The Wagnerian Project and the Goal of Cultural Reform

Human, All Too Human is best understood in light of two of Nietzsche's retrospective remarks on the work: one in which he referred to the book as the first in a series of writings designed to “erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit”;Footnote ⁷ and another in which he characterized the book as “the monument to a crisis” (EH HH 1). These two remarks are connected because Nietzsche constructed the image of the free spirit specifically as a response to the crisis brought about by his disenchantment with the ideal of Wagnerian opera. That shift—away from Wagner and towards the free spirit—revolutionized Nietzsche's philosophic orientation and his political stance at a single stroke. In order to grasp this dual dimension of the “crisis” that culminated in Human, All Too Human, a few words need to be said about Nietzsche's relationship to Wagner.

Nietzsche's earliest writings had been presented as tributes to Wagner, but at the same time they were deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer—the philosopher whom both Wagner and the young Nietzsche idolized. Schopenhauer had argued that music enables human beings to see beyond the corporeal world, and pierce through to the transcendent spiritual heart of things (see BT 16). On the basis of that Schopenhauerian claim, Nietzsche was encouraged to hope that Wagner's operas could act as an instrument for transforming the collective consciousness of the German nation, revolutionizing the broader course of human history in the process by ushering in a post-Christian, neoclassical Germanic civilization (BT 24; RWB 4).Footnote ⁸ As a consequence, although Nietzsche's early writings summarily dismiss any concern for the German politics of the time (SE 4), their extensive tributes to Wagner still imply a deep concern with the condition of the contemporary world—for it was Wagner's operas that he hoped might transform that condition more thoroughly than any ordinary process of political reform ever could.Footnote ⁹ Nietzsche's early plans for cultural reform therefore had two related goals in mind: on the one hand, a revolution in the existing political landscape; on the other hand, the production of transformative philosophic insights into the very nature of existence. Both of those ambitions were abandoned with the “crisis” of Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche turns against the old Wagnerian ideal, and towards the new ideal of the free spirit.

The proximate cause for Nietzsche's break with Wagner was the inauguration of Wagner's Bayreuth festival. In Bayreuth, Wagner had constructed an opera house specifically for the premiere for his titanic Ring cycle—a mythological operatic epic that defies simple summary (the entire cycle requires about fifteen hours to perform). However, in order to grasp Nietzsche's reaction to the festival, it needs to be stressed that Wagner was not attempting to produce mere operas at Bayreuth. His ambition was something far more comprehensive, which he called Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). At an artistic level, Wagner saw himself as the successor of (and superior to) not only Beethoven, but also Aeschylus and Shakespeare (i.e., not merely as a great musician, but as a sort of honorary poet laureate of a whole culture); at a philosophic level, his work was designed as a vehicle for the philosophy of Schopenhauer; and on that basis, it also presented a new, quasi-religious mythology that would give meaning to, and help to shape, human existence.Footnote ¹⁰ It was with those ambitions in view that Wagner had been able to enlist the support of a substantial section of Germany's cultural and political elite for the establishment of Bayreuth (the building of the festival house, and production of the operas, were both enormously expensive, requiring generous funding). As already noted, Nietzsche had substantially supported all of those ambitions in his earliest writings. Seeing them finally in action at rehearsals in Bayreuth, however, he turned passionately against them, and fled from the festival into the Bavarian forests, where he worked on the notebooks that became Human, All Too Human.

The confluence of factors that turned Nietzsche against the whole Wagnerian project at Bayreuth is complex, and Nietzsche certainly found a great deal there to criticize (everything from the design of the sets for the operas to the character of the audience).Footnote ¹¹ Behind all of this, however, lay a rejection of the entire Wagnerian enterprise of revivifying cultural-political life on a self-consciously mythological basis. By the time of Bayreuth, Nietzsche's sympathies (as evidenced by unpublished notes from the period) had already begun to shift in the direction of science and Enlightenment; being confronted with the full spectacle of Wagner's attempt to construct a new Romantic mythology repulsed him. Nietzsche's commitment was now to pursuing the truth (even harsh and unpalatable truths), not to constructing myths (no matter how comforting they might be).Footnote ¹²Human, All Too Human thereby amounts to Nietzsche's attempt to work through the “crisis” that he experienced at Bayreuth, giving a full account (both to himself and the world at large) of what had led him to reject Wagner's project for cultural-political reform.

