft 13 (trans. Walter Kaufmann)
Now at first glance it seems that the struggle in this passage is indeed against Christianity, but Girard thinks there is a deeper struggle, one within Nietzsche. After all, unlike positivist students of mythology, most professors of anthropology, and modern atheistical intellectuals, Nietzsche did not think the voluntary death at the center of Christianity was like all the violent sacrifices in so many founding mythologies. “Es ist nicht eine Differenz hinsichtlich des Martyriums — nur hat dasselbe einen anderen Sinn.” [It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom— it is the difference in the meaning of it.] Christianity is not, then, just another tired religion, waning faith in whose god might be termed a death. Thus in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft No. 125 (The Frolicsome Science), not only is this God said by the Madman to have been murdered by us all, but later in Zarathustra IV we hear that this God has been killed by an individual murderer, the Ugliest Man.[12] Of course, to confirm that Nietzsche thought Christianity unique, Girard could simply point out that Nietzsche almost always singles it out, as he does no other religion, for his criticism, and finally in Der Antichrist even calls it “the one immortal blemish of mankind” (No. 62 my italics).
Girard wants to prove more of course. And that “more” is much harder to prove. With Nietzsche’s relation to Wagner, Girard’s intuition told him a passage of ambivalent inner contradiction might well exist in the Nachlass, and then he discovered it, in the passage on Parsifal. Does such a passage exist about Dionysus and Christ, one in which Nietzsche contradicts what he holds about the opposition of Christ to Dionysus? Perhaps only the word “innocent” in the Nachlass passage itself (” “Gekreuzigt als der Unschuldige” “) but while acknowledging that Christ is innocent, thus unjustly sacrificed, still Nietzsche sways not a whit from siding with Dionysus against Christ. Apparently the good, as Nietzsche sees it in Dionysus, the good of uniting a society, trumps the just. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the innocent are to be sacrificed for the community, the sick for the species, and the weak for the sake of the strong. Yes, the weak should not sit in the places of the strong, eat their meat or drink their drink. They should not appear before them. (Nietzsche’s strong are not strong enough to look at a beggar.) Kill, kill, kill pity.
To prove that beneath the very evident attacks in the published works, there lies a profound ambivalence to Christ, Girard generously attributes to Nietzsche the insight that the truly important difference between the sacrifice of Dionysus and the “sacrifice” of Christ is that Christ was innocent and that we are taught by that innocence always to side with the innocent and against those violently sacrificing them to draw our sword and cry “hold your hand,” much as the * unnamed Servant in Shakespeare’s King Lear does (3.7). The evidence that Nietzsche saw this is, according to Girard, not only that he is too vehement in his worship of Dionysus and too vehement in his vilification of Christianity— as Gertrude might say “The man doth worship and vilify too much” — but that when Nietzsche went mad, he began confusing himself not only with Dionysus (and the Antichrist, Alexander and Caesar, and once even Wagner, but not Socrates), signing missives as Dionysus, but also signing missives “The Crucified One.” To the whole world, those postcards surely confess an inner conflict always there. From this collapsing of Dionysus and Christ together in the time of madness, Girard infers that the true conflict in Nietzsche between Dionysus and Christ was between, on the one hand, violent sacrifice as the core of life, will-to-power affirmed in destruction and self-destruction, confident of eternal return, and of such destruction as the core of every human community versus, on the other hand, the complete renunciation of violent sacrifice (and even perhaps the renunciation of resistance to it), the indignant admiration of justice, and the comforting protection of all innocent victims.
That Girard has pointed to some evidence, important evidence, for this profound conflict in Nietzsche about Christianity, must be granted I think. And this would be strengthened importantly by pointing to the profound distinction Nietzsche makes in Der Antichrist between Christ, on the one hand, with his wonderful, entirely un-resentiment-al disposition to death and, on the other hand, the Christianity of the uncomprehending disciples who, Nietzsche says, immediately covered the supernal, surpassing love of the Redeemer over with resentiment. Indeed, in Der Antichrist No. 27 he says Jesus was guilty, in depriving the Jews of the hope of becoming a nation once again, but in No. 58 in the course of a general criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche actually mentions “sacrifice of the innocent,” in a way that seems to include Christ, as a criticism of Christianity:
Diese Mucker-Schleicherei, die Konventikel-Heimlichkeit, düstere Begriffe wie Hölle, wie Opfer des Unschuldigen, wie unio mystica im Bluttrinken, vor allem das langsam aufgeschürte Feuer der Rache, der Tschandala-Rache — das wurde Herr über Rom, dieselbe Art von Religion, der in ihrer Präexistenz-Form schon Epikur den Krieg gemacht hatte.
The sneakiness of prigs, the conventicle secrecy, the gloomy concepts like hell, like sacrifice of the guiltless, like unio mistica in drinking blood; above all the slowly fanned fire of revenge, of chandala revenge—all that is what became master over Rome, the same kind of religion against which, in its preexistent form, Epicurus has waged war.
To be sure, this is not as strong as the passage in the Nachlass. Nevertheless, it seems that sacrifice of the innocent is among the things that Roman Nietzsche finds objectionable in Christianity. Would Nietzsche then join Epicurus in war against the same sacrifice of the innocent in the worship of Dionysus? Nietzsche is certainly a man of contradictions.
