1
Zarathustra and his Asinine Friends: Nietzsche on Post-modern, Post-liberal
Friendship
§1. The Turn from Friendship
To ask of Nietzsche sage wisdom regarding friendship seems somewhat
misguided—sort of like turning to Henry VIII for marriage advice or to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau for parenting tips. By most accounts Nietzsche was something of a
misanthrope, and his biography recounts a litany of failed friendships and long periods of
loneliness.
1
In his thought, especially his later work, he repeatedly praises solitude and
individualism and takes to calling himself a free spirit. These free spirits, he says, are
“jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude.”
2
But not only does he praise solitude, he goes so far as to disparage the company of others:
“He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of
distress, green and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly
not a man of an elevated taste.”
3
In an even more vitriolic moment, he remarks, “solitude
is with us a virtue: it is a sublime urge and inclination for cleanliness which divines that
all contact between man and man—‘in society’— must inevitably be unclean. All
community makes somehow, somewhere, sometime —‘common.’”
4
So what, then, does this misanthropic loner have to add to a discussion of
friendship? According to Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche was not always so caustic with regard
to friendship. In his middle period, she argues, the issue was a central concern and,
1
For an excellent account of Nietzsche’s personal life as it develops with his thought, see Rüdiger
Safranski’s Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, transl. Shelley Frisch (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2002).
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990)
73.
3
Ibid., 57.
4
Ibid., 214
Convention