That fundamental rejection of the Wagnerian project in Human, All Too Human is indicated by the distinctive character type that he champions in the work: the free spirits. The free sprits differ from the ideal of Richard Wagner (or just about any other sort of ideal) most essentially in this respect: the task of the free spirits is negative and destructive, rather than positive and constructive. It might be most accurate to describe the free spirits as Nietzsche's model for how to criticize existing ideals, without aiming to refurbish or replace them. To be sure, Nietzsche continues to consider the question of what forces ought to be responsible for shaping and sustaining a healthy culture (art, science, religion)—and, as noted above, he does so with a newfound sympathy for modern principles of Enlightenment, science, and liberal democracy.Footnote ¹³ But he no longer takes up these questions in the hope of transforming politics and philosophy through culture. To the contrary: what Nietzsche stresses here is the need to securely separate the realm of culture from the realm of politics (HH 235, 438).Footnote ¹⁴ This concern is at the core of the case for “limited government” that Nietzsche adopts in this work, where his aim is to cultivate a class of free spirits who have a broad range of opportunities for engaging the modern world experimentally (in the realm of culture), without having to commit themselves too strongly to any given aspect of it (as tends to be demanded in the realm of politics). Thus, the free spirit's quest for knowledge makes no special demands of politics, resists any dependence on it (HH 291), and entails a degree of skepticism which makes it ill-suited to politics (HH 230).

This is not to say that Nietzsche is counseling the free spirits to be “apolitical.” It is not so much the case that the free spirits are meant to be hostile to politics, as that Nietzsche thinks that because the modern world is a relatively new creation, and therefore still very much a work in progress (cf. WS 275, 350), that the free spirits—if they are to retain the ability to explore and experiment with the modern world most freely and fully—will have to remain unaffiliated when it comes to any particular conglomeration of social forces (such as a political party or ideology) (HH 579; AOM 301, 305, 318; WS 82, 293).Footnote ¹⁵ Where Wagner aimed to be a cultural founder (providing an original mythic-religious basis for unifying and directing German civilization), Nietzsche's free spirits aim to be something closer to cultural critics (appraising the dominant culture at some distance from it).

That being said, over the course of writing the three installments of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche acquired a deeper understanding of the obstacles involved in retaining a critical distance from any project of cultural or political reform. We cannot, then, understand the free spirits, or the practical-political posture that Nietzsche recommends for them, without understanding the evolution of that ideal in his thought.

The evolution of the free spirit ideal is reflected most obviously in the fact that Nietzsche initially wrote and published Human, All Too Human in three separate installments over the course of three years: Human, All Too Human (1878); Assorted Opinions and Maxims (1879); The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880). (The three installments were collected in a single volume, under a single title, in 1886.) When Nietzsche published the first of these installments, he knew that it would alienate him from Wagner, but sought to minimize that fact: initially by attempting to publish it under a pseudonym (a plan scuttled by his publisher), and ultimately by toning down language that indicted Wagner too directly.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words: when he wrote Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche shied away from living with the practical consequence of his new (anti-Wagnerian) theoretical commitments. The Wanderer and His Shadow, by contrast, was written at a time when Nietzsche had been forced to live with those consequences—consequences that included a process of professional and personal isolation, compounded by crippling ill health that brought him close to death (EH Wise 1 and HH 4).Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, what began for Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human as a somewhat tentative or experimental turn toward the ideal of the free spirit had become a gravely serious matter by the time of The Wanderer and His Shadow—and the book is, accordingly, Nietzsche's fullest digest of, and his most thorough reflection on, what living according to the free spirit ideal would entail.Footnote ¹⁸

In sum: The Wanderer completes the project that Nietzsche set out on with Human, All Too Human, while also adding new dimensions to that project. I will elaborate this point in what follows, first by outlining where the two works overlap, and then by looking at how The Wanderer goes beyond its predecessor.