Why Girard does not look at Der Antichrist, I do not understand, unless he does not appreciate the difference between what a man writes in his notebook and what he decides to publish. If Girard did examine Der Antichrist, what might he say? Perhaps that by splitting Christ and Christianity Nietzsche was seeking a way out of his struggle. Or maybe Nietzsche simply could not curse Christ, because he was too aware of Him. Aware of Him judging him. Or, worse in his view, aware of Him loving him (as I suggested above).
Another, though parallel, path, opened up by the end of Nietzsche’s Nachlass on Parsifal, would have been for Nietzsche to investigate the suspicion indicated there, that his criticisms of Christianity were really only of Protestant Christianity, of the profoundly anti-natural teachings of Luther, who said hatred of oneself is the basis of the love of God,[13] but also the same anti-natural teaching in Pascal (“Le moi est haïssable.”), and indeed all over the Gnostics such as Marcion, and not those of the Catholic Church which, holding onto the goodness of Creation, keeping the Old Testament in the cannon, opposed them.)[14] Perhaps Nietzsche explored this path, but I know of no evidence he did.[15]
As to Girard’s additional contention that it is this deep conflict in Nietzsche, between the claims of Dionysus, as he had championed them all his intellectual life, beginning with Die Geburt der Tragödie, and the claims of Christ, which he grew up with (living exclusively with female Protestants, all the relatives of Protestant pastors, going to a Protestant school, **preparing to become such a pastor, etc. )[16], and then this deep conflict mixed with Wagner and his music with its Christian themes, such a conflict always at work in Nietzsche, and issuing finally in his frenzied decline into madness —I would say that Girard’s account is certainly superior to one of the prevailing accounts, that the works, especially the works of the last lucid year have nothing to do with the madness that followed so swiftly,[17] because the madness has an exclusively material cause, perhaps syphilis. (Why do those who assert a material cause never ask to have Nietzsche’s body exhumed for modern analysis?[18]) There are just too many signs in the excited later works that point to the euphoric madness soon after, to deny some connection.[19]
Some connection, but is it the connection Girard claims? It seems to me that a far more detailed examination of the later books and the writings left in Nachlass would be needed to sustain Girard’s view. Girard would find his case, if not strengthened, at least made more persuasive to those who fear losing the fine things in these later books, by seeing them dismissed as madness, if Girard would concede that there are fine and even important things in these books. But numerous scornful asides about his fellow French Nietzscheans suggest that Girard thinks they, his prime audience, are not much interested in these fine things in Nietzsche, anyway. In writing one should beware of letting those one vilifies, however justly, distract one from addressing a fitter audience though few.
IV. Aprés Moi, Le Holocaust
On the basis of Nietzsche’s celebration of Dionysus, of his violent sacrifice, sacrifice of the innocent, affirmed in numerous passages in the published works and in the famous Nachlass where Dionysus and Christ are opposed and in another of the same time [20] in which Nietzsche maintains that the species endures only through human sacrifice, Girard accuses Nietzsche of being importantly responsible for the murderous destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis and importantly responsible for the subsequent vilification of Christianity today throughout the West by intellectuals.
Here is Girard’s most succinct expression of the accusation:
“To bury the modern [ultimately Christian] concern for victims under millions and millions of corpses—there you have the National Socialist way of being Nietzschean. But some will say, “This interpretation would have horrified poor Nietzsche.” Probably, yes. Nietzsche shared with many intellectuals of his time and our own a passion for irresponsible rhetoric in the attempt to get one up on opponents. But philosophers, for their misfortune, are not the only people in the world. Genuinely mad and frantic people are all around them and do them the worst turn of all: they take them at their word.”[21]
Girard’s accusation would be stronger, or at least more widely convincing, if he had first conceded, what must, I think, be conceded. Namely: that Nietzsche was not a Jew hater[22]; that Nietzsche vehemently denounced Jew-haters, such as the one his sister married; and that Nietzsche wrote one of the most exalted appreciations of a European Jew ever penned (Morgenröthe 205). Conceding these things would complicate Girard’s view of Nietzsche, but it would make his accusation more convincing. In addition it must be acknowledged that Nietzsche was also no socialist, but an aristocrat (“radical aristocrat” in Georg Brandes felicitous phrase, which Nietzsche adopted); and finally, that Nietzsche was no nationalist, criticizing Bismarck’s strutting Imperial Germany, lauding the civilization of the defeated French, and looking to a Europe of good Europeans. So, surely Girard must concede that the Nazis were three things Nietzsche opposed vehemently: nationalists, socialists, and Jew-haters.
Still, the passages Girard cites do justify the murder of the innocent and not reluctantly, nay almost stridently, and do call future Surpassing Men to take joy in cruelty. Nietzsche certainly criticized pity, sometimes justly, at least once with discriminating insight, when he names indignation at another’s suffering as the strong brother of pity (Morgenröthe 78), but usually so comprehensively and so vehemently critical of pity as to lose all intellectual virtue, even forsake his own thought; after all, why admire the protagonist in a tragedy, or Nietzsche’s own virtue in living his hard and solitary life, except that we feel the suffering he overcomes, in short feel pity for him.[23] In a thinker whose nobility will always deserve admiration, such lack of discrimination, of justice, of humanity, is a grave error of soul, and since Nietzsche published some of these thoughts, he bears a grave responsibility for those whose deeds were influenced by them, and even for the deeds of those who found excuse or justification for such deeds as they were going to do anyway. Here, then, lies the strength of Girard’s case. (It would be juster if Girard distinguished the thoughts Nietzsche published and those he merely wrote down, which others published, and he might have either destroyed, or never published.)
