Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching

Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching: For Individuals and Culture is a collection of sixteen essays that takes the therapeutic objectives of Nietzsche's writings as its central theme. It situates Nietzsche's work in the Greco-Roman tradition in which philosophical methods and doctrines were considered to be “medicine for the soul,” capable of curing us from the afflictions of irrational desires, disordered psyches, or poorly cultivated characters. It is due largely to Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) and to Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995) and What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) that interest in the Hellenistic tradition has revived in recent years, and with it, a growing awareness of the appeal of the meta-philosophical view that philosophy, rather than being a purely theoretical activity aimed at discovering truth, is primarily an activity aimed at helping us live a healthy, balanced, and rational life.Horst Hutter's Nietzsche's New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006) and Michael Ure's Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008) already showed that reading Nietzsche's works through the lens of this ancient philosophical tradition is capable of shedding new light on both well-known and lesser-known parts of his oeuvre. Indeed, readers of Nietzsche are bound to notice that his works are littered with medical language and analogies: he famously describes himself as a “cultural physician” (D 52), he repeatedly diagnoses sicknesses he deems typical of modernity (e.g., GM III:14), and he explicitly states that his aim is to promote a new and greater type of “health” (GS 382). To read these and related aphorisms not as outdated nineteenth-century biologism—or worse, as a proto-Nazi form of social Darwinism—but instead as continuing the Hellenistic therapeutic tradition, intentionally modeling itself on medical practice, certainly constitutes an exciting and potentially fruitful reorientation of Nietzsche scholarship.In a collection that aims to investigate the therapeutic merits of Nietzsche's philosophy one would expect to find essays explaining (i) which sicknesses or conditions are in need of cure; (ii) which doctrines or techniques of Nietzsche's are meant to do the alleviating or curing; and (iii) an evaluation of how effective or satisfactory Nietzsche's proposals are, or at least a discussion of how one might go about such evaluations. These three requirements are introduced by the editors of the volume as the “diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic” (2) dimensions of therapeutic philosophizing. About half the essays of this volume succeed in living up to this expectation. I will survey these chapters first, before expressing a more critical view about the other chapters.Horst Hutter's opening essay (chapter 2) points out that Nietzsche's doctrines should be understood as curative suggestions for the modern cultural malaise of nihilism. Hutter argues that by drawing from the spiritual exercises of antiquity and Eastern traditions we can develop “new modes of askesis [exercise or training]” and new forms of “gymnastics of willing” (5). He also highlights the need to form political groups and societies of sane and life-affirming individuals in an effort to confront and ultimately overcome nihilism. Although the essay does not indicate what these new modes of askesis might be, or why classical or Eastern forms of spiritual training might be helpful for a typically modern cultural problem, it at least renders explicit which crisis they are meant to solve and why therapeutic philosophy is needed.Chapter 3 by Martine Béland focuses on Nietzsche's struggles with his own health, specifically in the context of his decision to leave his position at the University of Basel. The essay is rich in detail and presents a balanced account of Nietzsche's personal reflections on philosophical life inside and outside academia. Béland carefully traces Nietzsche's efforts at reconciling his true vocation to live a properly philosophical life and the life shaped by the profession he was actually in, arguing that Nietzsche decided to leave his position in order to counter the moral and physical illness induced by professional academia—thus it was ultimately a “therapeutic process” for Nietzsche (25).Chapter 9 by Keith Ansell-Pearson draws a series of parallels between Nietzsche's middle period philosophy and Epicurus' philosophy, arguing that Nietzsche was deeply influenced by the latter in this period of his writing. Ansell-Pearson shows that Nietzsche adopts a number of Epicurean doctrines to “temper the human mind,” to “quieten our being,” and to “conquer the fear of death” (98) by coming “to know and accept, even embrace, the mortal conditions of human existence” (101). The chapter makes a strong case for reading Nietzsche as belonging to an eudaimonistic ethical tradition, but simultaneously makes it clear why an Epicurean philosophical therapy is relevant for modern life characterized by social control, discipline, and severe ecological challenges. The essay therefore not only offers a novel account of an Epicurus-inspired Nietzsche—a voice radically different from the later more militant Nietzsche—but also brings out the contemporary relevance and limitations of Nietzsche's allegiance with Epicurus.Michael Ure's chapter 10 and Babette Babich's chapter 12 draw further parallels between Nietzsche and the Hellenistic tradition. Babich analyzes Nietzsche's unpublished aphorisms on Empedocles and Lucian, focusing on the classical theme that the ultimate task of philosophy is to learn how to die, and thereby to overcome the “human, all too human desire for worldly supremacy, this-worldly and all too slavish power” (168). Ure picks up on a different theme, namely, the way the Stoics used exercises to adopt the so-called Olympian “view from above” (118), which offers a serene spectatorship of nature. Ure convincingly develops the thesis that Nietzsche similarly encourages free spirits to adopt this point of view, and in so doing, to overcome the distress caused by an awareness of the general purposelessness of human existence, ultimately enabling “free spirits to take joy in nature” (118).The other essays included in the collection (with two further exceptions, to which I will turn shortly) regrettably do little more than recycle the familiar set of Nietzschean