The Free Spirit Project and the Turn to “the Closest Things”

Human, All Too Human is, as its subtitle says, a book for free spirits. Nietzsche's earliest definition of a free spirit was stated plainly enough:

Nietzsche held to this basic definition of the character of a “free spirit” for the rest of his career. What was not so immediately clear to him was what exactly would be required for the free spirits to attain and maintain their exceptional perspective; that becomes clear only through The Wanderer and His Shadow.

Nietzsche had opened the first installment of the All Too Human trilogy with a chapter titled “Of First and Last Things”: that is to say, with a debunking treatment of “metaphysical philosophy,” which purported to investigate realms of knowledge that transcended the all-too-human temporal world, and an endorsement of “historical philosophy” in its place (HH 1–2, 26– 27). Nietzsche then went on to show in detail how “historical philosophy” could furnish the one tool required to craft oneself into a free spirit, enabling its holders to separate themselves from “the dominant views of the age” by uncovering the extent to which modern objects of admiration had been infected by the residue of discreditable ideals inherited from metaphysical philosophy and theology. Nietzsche exemplifies just such a critical perspective by engaging in an extended exposé of the popular phenomenon of Wagnerian opera, critically dissecting its appeal as the decayed vestige of bygone Christian grandeur, offering a form of escapist entertainment to an unrefined public (HH 150, 212, 215, 217, 219, 221; AOM 134, 171, 172; WS 149, 156, 165, 170). Indeed, the All Too Human trilogy as a whole shows Nietzsche constantly debunking the potentially intoxicating ideals of modern culture, seeking to inspire in their place an appreciation of seemingly ordinary or prosaic “unpretentious truths” that have been overlooked or despised for a great many ages (HH 3; cf. 6, 609, AOM 25; WS 16).

The Wanderer and His Shadow opens with a sequence of aphorisms covering much of the same ground.Footnote ¹⁹ Here again Nietzsche makes his target the traditional notion that the subject of philosophy is something called “metaphysics,” and that, moreover, it responds to some “metaphysical need” that human beings have—a desire to know “first and last things” beyond the human sensory world (WS 16). Philosophy in this sense is typically viewed as either laying the groundwork for a properly religious teaching (as Nietzsche understood Plato to have done), or acting as a latter-day substitute for a decaying religion (as Nietzsche had encountered it in Schopenhauer). In view of that tendency, Nietzsche hammers away that as religious belief continues to decline, its aspirations and exalted status must not be projected back onto philosophy. In particular, he emphasizes that philosophy must not be thought of as a means for justifying or satisfying many of the most pervasive human longings, but instead is only a tool for showing why those longings are unjustifiable and insatiable: not showing human beings to be “the goal and purpose of the existence of the whole universe,” but instead showing how little of it we can even know (WS 1, 2, 14, 16).

In all of these respects, the two volumes echo one another. But, on closer examination, The Wanderer and His Shadow pushes the argument into new territory. It does so by clarifying that the difficulty of consistently appreciating the all too human is not merely a historical problem (viz., the obstacle of an accumulated tradition whose residual power the diligent scholar must deconstruct via “historical philosophy”); it is a problem rooted more fundamentally in permanently problematic facts about human psychology and the relationship between individuals and their communities.

For, as Nietzsche now stresses, the delusions that have lent philosophy (and, through it, human self-understanding more generally) a grandiose but unwarranted sense of self-importance have their source in demands emerging out of social and political life, which manipulate and distort individuals' particular understanding for their own, larger ends (WS 5–6, 9–13). It is easy to become preoccupied with the mysteries of the universe when social authorities claim to have special insight into them; but if we reject those authorities, we will be content to leave the mysteries of the universe alone, and turn our attention towards the needs and nature of our individual selves (WS 2, 5–6). But this point is not primarily to be discovered through the academic task of historical research laid out in Human, All Too Human. In fact, historical philosophy is scarcely even mentioned here. In the opening sequence of aphorisms in WS (which corresponds to the first chapter of HH), the need for “a history of the ethical and religious sensations” is only broached at the very end (WS 16)—and there it is presented as in the service of a deeper concern, one that preoccupies Nietzsche throughout the work, and which is original to it.