Girard continues with this claim “Since the Second World War a whole new intellectual wave has emerged, hostile to Nazism but more nihilist than ever, more than ever a tributary of Nietzsche. It has accumulated mountains of clever but false arguments to acquit its favorite thinker of any responsibility in the National Socialist catastrophe….” Girard goes on to hold Heidegger’s dismissal of the texts in Nietzsche which curse Christianity and its pity for the weak innocent of the world as authorizing lesser minds in France and elsewhere to ignore Nietzsche’s partial responsibility for the Holocaust. I do not know if anyone has replied to Girard. That Girard sometimes shouts his accusations suggests no one has answered him.
Girard, however, also maintains that: “Nietzsche is the author of the only texts capable of clarifying the Nazi horror. If there is a spiritual essence of the movement, Nietzsche is the one who expresses it.”[24] Finally, Girard observes that the deep hostility of Nazism, of Heidegger, with his wish for some other “god” to save us (from God), and the Nietzscheans in Heidegger’s wake, dominant in the Universities of the West, for whom Christians have replaced Jews as scapegoats, is evidenced in their neglect of the religious struggle in Nietzsche.[25] It must be welcome then to René Girard that the Nietzsche Gesellschaft held a workshop on this important topic in September of 2006. And it would be well if Girard had been able to attend.[26]
V. Whither From Here?
The theme of this Nietzsche Congress of 2006 is the reception of Nietzsche by the French, with one section on Nietzsche’s reception of the French.[27] I have striven to show what features of Nietzsche, the man, his struggles, and his thoughts, have been received by René Girard. It is obvious that some things in Nietzsche have been left out. For example, the multitude of insights and appreciations in his work, one of which can often be fruitfully pondered for a long while, in truth treasured for life, as I treasure Frolicsome Science No. 295 or 329; for Nietzsche was right to claim he could say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.” Götzen-Dämmerung (Streifzüge 51) and to recommend only dipping into his thinking, strolling to the next bench, on the forest way or beside the stream, before reading another of his thoughts (Morgenröthe 454). Of such beautiful provocations to thought, Girard takes, so far as I know, no notice at all, though perhaps he assumes their worth.
What needs to be most remarked among the things in Nietzsche of which Girard takes no notice, is Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo, the most authoritative guide there will ever be to reading him, Nietzsche calls his lyrical epicthe greatest gift so far given to mankind. He did not say that about the works Girard focuses on, the Wagner books, the Geburt der Tragödie, and Der Antichrist, still less any Nachlass, all interesting and some illuminating. Zarathustra does not command Girard’s attention. After all, Zarathustra does not propose marriage to the women, Life and Eternity, through another person who turns out to be a rival wooer and who then wins the woman for himself; after all, Zarathustra does not begin by worshipping an older hero and then struggle to overcome him. And above all, Zarathustra does not bring intoxicating havoc to a city or community who then collectively murder him. Nevertheless, precisely because these features of Zarathustra are so different from the rest of Nietzsche, or from the part of Nietzsche Girard pays attention to, Girard should have paid attention to this lyrical and prophetic work. Wagner, Dionysus, Christ, these are great figures in Nietzsche and for him, but so is Zarathustra. And Zarathustra differs from the last two by not mixing or connecting violence and the sacred. This was deliberate and knowing on Nietzsche’s part. The opening of Zarathustra shows that had Zarathustra remained in the City of the Motley Cow, he would have been lynched. Only the spectacle of the Seiltänzer (Rope Dancer) falling to his death distracts the crowd. For giving his speech on the Übermensch (Surpassing Man), once they understood it, the crowd would have persecuted Zarathustra, at least exiled him. And still more would they have persecuted him, unto death, for any speech on the “Death of God” which Zarathustra does not whisper even to the Old Hermit he meets on the way down from his mountain solitude. In the whole of the poem Zarathustra never returns to the City of the Motley Cow and even remarks that Christ died too young. Moreover, although some passages in the Nachlass show that Nietzsche considered ending Zarathustra with his death,[28] he chose against that. And none of the rejected scenes Nietzsche considered would have portrayed Zarathustra’s death as a murder, either individual or collective, by the Higher Men. Whatever religion Zarathustra is introducing the Higher Men to does not originate in sacred violence. Instead, what we do have is Zarathustra’s preparation for death, not only in what he recommends as a free death loyal to the earth, but in the high point, at the end of Zarathustra III, when Zarathustra declares his love of eternity, which is, ipso facto, a preparation for death.[29] In such a preparation, Zarathustra is “blessing not clinging to life,” as Nietzsche said one should, and Odysseus did Nausikaa. And Part IV of Zarathustra shows the beneficence of Zarathustra, toward the various Higher Men, who may later reflect that beneficence upon others. From early on in his thinking and writing life, Nietzsche was concerned with, drenched with the blood of, the Bachee, with its story of how the intoxicating Dionysus destroys a community and himself, but joyously. It, and not the Oedipus dearest to Aristotle, it and not the Antigone dearest to Hegel, is Nietzsche’s paradigm of tragedy. And the Bachee is a pattern for the last six books Nietzsche wrote in his last lucid year, with its furious curse on Christianity and the author’s subsequent destruction in madness. Zarathustra, however, is the opposite. It is a refraining from such violent sacredness. It is revealing that Dionysus is never mentioned in Zarathustra. Girard should confront the contradiction, Dionysus versus Zarathustra, and what it means for Nietzsche, for his thought and for his life.
