Online First: Nietzschean Patience

Forgot to mention this with my other big announcement: my article "Nietzschean Patience" is now available Online First in The Journal of Value Inquiry. There are also several other papers there on Nietzsche and virtue. (These are to be published as a special issue; my article just happened to get accepted around the same time. A nice coincidence!) Enjoy.

"I Don't Have Time to be Patient!" (and a question about Nietzsche)

Or time to blog. It's been very busy this semester, busier than usual on the teaching front with three preps (one course is team-taught, but it also meets 5 days a week; more about it another day). Basically, I'm aching for time to write (I'm beginning to revise the thing that will become a book on patience), and this makes me feel a little discombobulated even though I'm enjoying the teaching. Some of my classes are rather front-loaded (in terms of reading and preparation), so things might pick up here soon, as I find myself needing to test out revised ideas and having a little more time to do so.

Later this month, I'll get to test out a short version of my paper on "Nietzschean Patience" in Nashville at the annual TPA meeting.

One thing I am trying to figure out, as I fold some of the above ideas from Nietzsche into the book, is what to make of Nietzsche's remark in The Gay Science (§336) that our patience (and good will, etc.) with what is strange is always rewarded by the thing's revealing itself "as a new and indescribable beauty." What about the things that are strange and, as it turns out after long attention and study, ugly? What about the fact that there are some things (in GS §276) that he will "negate" by "looking away" (though he does not otherwise want to "wage war against ugliness")? I suppose the easiest resolution would be to take the remark about patience with what as strange to be an overstatement, but one worth making since we often don't see as much beauty in what is strange as we could if we paid more attention (and got over ourselves a bit). However, elsewhere (in Daybreak, §550), he says that, "knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful." So, perhaps he means what he says, without overstatement, in GS?

P.S. He continues in Daybreak §550: "...he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything 'beautiful in itself'? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things - may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition!"

Nietzschean Patience Again

Here's a first draft of my efforts to say something about Nietzsche's various remarks about patience. I've yet to look at some sources others (thanks, j. and Rob Sica) have pointed out to me. The conclusion feels a bit weak, but I need to let it sit. In the mean time, perhaps others will have some thoughts and suggestions.

Nietzschean Patience

Nietzsche's various remarks on patience and virtues have lurked in the background of my thinking as I've worked on my papers and book about patience, at times as a kind of warning, questioning voice, that asks things like, "Are you covering up what is weakness as strength? Are you thinking like a 'slave'?" But Nietzsche himself also has positive things to say about patience (Geduld). I'm trying to write some on this now, and am currently trying to think about how the following two passages fit (or fail to fit) together.

First, from The Gay Science §336:

One must learn to love. —This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way—there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned.

Second, from Twilight of the Idols, "What the Germans Lack," §6:

People must learn to see, they must learn to think, they must learn to speak and to write: the goal in all three cases is a noble culture.—Learning to see—getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of an individual case from all sides. This is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is close to what an unphilosophical way of speaking calls a strong will: the essential thing here is precisely not ‘to will’, to be able to suspend the decision. Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus—you have to react, you follow every impulse. In many cases this sort of compulsion is already a pathology, a decline, a symptom of exhaustion,—almost everything that is crudely and unphilosophically designated a ‘vice’ is really just this physiological inability not to react.—A practical application of having learned to see: your learning process in general becomes slow, mistrustful, reluctant. You let foreign things, new things of every type, come towards you while assuming an initial air of calm hostility,—you pull your hand away from them. To keep all your doors wide open, to lie on your stomach, prone and servile before every little fact, to be constantly poised and ready to put yourself into—plunge yourself into—other things, in short, to espouse the famous modern ‘objectivity’—all this is in bad taste, it is ignobility par excellence. 

Nietzsche's patience seems significantly more circumspect in TI; there's not the seeming optimism in GS that patience always "pays off" or that anything and everything will, with enough patience, reveal to us its hitherto hidden beauty. In TI, the idea seems mainly to be that we need to be able to sit still and be calm, unjudging, long enough to arrive at a better judgment. But that might well be, so it seems, that this thing or person doesn't deserve a whit more of my patience (or forbearance, etc.).

