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ABSTRACT
Between his calling into question, on the one hand, the apparently unquestionable value of compassion itself, and his refusal, on the other hand, to concede that suffering is unconditionally bad, Nietzsche has been understood by many as expressing a callous indifference, or worse, to most human suffering. This article aims to show that this interpretation relies on an oversimplified characterization of the relevant moral emotions. Compassion (or pity, either of which word can be used to translate the German das Mitleid) is ‘a polyphonous being’, as Nietzsche insists in Daybreak (1881). A closer look at some key passages in Nietzsche’s text, and some help from Greek thinkers Nietzsche points us toward, will demonstrate that this term has meanings that have been lost to us. Recovering those meanings will shed light both on Nietzsche’s critique of compassion (or pity) and on his own attitude toward suffering.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 Nietzsche’s works are cited throughout this article using these standard abbreviations, followed by an abbreviated section title (if applicable) and section or aphorism number: A = Antichrist, BGE = Beyond Good and Evil, D = Daybreak, GM = On the Genealogy of Morality, GS = The Gay Science, HH = Human, All Too Human, Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All translations are in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, except for GM, trans. by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). KSA stands for Kritische Studienausgabe, the standard 15-vol. edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished work ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967ff.).
2 Part of the usefulness of this means of individuating emotions is that it is noncommittal with respect to the debate about cognitivism and the nature of emotions: ‘Both cognitivists and non-cognitivists typically assume that emotions have characteristic eliciting conditions; for example, fear occurs in response to (real or anticipated) danger, and sadness occurs in context of loss. Both sides also agree that emotions typically promote different patterns of behavior, and that behaviors require bodily changes that can be experienced as conscious feelings’ (Prinz Citation2010, 522). Following Prinz, then, and Haidt, I will be characterizing emotions in this discussion primarily by their eliciting conditions and action tendencies.
3 Renford Bambrough offers a ‘Proof of the Objectivity of Morality’, inspired by G.E. Moore’s ‘commonsense’ refutation of external world scepticism, in which he bets the entire farm, so to speak, on the undeniability of the claim, ‘We know that this child, who is about to undergo what would otherwise be painful surgery, should be given an anaesthetic before the operation’ (Bambrough Citation1969, 39). To deny this proposition is unthinkable; to accept it, he argues, demonstrates that there is at least one objective moral truth.
4 This is important to note because there are some thinkers (e.g. Christian thinkers responding to the challenge that the problem of suffering poses to theism) who deny, implausibly, either the amount of suffering in the world (claiming that, really, on balance, things are better than they appear) or its undesirability (claiming that, really, experiences are what you make of them, or some such), or who insist on its necessity (on the flimsy epistemic ground, for instance, that without experiences of suffering we would not understand pleasure, or happiness, or goodness). Nietzsche sees through these facile theodicies and is engaged in no such project himself.
5 See, e.g. Churchland (Citation2013), esp. chaps. 5 (‘Aggression and Sex’) and 6 (‘Such a Lovely War’).
6 See GS for another novel suggestion, that for all we know our capacity for experiencing joy is tethered to our capacity for experiencing pain in such a way that to eradicate one would threaten to eliminate the other: ‘For happiness and misfortune [Glück und Unglück] are two siblings and twins who either grow up together or—as with you [who would eradicate suffering in the interest of promoting others’ comfort]—remain small together!’ (GS 338; see also D 354). If this were true, it would make a reduction in either our capacity for or our opportunities for suffering something of a devil’s bargain.
7 I borrow this phrase from Christopher Janaway, who has argued persuasively for a sense in which Nietzsche encourages ‘growth through suffering’, and who concludes, rightly, that what is critical for our understanding of Nietzsche’s remarks on suffering throughout his career is our recognition that, for Nietzsche, suffering (like everything else) has no invariant value across all contexts (Janaway Citation2017b, 164; Citation2017a, 78–83).
8 ‘In such countless but very small doses in which malice makes itself felt it is a powerful stimulant to life: just as benevolence, disseminated through the human world in the same form, is the ever available medicine.—But will there be many honest men prepared to admit that causing pain gives pleasure? […]’ (HH 50).
9 Nietzsche’s infamous maxim, ‘Profound suffering makes you noble; it separates’ (BGE 270) seems to support such a reading, but it is crucial to appreciate the restricted scope of this remark—obviously, not all suffering has this effect.
10 Ken Gemes (Citation2023, 1308n1) characterizes the attitude of Nietzsche’s ‘masters’ in GM toward the miserable and downtrodden this way: ‘Masters can feel pity for the miserable, dishonourable, lives of slaves but be in no way moved to try to improve the lot of their slaves, to reduce their suffering; something they could easily do. Such masters cannot be said to have compassion for their slaves.’ On this issue, see also von Tevenar (Citation2007).