There is another feature of Nietzsche’s thought that Girard does not “receive.” Socrates. Nietzsche’s struggle with Socrates was life-long. In the beginning of his writing life, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, there is Socrates as the rationalist enervator of the tragic Greeks. And Socrates is there at the end of Nietzsche’s waking life. Indeed, the twelve numbered remarks on “Das Problem des Sokrates” and the surrounding remarks on Plato in Götzen-Dämmerung constitute the longest confrontation with Socrates in Nietzsche’s work. They lead to the conclusion, though a silent one, that Socrates committed judicial suicide. “Not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock,” writes Nietzsche (Götzen-Dämmerung, II, 12). To be sure, Nietzsche is also saying that Socrates was guilty, of seducing the vital and instinctual Greeks to the agon of reasoning (dialectics), and that he knew he was guilty, certainly guilty of not loving life (“a cock for Asclepius”), but still Nietzsche’s admiration for the equanimity of Socrates before death comes through as well. It is hard to understand why this scene of judicial murder by the community does not attract Girard’s attention. Nietzsche attended to it, but Girard does not.
Girard’s inattention to Socrates in Nietzsche’s work fits with his shunning of Socrates in his own work; so far in what I have read, in the works translated into English, I have found only one mention of Socrates’ death, a passing, almost perfunctory one.[30] According to Girard it is the Gospel story of Christ’s death that taught our Western ancestors to side with the innocent victim, not the society regaining its confidence by *scape-goating the innocent. But surely the death of Socrates taught the same, and even to the Athenians, who are reported to have regretted their vote to hemlock Socrates, and surely most readers of Plato’s account since have hated the injustice of it and thrilled to the virtue of Socrates,[31] even Nietzsche however ambivalently. As later instances of the pattern and teaching of Christ, Girard does mention Joan of Arc, the Jewish doctor of Elizabeth I, and Dreyfus, but not Socrates, before Christ.
And Nietzsche’s account of Socrates facing death in Götzen-Dämmerung should remind us of the similar confrontation with death of Jesus in Der Antichrist, written at virtually the same time, in which Christ is lauded in his death, and whatever resentiment surrounds or issues from the Cross is said to have arisen immediately from the failure of the disciples to understand the nobility of that humiliating death (and later Paul’s willful further traducement of it). Again, this is something that Girard slights, and despite the fact that it is an even more important “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thoughts than his love and hate of Parsifal. Here in Der Antichrist in its portrait of Christ, there is not only no Wille-zur-Macht, but neither the low resentiment, slavish morality and pity Nietzsche abhorred, nor the justification of collective sacrificial violence Nietzsche lauded in published passages and described in that Nachlass (which got published as No. 1052 in Wille-zur-Macht), which Girard has emphasized. Not that Girard should not have emphasized this passage, but that having done so, he should have taken note of what so massively contradicts it in Der Antichrist. In finding contradictions, Girard has his favorites.[32]
However, in the end and in summary, one should praise Girard. For pointing to so much that is rich and important in Nietzsche, he deserves our sincere and abundant thanks. Few among any nation have received so much from Nietzsche. And let us remember that among the French much has been received, not only by those mentioned in the announcement of this Nietzsche Congress, but by Malraux, Gide, and Marcel, by De Lubac, Mounier, Thibon, and Camus, and also by the DeGaulle who attributed the German defeat in W.W.I to its Nietzschean generals.[33] If this congress were devoted to the English-speaking reception of Nietzsche, would much more be remarked as having been “received”? After all, a translation of the Colli/Montinari faithful ordering of Nietzsche’s Nachlass has been available to French readers for decades, some parts even before the Colli/ Montinari edition itself! Meanwhile the English-speaking world still awaits such faithfulness and accordingly English-speaking Nietzscheans continue to mingle the beautifully composed books Nietzsche published with the Nachlass he never, after his breakdown, had the opportunity to order into more beautiful books, or to throw away.
Thus the poster for a Congress on the English and American Reception of Nietzsche might show mild-mannered, if terrifyingly-mustachioed, Nietzsche sitting on a crowded beach, at first hard to make out, à la Brueghel, in the midst of so much motley demotic mayhem, —think of Coney Island— and Nietzsche refusing with incipient nausea and yet politeness to sip the only drink offered, the sugar water called “Coke.” How unlike the poster for this Congress, showing Nietzsche convalescing in France, there “received” by a French maiden who has already been reading him, and thus would Nietzsche be made healthy, healthy enough to set aside his distaste for everything alcoholic and hence enjoying a glass of wine, Bordeaux perhaps, in the shade of a great-rooted tree, one of the walnuts of Altenburg.
And then, in such a conversation with Nietzsche, in such a happy landscape, perhaps we might take up the philosophic questions, now enhanced, that I sketched at the beginning of this report on René Girard versus struggling Nietzsche:
Why do we do what we do? Why do we desire what we do? And how do we become who we are? Why as we grow up do we imitate, then emulate, but finally perhaps slay the person we admire most, all to become who we are? If we were solitary, with no one to imitate, would we have no desires? Are none of our desires natural? Is life with others nothing but rivalry? Is nothing we desire shareable? Are we truly friendless? Who, then, are we?
What is it about us humans that our cities, countries, civilizations, and religions seem always to begin (as Machiavelli imprudently emphasized) with a violent deed —think of Romulus killing Remus and Cain killing Abel — and why is it that we, collective we, seem so ready to persecute the best of us, Christ for example, but also Socrates? We think of them as the founders of our civilization, the West, but if they reappeared on earth, would the one not be crucified again, and the other hemlocked? And what would they think of what they founded?