The primary subject of philosophy as The Wanderer conceives of it turns out to be, not history, but “the closest things”: for instance, “eating, housing, clothing, social intercourse” are now proposed as “the object of constant impartial and general reflection and reform” (WS 5–6; also see the second half of aphorism 16). This basic insight would remain one of Nietzsche's central concerns until the end of his career (see EH Clever 1–2). Thus, as Adrian del Caro remarks: “There is every reason to believe that Nietzsche regarded his discovery and advocacy of the closest things as one of his principal philosophical teachings.”Footnote ²⁰The Wanderer and His Shadow therefore constitutes a decisive turning point in Nietzsche's thought, for it is specifically in this work that his turn to “the closest things” occurs—and, in this way, the free spirit's concern with historical philosophy is supplemented, and to some degree overshadowed, by a deeper emphasis on psychology (i.e., the way in which our minds divert and delude themselves, becoming occupied with everything apart from those concerns which are naturally closest).Footnote ²¹

Nietzsche draws the reader's attention to the evolution of his thought in this regard via the title of The Wanderer and His Shadow, which refers us to the two characters who appear in short dialogues presented at the work's opening and closing. These characters are not identified until the closing dialogue, which indicates that the wanderer is the author of the book, Nietzsche himself, in conversation with his shadow. A central theme of both dialogues is to reveal that the shadow represents what the wanderer (i.e., Nietzsche) typically neglects about himself, and even what he simply fails to understand about himself. Accordingly, the dialogue between the two at the outset of the book reveals that although the wanderer's shadow is ever-present, the two hardly ever speak. This is so much the case that the wanderer initially does not recognize the shadow's voice as his own; that is to say, he does not initially understand that the shadow's existence is a part of his own. Nevertheless, despite the wanderer's initial surprise at encountering the shadow, the two proceed to affirm that they do not exist in opposition to one another; in fact, they presuppose one another. And the wanderer concludes their first exchange by declaring that their conversation will be a quest to find what they can agree on. That point of agreement is revealed in the exchange between the wanderer and his shadow at the book's end, which the shadow opens by observing:

In this way, Nietzsche shows the reader that his turn to “the closest things” is unique to this book—and to this moment in his life.Footnote ²²

In an autobiographical preface that Nietzsche added to the 1886 reissue of the All Too Human trilogy he stated this last point more directly, and in a way that also made it emblematic or prescriptive for other, prospective free spirits. Having described how the notion of a free spirit first formed in his mind, Nietzsche goes on to explain how a would-be free spirit would in fact form himself: beginning with a radical break from his youthful loyalties (i.e., Wagner and Schopenhauer), persevering through the consequent isolation from his contemporaries (i.e., of the sort that Nietzsche experienced after publishing the first installment of Human, All Too Human), maturing into a rigorous regimen of self-discipline, which in turn enables him to maintain a cool distance from all ordinary concerns, until

These retrospective remarks make clear that Nietzsche's free-spirited outlook evolved over the course of composing the All Too Human trilogy, and reach their climax in the turn to “the closest things” that emerges only in The Wanderer.

