What one requires is the development of an Epicurean attitude that will counteract the tendency toward pity that Nietzsche thinks people of modernity share. In The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche refers to two kinds of Epicurean “consolation” to help one accept the ways things are (WS §7) and in Daybreak he recommends an alternative to approaching the friend with pity. Nietzsche asks whether it is more useful to help another person by “immediately leaping to his side” which can itself become an overpowering act in which one attempts to exert their own will upon the other. Perhaps it might be more helpful to create “something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospital gate” (D §174). Following Epicurus, we should “share our friends’ suffering not with laments but with thoughtful concern.”[15]
This essay has attempted to illuminate Epicurean elements in Nietzsche’s middle works through a study of the free spirit and the therapeutic aspects of Nietzsche’s joyful friendship. For Epicurus, friendship takes one away from the pain of human mortality and toward tranquility through the community and security it provides.[16] In Nietzsche’s joyful friendship, free spirits become less anxious about their mortality through enabling each other to express and share joy. The community that they hold together provides a healing balm for the realities of human life, one which allows for the activation of an affirmative energy. “Why is making joyful the greatest of all joys?—Because we thereby give joy to our fifty separate drives all at once. Individually they may be very little joys: but if we take them all into one hand, our hand is fuller than at any other time—and our heart too!” (D §422)
Works Cited
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Beyond compassion: on Nietzsche’s moral therapy in Dawn.”
Continental Philosophy Review 44, 2011, pp.179-204
— “Heroic-idyllic philosophizing : Nietzsche and the Epicurean tradition.” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74, 2014, pp.237-263.
DeWitt, Norman Wentworth. Epicurus and his Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.
Hutter, Horst. Shaping The Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic
Practices. Oxford, Lexington Books, 2006.
Inwood, Brad and L.P. Gerson. The Epicurus Reader. Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing, 1994.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
—Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, Vintage 1966.
—Daybreak. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
—The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, Vintage, 1974.
—Human All Too Human. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
—On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe, Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
—Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Translated by Siegfried Mandel, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Long, A.A & D.N. Sedley. The Hellenistic philosophers vol. 1 Translations of the Principal
Sources with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Van Tongeren, Paul. Reinterpreting Modern Culture. West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 2000.
Verkerk, Willow. “Nietzsche’s Agonistic Ethics of Friendship.” Symposium: Canadian Journal
for Continental Philosophy 20.2, Fall 2016, pp.22-41.
[1] Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Trans. Siegfried Mandel, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2001. It was first published in German in 1894 as Friedrich Nietzsche in Seinen Werke.
[2] Translation modified. The German is, Wie man wird, was man ist
[3] Hutter, Horst. Shaping The Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices. Oxford, Lexington Books, 2006, p. 4.
[4] Long, A.A & D.N. Sedley. The Hellenistic philosophers vol. 1 Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.149.
[5] DeWitt, Norman Wentworth. Epicurus and his Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954, p.183.
[6] Ibid., p.150.
[7] Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Heroic-idyllic philosophizing : Nietzsche and the Epicurean tradition.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74, 2014, pp.237-263, 263.
[8] Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Beyond compassion: on Nietzsche’s moral therapy in Dawn.” Continental Philosophy Review 44, 2011, pp.179-204, 180.
[9] Ansell-Pearson, “Beyond compassion: on Nietzsche’s moral therapy in Dawn,” p. 182.
[10] Citing The Gay Science (P§2), Van Tongeren claims that Nietzsche approaches philosophy as “a physician of culture,” both as a psychologist and a physiologist. Nietzsche did so because he was influenced by the medical Greek approach to doing philosophy and also because he endured much suffering through illness in his life and his philosophical approach was admittedly affected by this. Van Tongeren, Paul. Reinterpreting Modern Culture. West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 2000, pp. 2-3.
[11] Inwood, Brad and L.P. Gerson. The Epicurus Reader. Indiannapolis/Cambridge, Hackett Publishing, 1994, p.33.
[12] DeWitt, Epicurus and his Philosophy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1954, p.29.
[13] Verkerk, Willow. “Nietzsche’s Agonistic Ethics of Friendship.” Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 20.2, Fall 2016, pp.22-41.
[14] Inwood, The Epicurus Reader, 1994, p.38.
[15] The Epicurus Reader, p.39.
[16] In The Principal Doctrines of Diogenes Laertius, one can find the following: “The same understanding produces confidence about there being nothing terrible which is eternal of [even] long-lasting and has also realized that security amid even these limited [bad things] is most easily achieved through friendship.” The Epicurus Reader, p.34.