Perhaps Nietzsche is worried about different things in each of these passages; in GS, there is a general theme of being adventurous and open. But TI reigns that in at least to remind us that, as it were, a mind that is too open is like a parachute with a hole in it. Splat. The "always" in the GS passage ("We are always rewarded in the end...") might seem out of tune with the caution and distrust and "calm hostility" in the TI. But maybe not, if the reward of patience is just that we come better to see what there is to be seen. If TI is supposed to show us the perils of decadence--as Ridley suggests in his introduction to the Cambridge edition--then is there still the issue that there is perhaps some decadence in the optimism--that there is beauty to uncover in everything--in GS? (Or: we can't even assume in advance what the particular "reward" of our patience will be? And some things might just be irredeemably ugly, stupid, monstrous, etc., in which case we'd better be careful about being forbearing lest we get squashed or sullied, etc.)

Lucky Find (& Bleg)

I'm working to put together a packet of readings from Nietzsche's The Gay Science for my Honors Humanities classes (as a preface to Sartre), and came across this. I doubt Cambridge University Press would be happy about it. But get it while it's hot (in more ways than one, I guess).

If anyone has any particular suggestions about what I *must* include in my packet, shoot. (Certainly, I'm including the death of God stuff, and some bits that capture his, as the 'all things shining' folks might put it, "polytheism"... I'm also skimming back over for swipes at utilitarian ethics, since I just finished teaching Bentham...)

Greatness?

From The Gay Science, Sec. 325:

What belongs to greatness--Who will attain something great if he does not feel in himself the power to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least; weak women and even slaves often achieve mastery at that. But not to perish of inner distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering--that is great; that belongs to greatness.

Rob Sica brought this passage to my attention when I first introduced the notion that facing others as subjects is an essential part of moral courage, the taking of stand for one's moral convictions. This is no doubt one of the "terrible" moments in Nietzsche's work--that is, roughly, the sort of thing that the Nazis would have liked.

I don't know enough about Nietzsche's life to speculate much about the psychological motivations for this kind of statement, though my general impression is that he was a generally civil, gentle, and frail man. Perhaps there was some self-loathing here?

Whether we want to agree that what he describes is a feature of greatness, he is at least right that we do not like to look at suffering, and it is furthermore difficult, as Gaita has said, to see the humanity in another who is suffering greatly from some affliction. There is a greatness of soul in the person who can see that. (Gaita would say that it takes a saint to see it in the hardest cases, but that seems rather different from what Nietzsche has in mind.)

But what about Nietzsche's seemingly terrible point about inflicting suffering? I think it is connected to the point about, for to "hear the cry of this suffering" could be read as hearing the cry of a fellow human (or even fellow creature). It might seem that Nietzsche's great man is capable of being utterly heartless.

On the other hand, it might seem that he has a point to make that connects to what I've suggested about facing others: if genuine moral courage involves facing others as subjects, and should the stand one takes cause others to suffer (either physically or psychologically), then it is one thing to avoid facing those effects of one's actions by objectifying (or demonizing, etc.) those one opposes, and something different to remain steadfast in one's aims, while recognizing the humanity of those one opposes. As Duncan Richter has recently noted, it will be tempting to see those one opposes in abstract, objectifying terms. This, I suspect, makes it easier to justify doing terrible things to them, because this objectification allows one to act without facing the particularity (and distinct humanity) of those others. One might think that this is where the Nazis failed, though I'm not sure how plausible this is, and such a sweeping suggestion is an abstraction itself.

So, maybe Nietzsche is thinking that it is only if one can honestly face the other as a fellow human that one shows greatness. We could understand such an honest facing as being fully alive to their suffering--to how bad it is, not "alive" in the sense of enjoying it. In many cases, I would guess that being fully alive to it would force us to stop what we are doing, and in many cases, that might be the point (even Nietzsche's point). But then Nietzsche leaves open that one's cause could be worthy enough to overrule this empathetic engagement. And this would be part of saying "Yes!" to everything, as Richter notes (in the post above). At the moment, I can't think of a way of describing such a situation that wouldn't still leave it seeming terrible--"I'm sorry, but this is what I must do..." or, "I know you are suffering, but you deserve it..."--but perhaps that's Nietzsche's point. This is related, among other things, to revenge, and I hope to return to that topic soon (in connection with moral courage).