Having recognized that The Wanderer and His Shadow supplements Human, All Too Human in this way, a potential misunderstanding of the practical consequence of that fact needs to be addressed. It would be tempting to take Nietzsche's turn to the “closest things” in a roughly “Rousseauian” vein, as if he were suggesting that once “historical philosophy” has succeeded in unshackling us from various pathologies introduced into human nature over the course of many ages, we are then free to tend to those closest things that constitute our most elemental and enduring needs, and that can be enjoyed most securely in a tranquil retreat away from society via immersion in an uncorrupted natural environment (à la Emile or the Solitary Walker—Rousseau's exemplars of the healthiest ways of life possible in the modern world). And, indeed, at several places in The Wanderer Nietzsche seems close to such a prototypically Rousseauian vision (WS 192, 200, 295, 338). Nevertheless, the Rousseauian path is not the primary practical consequence that Nietzsche draws from his renewed appreciation of the goods of ordinary life. Very much the opposite: the turn to the “closest things” leads Nietzsche to call for a more direct confrontation between the free spirits and social or political authority. In order to see how this works, we need to now consider the two classical models that Nietzsche introduces for the free spirits in The Wanderer and His Shadow, both of whom are presented in order to exemplify the proper orientation towards those closest things whose importance Nietzsche has impressed on the reader.

The Free Spirits' Socratic Predecessor

Nietzsche's first model for the free spirit is Socrates (WS 6). This appeal to Socrates might surprise the reader, since Nietzsche is well known for his sharp, and sometimes vituperative, criticism of the ancient Athenian.Footnote ²⁴The Wanderer and His Shadow presents what is, in many ways, almost a mirror image of Nietzsche's better-known position on Socrates. Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, had blamed Socrates for setting in motion the destruction of classical Greek civilization. The Wanderer and His Shadow presents a surprising variation on that theme: Socrates is once again presented as an opponent of Greek civilization—only now in a manner that redounds very much to his credit, inspiring Nietzsche's praise rather than blame.

Nietzsche's praise of Socrates initially occurs early in The Wanderer's first discussion of “the closest things.” The immediate context is Nietzsche's condemnation of social authorities who “hammer even into children that what matters is” not “the requirements of the individual” but instead “the salvation of the soul, the service of the state, the advancement of science, or the accumulation of reputation and possessions, all as the means of doing service to mankind as a whole.” In response, Nietzsche insists that all such claims (whether derived from politics, religion, or science) are illegitimate because they distract our attention from those things closest to us, which ought to matter most. On that basis, The Wanderer counsels free spirits to refrain from involvement in any larger social project, any greater good that does not serve their individual good (WS 6).

The great difficulty with following this injunction, Nietzsche stresses, is that the various mechanisms of society have been constructed to confuse us about what in fact serves our individual interests:

With this remark The Wanderer introduces Socrates in a sharp light: as a representative of the individual and individual interests against attempts to sacrifice those interests to a greater communal project, especially by confusing the individual about what his or her interests actually are. Socrates's example serves as a severe reminder of the fact that we must struggle to keep those things that are naturally closest to us constantly at the forefront of our concerns, if our individual interests and self-concern are to retain primacy throughout our lives, and not be subsumed within the interests and demands of the larger communities in which we find ourselves.Footnote ²⁶ Subsequently, Nietzsche will indicate (through a discussion of Epicurus) that this means that we ought to limit ourselves, as far as possible, to pursuing goods which can be attained and enjoyed without falling into dependence on others.

For present purposes, however, we can observe that later in the text Nietzsche sharpens his depiction of Socrates as representing one pole in a larger struggle between the individual and the community. Aphorisms 72–86 of The Wanderer and His Shadow comprise a subsection dealing with religion.Footnote ²⁷ The first and last aphorisms in this sequence happen to be about Socrates. In a way, this should not be surprising. After all, in Platonic dialogues such as the Republic and the Phaedo Socrates promulgates theological or quasi-theological teachings that Nietzsche famously blamed for spawning Christianity (BGE Preface). On the other hand, we have just noted that The Wanderer's presentation of Socrates is unique in Nietzsche's corpus, and, accordingly, Socrates's religious significance in the book also differs from how he presents it elsewhere. Here Nietzsche has Socrates bookend his discussion of religion in order to stress that Socrates was not and could not have been the founder of any dogma, and was in fact a consistent critic of popular belief.Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, through these two aphorisms Nietzsche proposes that Socrates furnishes a model of how such criticism ought to be undertaken: not via a peaceful retreat from society, but, rather, through a combative contest with it.Footnote ²⁹