And why was it just in our time, after you Nietzsche, that a movement arose filled with hatred of the weak and scorn for pity and also that just in our time it met with a people willing to go so gently to slaughter?[34]
What is the deepest representation of our strange and wonderful condition? Is it tragedy, Christianity, or philosophy? Is it perhaps the Bachae, in which the intoxicating god of tragedy, Dionysus, drives mad the city, especially its women, and then the madding city tears Dionysus apart, but he affirms suffering life joyously. Or is it the Gospel representation of the Crucifixion, in which Christ accepts suffering so as to teach us to pity the innocent victim, not the mighty crowd, but also refuses to rule? Or is it philosophy, the philosophy of Socrates, who recognizes sharable goods, such as truth, enjoys friendship, and prefers to suffer evil than do it, but is, nonetheless, loyal to the city hemlocking him, and if he were asked, willing to rule the city, which would be the nearest thing to establishing justice on earth?[35]
Prof. Dr. Michael Platt George Wythe College (Cedar City, Utah, United States) Humboldt Stipendiat, Universität Heidelberg (82-83 with Hans-Georg Gadamer) and Universität Greifswald, Philosophisches Institut, Sommer 2006, invited to visit the Politisches Institut, and returning to a circle of students for Sommer 2007 and Sommer 2008. His first book on Shakespeare was Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare; his work on Nietzsche appeared in Nietzsche Studien when Müller-Lauter and Montinari and the like were editors.
Endnotes:
[1] All quotations from Nietzsche, unless otherwise noted, will be from the Colli and Montinari edition. In English they will be from Walter Kaufmann’s translation, if otherwise as noted. The things of Girard’s that deal with Nietzsche, those I am aware of, are “Superman in the Underground: Strategies of Madness —Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevsky,” in Modern Language Notes Vol. 91 (1976) 1161-85; republished as “Strategies of Madness — Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevsky,” in “To Double Business Bound“: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Johns Hopkins, 1978).
La Violence et la Sacré (1972, Editions Bernard Grasset, Paris) [Eng. trains. Patrick Gregory (Johns Hopkins, 1977)]; Nietzsche just a few times mentioned; however, the index missed one mention (296) and one of Zarathustra.
Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset, 1978; trans. Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Matthew 13:35) (Stanford U. P.,1987); just mentions of Nietzsche, but more of them, in this book.
René Girard, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 99 (ca. 1984, No. 4), pp. 816-835. Most important.
“Nietzsche and Contradiction,” in Nietzsche in Italy, ed. Thomas Harrison (Saratoga, California: Anima Libri, 1988) (written sometime after the 1978 French publication of Colli/ Montinari Nachlass of 1885-87; here Girard discovers Nietzsche’s Nachlass adoration of Parsifal for its address to his deepest Christian questions.
“The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” in Violence and Truth: On the Works of René Girard, ed. Paul Dumouchel (Stanford U. P. 1988) but originally in French of the volume in 1985 (Violence et verité, Grasset & Fasquelle); in the essay Girard humorously portrays himself as, being unable to find anything but his idée fixe, only by accident with his eyes closed opening to the Madman’s report of God’s death in Nietzsche.
“The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage,” in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2001) trans. of Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1999).
Several things from the above, including “Nietzsche versus the Crucified,” but also out of the way things, reprinted in The Girard Reader ed. James G. Williams (Crossroad Herder, 1996) along with an excellent interview at the end and a short intellectual and spiritual biography at the beginning.
The best criticisms of Girard’s work I have found are: Pierre Manent, Contrepoint 14, 1974; Hans Urs v. Balthasar, Theodrama: IV pp. 296-310 (Ignatius Press); and Lucien Scubla, “The Christianity of René Girard and the Nature of Religion” in Violence and Truth: On the Works of René Girard (cited above).
[2] Girard pays so much scornful attention to various French intellectuals that a wag could propound a theory of anti-imitative desire, about how some people are animated to do what they do by resolving not to imitate others. “Whatever I see someone else wanting, I want the opposite.” Come to think of it, this wag could cite Nietzsche as an example, for so often his screaming “noes” about anything precede his gentle “yeses.” Or are not followed by the “yeses”. You have to infer those from the “noes.”
[3] Shakespeare has portrayed such weak desire in Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, who has the Prince woo Hero for him, and portrayed the struggle to emulate and yet to be, in Hamlet; for more, see my “To Emulate or To Be: Hamlet and Aeneas,” in Law and Philosophy: The Practice of Theory [Essays in Honor of George Anastaplo] ed. William Braithwaite, John Murley, & Robert Stone.(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University / Swallow Press, 1992), Vol. II., pp. 917-936.
[4] In a 1992 interview excerpted in The Girard Reader (Crossroads, 1996) Girard asserts he does recognize a good form of imitative desire (pp. 62-65), but not it seems to me sufficiently; for it does not lead to a re-thinking of the whole theory from scratch.
[5] Werner Ross Der ängstliche Adler: Friedrich Nietzsches Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1980).
[6] (Colli/Montinari KSA XII, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Sommer 1886 — Herbst 1887 5[41]) As the reader might have guessed there is reason to construe this “paragraph” as a revision of the one above, a conjecture supported by seeing the notebook itself, as I did at the Goethe Schiller Archive in Weimar, thanks to the staff and Marie-Louise Haase.
[7] In the Nachlass there is an Entwurf of a letter to Cosima (No. 1099a), believed to belong to early September of ’88. There are of course the later missives (and drafts) of December, and one, addressed to “Prinzess Ariadne, meine Geliebte,” in which Nietzsche suggests he was once Richard Wagner (3 Jan. 89, No. 1241 in Colli / Montinari). Surely good evidence of unfinished struggle. A struggle never to be finished.