memes—the eternal return, the will to power, agonism, the overhuman, and so on—adding, often only in passing, that these concepts have some kind of therapeutic value, but repeatedly failing to work out what this therapeutic value is or which particular ends it is supposed to serve. Some of these chapters focus heavily on Z and read more as literary exercises on Zarathustra's metaphors than focused analyses of their therapeutic value. A recurring theme is that of agonism, for which a number of contributors claim therapeutic relevance, but again, without clarifying how or why this is so. I will now give an indication of the sort of claims made in these chapters, but I should emphasize that the reader interested in Nietzsche's therapeutics, or his philosophy more generally, will gain relatively little from them.Chapter 4 by Nathalie Lachance addresses the problem of education after the demise of belief in absolute truths, but then concentrates on Nietzsche's remarks on how to read: without haste, not bringing everything back to one's own education, and not expecting results and new tables of what is good as a conclusion. She suggests that Nietzsche's often inconclusive thoughts and agonistic aphorisms, when approached in this fashion, will enable a process of liberation. Chapter 5 by José Daniel Parra draws together a range of familiar themes of Nietzsche's later philosophy: amor fati, the eternal return, anti-Platonism, the will to truth, and nihilism. Parra presents these notions as an “enticement to self-examination, personal development, and spiritual self-overcoming” (47). Bela Egyed's chapter 7 adds to these underdeveloped claims the idea that Nietzsche's therapy is neither pleasant nor comforting, but offers instead a bitter medicine—even claiming that “it is harmful to life as we now live it” (77). Egyed adds that nonetheless Nietzsche's therapy will bring about “new ways of valuing, new ways of living, new ways of sensing” (74). Chapter 15 by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy seeks to analyze what she calls “Nietzschean political physiology” through a discussion of the concepts “great politics,” “eternal return,” and “the philosopher of the future”—without any further discernable thesis.In chapter 6 Willow Verkerk focuses on the theme of friendship in Z. She argues that Zarathustra advocates enmity, contest, and competition in friendships, and claims that this is connected to “therapeutic self-overcoming and a striving towards the Overhuman” (62). Although Nietzsche's encouragement to forge combative friendships is worked out in detail, Verkerk's more ambitious claim remains little more than a bare assertion. The theme of agonism returns in Yunus Tuncel's chapter 8, which highlights the agonistic spirit of Nietzsche's rhetoric, claiming it has “healing aspects” (81). It discusses the theme of the agon in ancient myth, politics, and games before proceeding to Nietzsche's claims about power and the “agonistic practices” that make for “a new regime of askesis” (88).A more specific focus on Z is found in chapters 11 and 13. In chapter 11 Ranier Hanshe focuses on the value attributed to incubation and dream-states in Z. He analyzes how pre-Socratic philosophers used incubation as a technique to experience “dying before you die” (148), and argues that Nietzsche equally considers dreaming a “deeply meditative activity” in which the soul is “stretching out” (145), allowing insight into the psyche's “hidden depths” (114). Chapter 13 by Graham Parkes presents a different take on Zarathustra's sermons by focusing on the therapeutic powers of the natural world, especially stones and rocks. The image of a rock is claimed to signify “death” (177), “that in us that we cannot change” and “the very bottom of the soul” (184), and “the spirit of heaviness” (188)—all of which are to be overcome by contemplating the eternal return of the same.Finally, in chapter 17 Eli Friedland tries to show that the spiritual transformations Nietzsche envisioned exhibit strong continuities with Christianity. Connections are developed between the overman and Christ, the eternal return and Christ's second coming, and will to power and original sin, resulting in the conclusion that Nietzsche's philosophy “mirrors Christianity in an uncanny way” (240) and the suggestion that his doctrines fulfill, rather than destroy, Christianity (236, 239)—unsubstantiated claims that will make most readers of Nietzsche frown with skepticism.Two other chapters do not really fall into the two groups of papers that I have distinguished. They are relatively self-standing essays that do not connect directly with the theme of Nietzschean therapeutics, but nevertheless contain high quality scholarship. The first of these is chapter 14 by Lawrence J. Hatab, which explicates Nietzsche's idea of selfhood, emphasizing that he tried to do away with “the modern model of an individual, unified, substantive and autonomous self” (191). Through a careful study of Nietzsche's remarks on the development of self-consciousness and language, the chapter highlights that creativity and self-shaping is a matter of breaking with existing structures of meaning and disrupting ordinary forms of communication. The second is chapter 16 by Béatrice Han-Pile, which concentrates on the notion of amor fati, building on her earlier work on this topic (“Nietzsche and Amor Fati,” European Journal of Philosophy 19.2 [2011]: 224–62). The chapter argues that amor fati is to be understood as an “agapic bestowal of value” (226), which produces a transfiguration of the person engaged in such bestowals. Han-Pile introduces the concept of “medio-passivity,” and argues that this concept can help us understand how amor fati “requires our participation” even though “it does not fully depend on us” (227).Overall, what promises to be an original, provocative, and perhaps even agenda-setting collection of essays turns out to be a very mixed collection, probably best read selectively depending on one's interests: Nietzsche's philosophical therapy inspired by Hellenistic philosophy (chapters 2, 3, 9, 10, 12), Zarathustra's metaphors (chapters 4, 6, 11, 13, 17), agonism (chapters 4, 5, 6, 8), selfhood (chapter 14), or amor fati (chapter 16). The volume nonetheless makes a strong case for approaching Nietzsche's thought in light of the therapeutic conception of philosophy, showing with several highly original essays how fruitful this approach to Nietzsche's philosophy can be

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