Nietzsche illustrates the Socratic spirit through an interpretation of Socrates's famous “divine mission.” The divine mission is mentioned in Plato's Apology of Socrates, where Socrates defends himself against the charge of impiety by insisting that the dialectical interrogations to which he habitually subjected his fellow Athenians were part of a quest to determine whether the Delphic oracle had been correct to claim that he was the wisest man alive; on this basis, Socrates characterizes his dialectical cross-examinations as part of a “divine mission.” Nietzsche, however, suggests that this story hardly proves that Socrates was especially devoted to the Greek god; on Nietzsche's view, the divine mission is much better understood as Socrates's playful or ironic manner of accommodating himself to popular devotionFootnote ³⁰—that is, a disingenuous way of claiming a divine imprimatur for his rather upsetting practice of interrogating popular beliefs.Footnote ³¹

For Nietzsche, then, Socrates's “divine mission” was the means through which he “put the god to the test in a hundred ways,” that is, critically scrutinized its claims rather than accepting or rejecting them outright. Nietzsche concludes by calling this “one of the subtlest compromises between piety and freedom of spirit ever devised,” and thereby suggests that Socrates in fact is the model of a certain sort of free spirit—a prudential free spirit who maintains an intellectual and spiritual independence from society without feeling compelled to launch a direct assault against it.Footnote ³²

This notion of Socrates as a model of free-spiritedness is underscored by Nietzsche's final reference to him, in aphorism 86 at the end of the subsection on religion, which remarks:

Nietzsche's own return to and reconsideration of the problem of Socrates in The Wanderer and His Shadow indicates that the Athenian philosopher persuaded him that the essential task of a free spirit could not be simply that of correcting the problems bequeathed to the contemporary world by a decaying (Platonic-Christian) tradition; instead, the primary task had to be one of recovering and reaffirming the inherent disjunction between individual and communal interests—a tension first revealed by Socrates in terms that hold true for the modern world. In this way, Nietzsche's reading of the Delphic Oracle story works to suggest that Socrates's example can still serve to inspire and guide free spirits today, furnishing them with a model of how to critically engage and interrogate the broader society in which they happen to be situated, seeking out and contesting its most authoritative claims in order to enrich their own self-understanding (cf. Plato, Apology of Socrates 37e–38a)—all without thereby seeking to lead a movement to overthrow those authorities or transform popular opinion.

The Socratic turn that Nietzsche recommends to the free spirits is then a political turn insofar it entails a new recognition of the importance of political questions for structuring the life and thought of even the freest spirit—but it is a turn that is ultimately made in the service of understanding and protecting those things that remain closest to the free spirit, not for the purpose of remaking politics in accord with the free spirit's own ideas (or ideology).

The Sources of The Wanderer's Socratism

Although Nietzsche's allusions to Socrates in The Wanderer and His Shadow are brief, they are of special importance, because they represent the culmination of a reevaluation of the old Athenian that Nietzsche began around the same time that he broke with Wagner.

A few scholars have noted that Nietzsche's estimation of Socrates changes dramatically in Human, All Too Human—although Alexnader Nehamas remarks that this change is “strange and difficult to explain.”Footnote ³³ But in The Wanderer Nietzsche provides an essential clue to explaining that change. For, as we saw above, when he holds up Socrates as a model of the philosophic life in this work, he singles out “the Memorabilia of Socrates” as the authoritative source for that claim. In other words, Nietzsche directs prospective free spirits to Xenophon's Socrates, rather than to the more famous dialogues of Plato.Footnote ³⁴ This endorsement of Xenophon's Memorabilia is no accident. Its significance is confirmed and clarified by several remarks found in Nietzsche's notebooks and letters from the second half of the 1870s (i.e., during the period that Nietzsche broke with Wagner and wrote the All Too Human trilogy).