[8] A man with a similar theory, a similar simplicity, and a similar inability not to ride his hobby-horse, and yet with insight is Harold Bloom, with his theory of emulation and overcoming. (So far, I have not run across in Girard any mention of Bloom.)
[9] Girard’s book on Shakespeare, A Theater of Envy (Oxford U. P., 1991), leaves the general impression that his theory visits the works, finds itself there, and says “what a pretty theory am I!” but Girard does find interesting things; envy is important in Shakespeare; and Girard is, for example, wonderful on what moves each of the conspirators against Caesar to join the conspiracy.
[10] The passage comes from the only chapter of a planned book on Nietzsche that Romano Guardini never got to wrote before his death, extant in the Guardini Archive at the Catholic Academy in München; see below. (Trans. Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Michael Waldstein, President, International Theological Institute, Gaming Austria). Many thanks to Dr. Stephan Höpfinger and Prof. Dr. Hans Mercker for help locating this mss.
[11] Opposite of Pascal, “le moi est haïssable.”
[12] That the Ugliest Man is an individual murderer* deviates from Girard’s theory of collective murder, but perhaps, as Girard argues, that is not as disabling as it seems, if the Ugliest Man is the same as the Madman, or if he is representative of all men, just more knowing. For the interesting suggestion that the Ugliest Man is Socrates, see Weaver Santaniello’s “Socrates as the Ugliest Murderer of God” in Nietzsche and the Gods ed. Weaver Santaniello & John J. Stuhr (SUNY Press, 2001).
[13] For Luther’s declaration, Est enim diligere seipsum odisse, see Anders Nygren, Eros und Agape: Gestaltwandlungen der christichen Liebe Two Vols. (Gütersloh, 1930, 1937) II, 533. See also the Fourth of his Ninety-Four Theses. For a sagacious exposition of the issue, read Josef Pieper, About Love (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1974), especially Chapter V (orig. Über die Liebe [München: Kösel, 1972]).
[14] And if Nietzsche had studied in the direction of his suspicion, voiced in the Nachlass on Parsifal, that his criticisms of Christianity were of Protestant Christianity, perhaps he might have discovered how mistaken even his quotation of Thomas at the end of Zur Genealogie der Moral I (15) is, the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae III not by Thomas, but by his follower Reginald; to be sure it is in accord with Thomas elsewhere but the point made (Suppl. III 94, aa. 1-3 ) is not Nietzsche’s or Tertullian’s; the blessed do not rejoice in the sufferings of the damned, they feel grateful not to suffer them. Nietzsche gives fine advice about reading and has some wonderful descriptions of what he desiderates in a reader, in one of which he says he prefers the reader who would rather guess than know.(Ecce Homo 3 (quotes Zarathustra III “Vision and Riddle” 2). But as to who wrote or did not write something, to leave it at conjecture and not try to find out the truth, is not the probity of a philologist, the practice of a good reader, or the way of a philosopher.
[15] Thomas Brobjer’s detailed “Nietzsche’s Changing Relation to Christianity” in the collection, Nietzsche and the Gods, stops before 1883.
[16] Did Nietzsche ever know a living Catholic? Perhaps only Heinrich Romundt, his fellow student who became Catholic. And what of Catholic teachers? There are brief confrontations with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas à Kempis, but none with any of the Church fathers or his contemporary, Newman. Nietzsche said one loves Pascal, but he loved him mostly as an example of the sacrifice of a great intellect, which is hardly to confront Pascal’s arguments. Despite the high and elating standards Nietzsche sets for his readers, he seems seldom to practice them when reading others, sharp and wonderful as are some of his insights are, as when *he adds, to Aristotle’s remark that the man who lives outside the city (polis) must be either a beast or a god — the penetrating truth “or a philosopher” (Götzen-Dämmerung, Sprüche und Pfeile, No. 3). Nietzsche praised slow reading, but who did he read slowly? Emerson surely. Pascal and maybe Montaigne. Nothing in Italian or Spanish. Lots in Latin and Greek, especially Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians and Homer. So one presumes, for he studied and taught them. And who in German? Goethe? Heine? Schopenhauer? And maybe for a time Wagner?
[17] A view I once held: “Behold Nietzsche,” Nietzsche Studien, Band XXII:(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 42-79. Reprinted with additions: in Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. Daniel W. Conway, with Peter S. Groff Vol. III: On Morality and the Order of Rank (London & New York: Routledge, 1998) pp. 218-255.
[18] A physician I know is of the opinion that, depending on the state of the body, over a century now since it became a corpse, something might be learned. Of course, any traces of poisons in the corpse would have to be examined with the following questions in mind: does this trace come from whatever Nietzsche was given to eat or drink during his madness over his last decade and does this trace come from one of the nostrums he gave himself, many of which, for sale over the counter in the 19th century or available to Dr. Nietzsche with his doctor’s hard-to-read handwriting, contained poisons. In a recent diagnosis something other than syphilis as the most likely cause of Nietzsche’s illness and death: M. Orth and M. R. Trimble “Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental illness – general paralysis of the insane vs. frontotemporal dementia” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Volume 114 Issue 6 Page 439 – December 2006 . I have not been able to secure Pia Daniela Volz, Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit. Eine medizinisch-biographische Untersuchung, Würzburg 1990 (Diss. med. Tübingen 1988); more recent and laudibly *skeptical is Ricahrd Shain’s The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis (Greenword: Westport, Connecticut, 2001).