11 On Leiter’s analysis, Nietzsche takes the condition of suffering to be internal to, and basically ineradicable for, human beings. The incurability of the weak and sick both render most efforts expended on their behalf futile, and also, crucially, risk the condition of those who are stronger and healthier. Thus, the best strategy is rigorous quarantine, and compassionate feelings may be an obstacle to good hygiene. These observations are on target for a great deal of human suffering, but internal conditions do not account for all its forms. Suffering can be quantitatively increased for human beings; if it could not, Nietzsche would not have reason to complain, as he so frequently does, either that compassion (Mitleid) increases the amount of suffering in the world, or that the moral guilt and notions of sin conjured up by priests amounts to the invention of new forms of torture.
12 The Third Essay of GM advances the hypothesis that Christianity succeeds by opportunistically exploiting man’s need for meaning. Finding humanity on the brink of suicidal nihilism, Pauline Christianity supplies an interpretation for suffering that effectively seduces humans back to life. It might be thought that its doing so means Christianity cannot cause suffering; rather, one may object, the point advanced in the Third Essay is that Christianity provides a balm, an anaesthetic, that it addresses and alleviates man’s suffering. That Christianity alleviates one kind of (existential) suffering, however, in no way entails that it cannot cause suffering in a host of other forms.
13 Nietzsche opposes the idea that suffering is intrinsically or inherently bad. This does not entail that he thinks it is good, nor does it follow that he can never oppose any instance of suffering. It is clear that he regards gratuitous or otherwise avoidable cruelty, indulged for nefarious religious or moral purposes, as objectionable, particularly if it results in repulsive, horrific, or ugly spectacles, and he often describes it as eliciting disgust. This is perfectly compatible with his maintaining, as he does, that suffering is sometimes indispensable to great or noble enterprises.
14 In this paper I focus on Nietzsche’s analysis of Mitleid and his own reactive attitude to the suffering induced by ascetic morality. In the current literature, many readers tend to other facets of Nietzsche’s concern with suffering, especially insofar as it is motivated by his response to pessimism (see, e.g. Came Citation2006; Citation2022; Janaway Citation2017a; Citation2017b; and May Citation2016). Came and May, in particular, read Nietzsche as some sort of apologist burdened with the philosophical task of justifying suffering, and consequently see him as carrying on within a Christian tradition of theodicy. This interpretation is misguided in its own ways, I believe, but that argument is beyond the scope of the current paper.
15 It is worth clarifying at this point that either of the English words pity or compassion (and sometimes even sympathy) can be used – and have been used in the history of Anglophone translations of Nietzsche’s texts – to render the German term das Mitleid, which Nietzsche uses in all of these passages. Salient as the difference in connotation between pity and compassion seems to us, however, it is crucial to note that the difference does not exist in German.
16 The point about interpretations is not incidental: In D 83, Nietzsche repeats the lament from D 78 (‘Poor mankind!—’) in the title of the passage, and in the section following that one, he excoriates ‘the philology of Christianity’ for its blatant dishonesty. Christianity is (again, among other things) an interpretive scheme, but it is an unprincipled one: ‘they [Christian scholars] present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and are rarely in any honest perplexity over the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. […] … how the Bible is pummelled and punched and the art of reading badly is in all due form imparted to the people’ (D 84). Two sections later, and again echoing D 83, Nietzsche describes the ‘torment’ of the one who has been led to interpret the various ‘chance operations’ of his bodily machine as signs of salvation or damnation: ‘Oh what an unhappy interpreter!’, Nietzsche exclaims (D 86). Christianity not only indulges in bad modes of interpretation; it weaponizes bad philology. It is this running theme that makes Nietzsche’s contrast with his own ‘art of reading well’ and good philology significant. Psychology, too, is an interpretive art, and one to which Daybreak is devoted; that Christians are bad at this, too, is not unconnected to the way in which they promote an understanding of compassion that serves their purposes but misconstrues the real psychological phenomenon.
17 For solving this riddle of D 78, sadly, the relevant Kommentar passage is singularly unhelpful and might well be misleading: ‘Die Griechen haben ein eigenes Wort für die Empörung über das Unglück des Andern] Dieses Wort lautet νϵμϵσσητικόν. Der Verbalstamm hat die Bedeutung “unwillig sein”. In einem nachgelassenen Notat vom Jahr 1876 heißt es: “νϵμϵσσητικόν ist der Götterneid” (17[58], KSA 8, 307)’ (Schmidt Citation2015, 162). In D 78, Nietzsche clearly has in mind an affect, an emotional response; the term nemesētikon, however, suggests something more stable over time, like a temperament or trait of character. In Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle considers whether being nemesētikos could contribute to the development of virtue. But the explicit juxtaposition of ‘indignation’ and ‘pity’ in D 78 and the prevalence of forensic motifs in the surrounding passages is far more relevant to the analysis in Rhetoric. See Coker (Citation1992, 64) for further discussion and a helpful explanation for why ‘the mean temperament of being nemesētikos is not homologous with or reducible to the mean affect nemesis’.