When, as a young philology professor, Nietzsche had issued his first assessment of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy, he shared the common judgment of his profession according to which Xenophon's portrait of Socrates amounted to prosaic history, not bearing on the heart of Socratic philosophy.Footnote ³⁵ Around 1875, however, Nietzsche acquired an intense interest in Xenophon's Memorabilia, evidenced by a number of unpublished remarks.Footnote ³⁶ These remarks all have the same gist: other classical scholars have wrongly judged the work to be “boring”; to the contrary, Nietzsche judges it to be a more accurate and compelling representation of Socrates than that found in Plato; moreover, he takes the Xenophontic Socrates as a “model” to be imitated in the modern world. This last suggestion is given a special resonance by the fact that, in one instance, Nietzsche describes himself as “haunted” by the Xenophontic Socrates's judgment that those who teach for pay forfeit their independence in the process;Footnote ³⁷ Nietzsche left the academic profession in 1879. In view of that fact, we can conclude that, when Nietzsche expressed in print his hope that the Socrates of the Memorabilia would replace the Bible as a guide to the proper conduct of life, he was actually in the process of following that injunction himself.

These details add weight to The Wanderer's various exhortations to a simple way of life, one unencumbered by external needs or personal dependencies. Those exhortations, we can now conclude, appeal (at least in part) to a way of life whose “model” Nietzsche had found in Xenophon's Socrates, who took such pride in the independence that he gained from his bare-bones existence.Footnote ³⁸ And, with regard to that point, it is relevant to add that, while the Xenophontic Socrates places great emphasis on his freedom from material needs, he also stresses that that freedom is not acquired through his fixation on an incandescent supersensible world or a perfect harmony of his soul's desires (as Plato's portrait of Socrates sometimes suggests), but instead through a rigorous program of self-discipline, imposed even in the teeth of his natural desires.Footnote ³⁹ Xenophon's Socrates thereby offers an outstanding example of the self-sufficiency that characterizes a philosophic lifeFootnote ⁴⁰—while also making readily apparent the formidable challenge (emanating from one's own more ornery inclinations) involved in acquiring and maintaining such an austere independence.

In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche makes this last point thematic in the following way. Immediately after introducing Socrates as his first model of how to pursue “the closest things,” Nietzsche provides a second classical example of how best to care for those things: Epicurus (WS 7). The Epicurean model turns out to supplement the Socratic one in a crucial way, because it shows that the division between individual and communal interests results not only from social engineering and propaganda (which the Socratic gadfly model is designed to combat), but also from a division in the free spirit's individual soul: that is to say, on the one hand, a free spirit will experience a natural, powerful drive to acquire the independence and critical perspective associated with Socrates; on the other hand, free spirits will retain a persistent desire to partake of the goods of social and political life. The great puzzle for the free spirit is to determine how these two natural yet competing tendencies can be fit together. Nietzsche's turn to Epicurus addresses the difficulty by emphasizing the exceptional self- discipline that is required to sustain the free spirits' way of life. But, as we shall see, by stressing that the free spirits will have to continually discipline or master themselves in this way (as opposed to attaining a perfect harmony of soul), Nietzsche suggests that it might not be possible to leave entirely behind the whole set of aspirations that had once drawn him to Wagner and the Wagnerian project, including the desire to partake of and contribute to communal goods (such as are found in music, religion, or politics) that are denied to the free spirits.

The Self-Disciplined Heart of the Free Spirit Project

Nietzsche places the theme of self-discipline at the core of his discussion of Epicurus by reminding us that Epicurus's philosophy of pleasure (his hedonism) was not directed at sources of pleasure indiscriminately (as contemporary usage of the term “hedonist” tends to imply), but, rather, specifically at those that lay closest to him and, to the maximum extent possible, those things only. Epicurus's great insight was therefore to appreciate that a consistent and thus truly satisfying hedonism must limit itself to those pleasures that are closest at hand (that is to say, those that can be acquired and enjoyed using one's own, individual powers, rather than relying on others) because only they provide a reliable and secure source of pleasure.Footnote ⁴¹