[19] Judicious on the question of Nietzsche’s madness is Daniel Breazeale’s “Ecce Psycho: Remarks on the Case of Nietzsche,” in International Studies in Philosophy XXIII/2, pp. 19-33. For the view that Nietzsche was insane throughout his writing life see Max Nordau, Degeneration (trans.: Univ. of Nebraska, 1968). He is certainly right, if unappreciative of other things, to speak of Nietzsche having a mania for contradiction, but there may be teacherly method in this “madness.” Although Nietzsche said his way was “A yes, a no, a straight line, and a goal” (Götzen-Dämmerung, Sprüche und Pfeile, No. 44), the way he makes the reader go is more often a no, no, no, that points, in a crooked line, to a goal. Consider for example the many passages where Nietzsche attacks something as anti-nature, from which you must gather what he thinks nature is, and how few passages there are that start with nature. In truth, I cannot think of any.
[20] KSA XIII Nachgelassene Fragmente (Frühjahr 1888 14 [5]. In Walter Kaufmann’s translation, p. 142.
[21] All the quotations from Girard in this section are from “The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage,” I See Satan Fall Like Lightning trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2001) Chapter 14, pp. 170-181; it is a translation of Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1999).
[22] The term “anti-Semite” is too pale for the hatred it covers, also inaccurate since Jews are not the only Semites. I understand the term was coined by one Wilhelm Marr to give the old hatred a modern and scientific appeal.
[23] See Erich Mende Nietzsche und sein Gegensatz (Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans, 1997) for a sharp observation of the contradictions in Nietzsche’s thinking and especially the contradiction between the hardness he lauded and the pity all his complaints, requests for wursts, hams, and Zwieback, and descriptions of his sufferings appealed for, whether he would admit it or not.
[24] Does “spiritual essence” in the English translation of Girard refer to something in the French that alludes to Heidegger’s famous remark about National Socialism in his Introduction to Metaphysics about the “inner truth and greatness of this movement”?
[25] Here I summarize the concluding pages of Girard’s “Twofold Nietzschean Heritage.” Among those who do not neglect the religious struggle of Nietzsche, I am aware of more Germans than French scholars: e.g. Josef Pieper passim, Hans Urs von Balthasar (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, II), Henri de Lubac (Drama of Atheist Humanism), Roman Guardini, passim, Helmut Kuhn (Encounter with Nothingness), Eugen Biser (God-seeker or Antichrist? Nietzsche’s Provocative Criticism of Christianity and others), Gustave Thibon (Nietzsche or the Decline of the Spirit), Alistair Kee (Nietzsche Against the Crucified), and now Pope Benedict, in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (the first encyclical ever to address a worthy adversary of Christianity). There are also the fine collections: Jossua, Jean Pierre and Claude Geffre ed. Nietzsche and Christianity, Weaver Santaniello ed. Nietzsche and the Gods, and James O’Flaherty ed. Studies in Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
[26] I have left largely to the side the important matter of whether it is fair to Nietzsche to pay so much attention to Nachlass, thus to things he never published, and never got the chance either to publish or to get rid of (as he did some things, telling his landlord in Sils Maria that last summer to throw stuff he left in a basket out, but Durisch didn’t and some of it found its way into Elizabeth’s Wille-zur-Macht. Beyond that, there is the question of whether if Nietzsche did publish the Nachlass Girard fixes on, whether it would not have been quite altered. Nietzsche’s first drafts are more worthy of attention than the vast majority of other’s final drafts, but his own list drafts are far more worthy of attention than his first drafts.
Having discovered our mutual interest in the matter of the late Nachlass, Bernd Magnus and I combined our efforts and he published what we found about the Nachlass of 1888, including the basket of Nachlass Nietzsche told his landlord at Sils-Maria to get rid of, but when Herr Durisch failed to and began passing it out to visitors, Elizabeth frightened him into giving the rest to her, and some of it got into Elizabeth’s Wille-zur-Macht book. Bernd first published this research in “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in 1888: The Will-to-Power and the Übermensch,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (Vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 79-99), revised it in “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche ed. Robert C. Solomon & Kathleen M. Higgins (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 218-235, and then included it (perhaps further revised) in Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche’s Case (New York: Routledge, 1993); see especially pp. 35-46 and the index under my name.
[27] There is no mention of Tocqueville in the announcement of the Congress, and rightly so; though Nietzsche knew of Tocqueville (Colli/Montinari KSA XI, p. 442; Nachgelassene Fragmente April — Juni 1885 34[69]), he never confronted him. It is the most important meeting between a German and a Frenchman that never happened, for in Tocqueville Nietzsche would have met the most comprehensive appreciation of democracy by a man whose nobility and whose esteem for aristocracy, think of what Tocqueville says of Pascal, Nietzsche could not dismiss easily and might have lauded. In such a meeting Nietzsche would have had to confront Tocqueville’s argument that though democracy will only rarely be great, will never have the likes of Pascal, it can be good and it is just. From this confrontation, Nietzsche would have had to think more about his view of justice, something he more commonly launches out from, in criticizing others, than reflects on. Of course to find his way to Tocqueville Nietzsche would have had to overcome the neglect during Nietzsche’s time that Tocqueville apparently sank into in France, which neglect has in our time thankfully dissipated, especially in the thinking of Pierre Manent and Philippe Benéton.
[28] For example, KSA Nachlass Sommer 1883 10[45]; 11[2] and 13[2].