18 According to David Konstan, it is ‘Aristotle’s penetrating discussion of pity in his Rhetoric which set the terms for subsequent technical treatments in classical antiquity’ (Konstan Citation2001, 18). It is a touchstone passage, and it is the one I believe makes the best sense of Nietzsche’s remark about the ‘brotherhood’ of two important moral emotions, pity and indignation. That Nietzsche does not mention Aristotle by name or provide any citations to the Rhetoric shouldn’t surprise us. But that we cannot make complete sense of Nietzsche’s remarks on Mitleid in Daybreak without this text will soon become clear enough.
19 Citations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by volume number, chapter, and page number where necessary refer to the Loeb Classical Library Vol. XXII, trans. John Henry Freese and revised by Gisela Striker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926/2020).
20 It is the relevance of assessments of desert or liability to punishment that earns this discussion a place in a treatise on forensics. And it further supports my suggestion that Nietzsche has Aristotle’s text in mind here: Nietzsche’s observations about Mitleid in Book I of Daybreak also arise in the context of thinking about suffering as a punishment for sin and about judgment, justice, and desert. The title of D 78 is ‘Justice which punishes—’.
21 Translation slightly altered. Interestingly, the temptation to connect Aristotle to Nietzsche was clearly irresistible to John Freese, who takes the opportunity to add a footnote to Nietzsche after the opening sentence of Rhet. II, 9 in his 1926 English translation for the Loeb Classical Library: ‘“the nobler brother of envy” (Nietzsche)’. Freese has in mind HH II 'WS' 29, rather than D 78; my thanks to James Martin for clarification of the reference.
22 For this example and for many comments and suggestions that helped me clarify the relationship between eleos and nemesān, and that substantially reoriented my thinking about these issues, I am deeply indebted to my colleague Allison Piñeros-Glasscock.
23 Citations of Homer’s Iliad refer to the Stanley Lombardo translation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997); cited by book and then line number.
24 For an illuminating account of this transformation, see Keaty (Citation2005, 185–186): ‘While Aquinas incorporates into his account of mercy the central elements from Aristotle’s analysis of pity, Aquinas turns to Augustine’s definition of mercy … for the categories according to which Aquinas will organize his four articles on mercy. … Two categories emerge from Augustine’s definition. The first category is “another’s distress” that evokes or causes a person to feel heartfelt sympathy for the suffering person. The second category is the subjective disposition in the merciful person “impelling” the merciful person to succour the one suffering. … Thus, while Thomas [Aquinas] incorporates Aristotle’s central observations concerning pity into the account of Christian mercy, Thomas places Aristotle’s observations within the framework provided by Augustine’s definition of mercy, alerting us that a transformation of Aristotle is occurring’ (emphasis added). This is the religious and moral attitude to suffering and the conception of well being as freedom from distress that Nietzsche assails in BGE 225, to which I shall return.
25 To clarify, I take the idea of ‘innocent misfortune’ in D 78 merely to rule out suffering one has reason to expect given one’s own actions. The Achaeans, for instance, would suffer at the hands of Hector a harm they did not bring on themselves. Contrast their case with that of Prometheus, mentioned in D 83 (which is titled, ‘Poor mankind!’): At first, it looks absurd for Nietzsche to suggest that a human being today might suffer more from a physical malady (‘one drop of blood too much or too little in the brain’) than the mythical Prometheus, whose ghastly punishment lasts an eternity. Does the modern’s condition hurt more? Surely not. Nietzsche’s point is that the Christian (mis-)interpretation of the causes of suffering in such a case (their wilful ‘misunderstanding of the body’) not only does nothing to help the sufferer, but in fact exacerbates his situation. On the one hand, by appearing to provide an explanation, it stands in the way of an investigation into the proper causes of the pain. On the other hand, ‘it also makes the sufferer’s imagination suffer, so that […] he feels himself morally reprehensible and cast out’ (D 78). Nietzsche’s point is that Prometheus, for all that he suffers, is better off insofar as he understands that his suffering is in fact punishment. He knows exactly why he suffers. Consequently, we can be horrified at his suffering, but not moved to pity: ‘“Yes, he should have gone his way a little more cautiously and will less haughtiness!”’ (D 78).
26 That shortcoming he identifies in HH 2 as the ‘family failing of philosophers’.
27 Note that Nietzsche is not merely levelling the puerile accusation that behind every action there are ulterior motives. That intuition – the crude intuition underlying most egoisms – is an empirical psychological claim. Though Nietzsche’s psychological observations in the middle-period works provide heaps of support for that conclusion, establishing it is not his goal here. Instead, Nietzsche’s critique of ascetic ideals goes further, by raising questions about the very coherence of the idea that a self could ‘set itself aside’ in the required sense and whether doing so could be a desirable or even reasonable aim.