To that end, Epicurus had to restrain himself from indulging many of the pleasures (or prospective pleasures) that so ubiquitously attract human beings: pleasures which draw one out of one's individual self and thereby into a potential dependence on other people, or that rely on our capacity for hopefulness and thereby lead us into painful disappointments. Any sort of ambition (but especially any political ambition, and hopes for fame or influence more generally) would have to count prominently among such pleasures to be resisted. Thus, Nietzsche stresses that the Epicurean way of life allows for little more than a retired, anonymous, and simple existence (WS 192, 227, 295).Footnote ⁴²

Moreover, the illusory pleasures which Nietzsche's Epicurean model warns against are not limited to the desire to stretch out one's individual influence in the world. They also include a warning against the desires associated with the quest for knowledge—the hope to know more than one's modest powers naturally make possible. To that end, Nietzsche stresses that the Epicurean model demands that one “quiet the heart,” that is, refrain from concerning oneself with matters that one cannot satisfactorily resolve, such as the existence of a supernatural realm, or its possible concern for the natural world (WS 7). Now, to speak of quieting the heart in this context implies that the heart has a natural inclination to reach out beyond what it can naturally know, or that we have natural longings that we cannot naturally satisfy. And this, I would like to suggest, is how Nietzsche is encouraging us to understand traditional philosophic metaphysics: as a desire, which can be indulged or resisted just as a desire for sensuous pleasure might be.

The distinct posture towards one's individual desires or longings that is implied here can be recognized more clearly by considering the posture towards music that Nietzsche recommends to the free spirits. The transfiguring or revolutionary potential that seems to be contained within music is a theme that runs from Nietzsche's earliest writings through to his latest.Footnote ⁴³ But in his Book for Free Spirits Nietzsche turns sharply against music as part of his broader effort to invest himself in satisfying only a certain, narrowly circumscribed set of desires, and conducting his whole life so as to dampen down or quarantine more expansive inclinations. Nietzsche formulates what is at issue with great eloquence as follows:

If we read this passage in light of the Epicurean exhortation to “quiet the heart,” we can conclude that the free-spirited model of philosophy which Nietzsche endorses here does not so much involve a straightforward return to blissful nature (in the manner of the Rousseauian ideal) as it requires a self-disciplined attempt to counteract naturally wayward human nature.Footnote ⁴⁵

In fact, Nietzsche stressed just this point when, several years after his “middle period,” he issued a newly detailed analysis of the character of the free spirits, and highlighted the rigorous program of self-discipline that characterized their way of life:

An aphorism toward the end of The Wanderer and His Shadow makes the same point:

In other words: the return to “the closest things” to which Nietzsche exhorts philosophy requires an intense self-discipline because Nietzsche sees the philosophic “metaphysics” which lead away from them as the product of natural human inclinations (we might think of this as the heart's natural inclination to draw the mind outside of nature).

As this suggests, then, Nietzsche's turn away from the promise that Schopenhauer and Wagner had once held out to him might be best understood, not as result of his having become simply or thoroughly “disenchanted” with them, but, rather, as part of a broader attempt to conscientiously counteract a persistently simmering set of desires woven into his nature. From this observation we can also gather why the turn towards “historical philosophy” alone would not have been sufficient to sustain the critical perspective of the free spirit: for debunking a popular or intoxicating phenomenon (such as Wagnerian opera) simply on the grounds that its origins were more “human, all too human” than previously supposed could not, by itself, extinguish the desires that made one susceptible to such a delusion in the first place (consider GS 59 and BGE 229–30). Thus, The Wanderer and His Shadow shows that when Nietzsche exhorts philosophy away from “metaphysical” concerns and towards “the closest things,” it will not be enough to limit oneself to clearing away old cobwebs of tradition and the machinations of social authority. It is also a matter of maintaining an appropriate internal disposition, placing a restraint on the heart that liberates the spirit and frees the mind.