[29] For more, see my “What Does Zarathustra Whisper in Life’s Ear?” Nietzsche Studien, Band XVII:(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 179-194.
[30] Violence and the Sacred (Johns Hopkins, 1977, p. 295.
[31] Not however, Thomas West in Plato’s Apology of Socrates (Cornell U. P., 1979).
[32] As to who, before himself, made the discoveries he trumpets, Girard would surely name Christ, and after Him to some of the great poets, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare especially, and of course to Nietzsche. And since the distinction between all pagan sacrifice and Christ’s crucifixion is stressed by Nietzsche, one wonders if Girard learned it from . . . Nietzsche.
[33] In his Discord Chez Les Enemis (Discord Among Our Enemies: (trans as Our Enemy’s House Divided by Robert Eden (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
[34] As Hannah Arendt famously asked in her Eichmann in Jerusalem.
[35] I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for support during the time this was written, my students at Greifswald during that Sommer Semester (2006) and Dr. Till Kinzel for his corrections and comments.
Dear Clemens,
I realize that there are more than “few” corrections, so I’m going to send the page proofs with corrections in the margins on Monday. However, some of the most important corrections should be noted now, including some corrections that are too long and complicated to be written in the margins of the page proofs. These will be here below and only here below.
One other thing: I think German usage must dictate that when a quotation comes at the end of the sentence, the period is always comes after the quotation mark, like this “. In English however, the custom sometimes calls for the quotation mark to come after the period, like this .” Someone spent a tedious hour changing all mine, and since it would be as tedious for you to set them right, if you want to skip that, fine by me.
Now let me list the most important things to be changed.
First, the title I have settled on is “René Girard and Nietzsche Struggling”. (I like the way it puts the emphasis on N’s struggles, but also the way the slight ambiguity can suggest that Girard struggles with N.)
Second, here is what should be said about me; if it is too long, or too short, or too sharp, alert me, and I’ll adjust:
Prof. Dr. Michael Platt George Wythe College (Cedar City, Utah, United States) Humboldt Stipendiat, Universität Heidelberg (82-83 with Hans-Georg Gadamer) and Universität Greifswald, Philosophisches Institut, Sommer 2006, invited to return to the Politisches Institut, and returned to a circle of students for Sommer 2007 and Sommer 2008. His first book on Shakespeare was Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare; his work on Nietzsche appeared in Nietzsche Studien when Müller-Lauter and Montinari and were editors.
Third, the English translations of several of the long quotations of Nietzsche should be as indented from the left margin as the original German quotations just above them.
Now for the corrections, too large, or too complicated to put in the margins of the page proofs, which corrections will only appear here in this email.
First, On page 364 of the page proofs, towards the top, a whole passage have been omitted from my original text. Take a look at page 364; the missing passage goes in between the <***** and the *****>; and within the missing passage the quotation in German should be indented, and at the end of the missing passage, a new paragraph should begin, with “Why Girard .. . :
the supernal, surpassing love of the Redeemer over with resentiment. <***** Indeed, in Der Antichrist No. 27 he says Jesus was guilty, in depriving the Jews of the hope of becoming a nation once again, but in No. 58 in the course of a general criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche actually mentions “sacrifice of the innocent,” in a way that seems to include Christ, as a criticism of Christianity:
Diese Mucker-Schleicherei, die Konventikel-Heimlichkeit, düstere Begriffe wie Hölle, wie Opfer des Unschuldigen, wie unio mystica im Bluttrinken, vor allem das langsam aufgeschürte Feuer der Rache, der Tschandala-Rache – das wurde Herr über Rom, dieselbe Art von Religion, der in ihrer Präexistenz-Form schon Epikur den Krieg gemacht hatte.
To be sure, this is not as strong as the passage in the Nachlass. Nevertheless, it seems that sacrifice of the innocent is among the things that Roman Nietzsche finds objectionable in Christianity. Would Nietzsche then join Epicurus in war against the same sacrifice of the innocent in the worship of Dionysus? Nietzsche is certainly a man of contradictions. *****>
Why Girard does not look at Der Antichrist, I do not understand, unless he does not appreciate the difference between what a man writes in his notebook and what he decides to publish.
footnote 27 should read:
Here I summarize the concluding pages of Girard’s “Twofold Nietzschean Heritage.” Among those who do not neglect the religious struggle of Nietzsche, I am aware of more Germans than French scholars: e.g. Josef Pieper passim, Hans Urs von Balthasar (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, II), Henri de Lubac (Drama of Atheist Humanism), Roman Guardini, passim, Helmut Kuhn (Encounter with Nothingness), Eugen Biser (God-seeker or Antichrist? Nietzsche’s Provocative Criticism of Christianity and others), Gustave Thibon (Nietzsche or the Decline of the Spirit), Alistair Kee (Nietzsche Against the Crucified), and now Pope Benedict, in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (the first encyclical ever to address a worthy adversary of Christianity). There are also the fine collections: Jossua, Jean Pierre and Claude Geffre ed. Nietzsche and Christianity, Weaver Santaniello ed. Nietzsche and the Gods, and James O’Flaherty ed. Studies in Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
page 353, should read (with caps) II. DESIRES, WEAK AND STRONG
page 370 top, Title of section V, should read: V. WHITHER FROM HERE?
at the end of footnote 20 (in the page proofs) add this:
; more recent and laudibly skeptical is Ricahrd Shain’s The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis (Greenword: Westport, Connecticut, 2001).
Friends Of The Republic 