28 Don’t appeal to Hamlet for pity, for instance. Thanks to Mark Migotti for the illustration.
29 It is for this reason that the Greek gods, who are more powerful than mortals, though not invincible, are quicker to outrage or indignation (nemesān) than to pity (eleos). Yet it is important to note that the pathos of distance does not render them indifferent to the fate of human beings: Hera clearly thinks Poseidon ought to be able to find it in his heart to aid the dying Achaeans by joining her in thwarting Hector’s plans for vengeance.
30 Loss of self is part of what requires us to ‘guard against’ pity, as Nietzsche explains in D 134. I believe this consequence, in particular, the losing or giving up of oneself, also tracks Nietzsche’s characterization of Mitleid as feminine; the ‘more manly’ version, by contrast, would be self-preserving. See also D 172 on how ‘hard and warlike souls’ experience pity.
31 That is, I believe, in the feeling more precisely picked out by the term eleos, a feeling which is, in our modern context, only misleadingly or badly translated by Mitleid.
32 I leave aside here the interpretive question whether, for Aristotle, cognitive judgments are partially constitutive of emotions or are just causally prior to them, and with that question, I leave aside the issue of whether Nietzsche is committed to what we would now call ‘cognitivism’ about the emotions and, if so, in what form.
33 See, e.g. D 134; GS 271; GM III, 14; A 7. Of course, Nietzsche is fully aware that in some contexts, Aristotle, too, ‘saw pity as a dangerous pathology’ (A 7), ‘a morbid recurring affect the perilousness of which can be removed by periodical deliberate discharge’ (D 134). In a notebook passage from 1880, around the time of his writing Daybreak, Nietzsche does refer to explicitly to Aristotle, conveying precisely the idea that pity must be periodically discharged through tragedy (KSA 9:4[110]). But Aristotle’s account allows that it bespeaks a virtuous or noble character to experience pity for the right object, in the right circumstances, in the right measure; it is an excess of pity that can be harmful. Nietzsche appreciates this point, as well as its connection to the power of tragedy, the cathartic effect of which keeps pity from overcoming or poisoning the man of honour or noble character.
34 For an important discussion of the connection between Nietzsche’s investment in the value of honour and our capacity for empathy (especially as this capacity is manifest in Nietzsche’s ‘higher types’ of human being), see Ganesh (Citation2017).
35 This passage is not an anomaly. In Nietzsche’s description of the ‘noble’ character in GM, he cautions us: ‘Do not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances that, for example, the Greek nobility places in all words by which it distinguishes the lower people from itself; how they are mixed with and sugared by a kind of pity [Bedauern], considerateness [Rücksicht], [even] leniency [Nachsicht]’ (I, 10). Tellingly, Nietzsche eschews the term Mitleid in connection with this benevolent glance, but it is significant that the noble attitude is fully capable of its own kind of softness. See also BGE 293, where Nietzsche allows that ‘if a man [who is naturally master] has pity, well then! this pity is worth something!’
36 The contrast with Christian compassion is obvious here, too. The Christian version of this moral emotion is at least compatible with complete inaction, and the Schopenhauerian version even more obviously so, since Schopenhauer has been read by some as a quietist.
37 On Nietzsche’s own characterization of his aims as rectifying, see also D 52, D 54 (‘Do you now understand our task?’), and the closing short aphorisms of GS Book III, including GS 273 and 274 (‘What is most human to you?—To spare someone shame’). On the adjacent ‘anti-compassion’ passage GS 271 (‘Where lie your greatest dangers?—In compassion [Im Mitleiden]’), see footnote 33 above.
38 Cf. BGE 62, which uses the same term in offering an assessment of the legacy of Christianity. Interestingly, the affect of disgust, evident in this and many passages in which Nietzsche paints a vivid picture of the legacy of suffering wrought by Christian asceticism, is also not anathema to pity (eleos) on Aristotle’s understanding of it. As we are now in a position to see, that aversive reaction, like the fear that is partly constitutive of eleos, is evidence of a certain fellow-feeling, an empathetic response the absence of which is not admirable. The aversion and its unpleasantness are partly constitutive of the motivational force of this attitude, and therefore help explain its retaliatory action tendency.
39 This article has benefitted from the generosity of interlocutors too numerous to mention, including many of my colleagues at Georgia State University. I would also like to thank, collectively though not exclusively, participants at the 2023 International Society for Nietzsche Studies meeting in Atlanta, and audiences at the University of Kansas, University of New Mexico, Stanford University, and St. Norbert College.
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