Interest in the “therapeutic” aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought is growing in academic circles, after years of toiling in the shadows of more traditional philosophical interpretations in the tertiary scholarship. Studies such as Michael Ure’s Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (2008), Daniel Ahern’s The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue (2012), and Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland ed. Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Teaching: For Individuals and Culture (2013) advance the general thesis that Nietzsche intended to help nineteenth-century readers cultivate—even rehabilitate—their spiritual lives in the face of daunting and long-established social and historical challenges. This general thesis is shared by Jeffrey M. Jackson in his 2017 book, Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories: Genealogy and Convalescence but, to his credit, Jackson offers an innovative twist on this theme: the therapeutic work to be done must not be thought to lie upon individuals who heroically (or not) encounter the demands of self-overcoming and self-cultivation, working in isolation against the pressure of social norms. Rather, because this natural history of values is “suffered” collectively, the task of coping with that history must also be shared. Jackson’s thesis is simple and powerful, but the full meaning of it must be worked out, which this study attempts with mixed results. For Jackson, negotiating the implications of “suffered history” in the Nietzschean vein is best done by interpreting the philosopher’s project of “genealogy” as one of seeing that human subjects and their history of values have a reflexive relationship, and by interpreting “convalescence”—the work of coping with that reflexivity—as the logical inference following the genealogy. Yet, there’s no consideration here for what Nietzsche says on behalf of self-cultivation, on the ancient practice of askesis, for example—of the training of bodily instincts and spirit—or whether the challenge today might be to reclaim askesis as a social goal without reconciling the principles and methodologies of that training with a degenerate morality—that is to say, a morality that is hostile to a regenerative and healthy life. Instead, Jackson’s study seems eager to ontologize “suffered history” as both trauma and a negativity to be negotiated and endured.

The study is composed of five chapters. The Introduction (chapter one) alludes to a set of issues that will emerge as the book’s major themes. The analysis here is dense and not easy to unpack, but the basic premises seem to posit that Nietzsche shows 1) the history of values and human subjectivity are “reflexive.” That is, values are created over long periods of time from human (and even pre-human) perspectives, and human subjectivity is determined by those values, such that values and humans have always been co-constitutive and continue to be so. This reflexivity makes the investigation of the history of values a rather complicated task because in order to reflect upon that history fully, one must also reflect upon the investigator herself, as well as the historical track leading up to the moment of any reflection. Such insight can never be whole and complete. 2) For these reasons, reflexivity is not understood so much as it is “suffered.” 3) The quality of such reflection may, however, be assessed in the following manner: there is the sort of reflection that more or less “negotiates” reflexivity in ways that follow “genealogy” and “convalescence” as Nietzsche is said to conceptualize the terms. There is, moreover, the more common and less desirable sort of reflection that fails to negotiate reflexivity and thus remains mired in what Nietzsche is said to mean by the terms “ressentiment,” “bad conscience,” and the “ascetic ideal.” Nietzsche, for his part, is said to interrogate “social history” with the insight that any subject conducting such an investigation will itself be determined by that history. Thus, Jackson detects “a reflexivity between reproduction of social crisis and the reproduction of subjectivity, such that social critique must also be a critique of the subjectivity that is socially reproduced and which engages in that critique” (1). Jackson is correct to observe that Nietzsche holds “the highest concepts” (such as good/evil, good/bad, truth/lies and so forth) to be impossible without the human world and that this world is symbiotically framed by these concepts in such a way that the individual is determined by them (commonly cited references to this insight may be found in the essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” and in the chapter “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” section 4 from Twilight of the Idols). Because of reflexivity in the determination of values and subjects, Jackson claims that for Nietzsche “reflection on social crisis implies a need for the self-critique of reflection that is a symptom of the suffered crisis it attempts to conceptualize,” making thinking itself to be “a symptom of suffered social histories” (1). Reflection, in this view, is always partial, given that there is no unbiased origin from which to begin to reflect. The measure of the “self-critique of reflection,” whether or not reflection is emancipatory, can be found in Nietzsche’s concepts such as genealogy and convalescence (when emancipatory reflection is accomplished), and ressentiment, slave morality, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal (when it is not). These two “paradigmatic forms” are often “subtly intermingled.” As tools for conceptual analysis, however, it is claimed that this latter form finds “truth in what is familiar, simplified, ahistorical, and socially shared” (5), while the other form of reflection carries the possibility of “transforming society” along these emancipatory paths. Because subjectivity is “imbricated…within suffered relational histories,” true analysis of subjectivity’s imbrication discovers it to be “symptomatic” of “suffered social scenes” (22).

An implication from this treatment is that Nietzsche “can be read as contributing to social theory” in so far as genealogy implies convalescence, which is said to be the “negotiation” with suffered history that nevertheless admits to no subjective choice nor does it unfold in “ethical reasoning.” What follows, however, is that “reason’s critique of itself does not merely imply a need to think differently, but rather a need for new social conditions which would facilitate convalescence” (5).

The work summons various late-nineteenth-and-twentieth-century thinkers to function as “lenses” and as points of contrast in order to bring this reading into sharper focus. Jackson compares Nietzsche’s insights into suffered social history with those, for example, of Marx and Freud. For each of these, a suffered sociality “founds the subject.” For Marx, that founding occurs through the accumulation of property and the division of labor; for Freud, it happens through the child’s transition from family care to socialization. For Nietzsche, the founding of the subject is said to happen in “the violent relation between slaves and masters, and the imposition of the social straightjacket.” For each, this suffered sociality repeats itself as an “amoral, more or less traumatic meaninglessness” (22-3). Trauma then becomes “naturalized” through social normalization and the subject’s bad conscience, all of which tends to “reproduce the status quo” in subsequent analyses. In contrast to Jackson’s analysis, those merely “theoretical appeals” to Nietzsche found in Ricoeur, Kofmann, and Foucault “may gesture” in the direction of coping with suffered histories, but they do so “in ways that seem to occlude their own vulnerability to excessive history” and to simply reproduce past traumas (38).

Jackson struggles with a prose to account for the many ways in which the term “suffered” is to be thought in this analysis. Historical “scenes” are said to be suffered, rather than understood as causally implicated, when “the more or less traumatic excess that is constitutive” of them are primary. “The excessive character of social history is primarily suffered and defended against, not merely ‘understood,’ ‘confronted,’ or not ‘understood’ or not ‘confronted'” (32). “The ambiguity of the scene as being both remembered and constructed not only implies the interpretability of the scene, but also the excessive, relational materiality of the scene; what counts is how the excess is negotiated and that points to an ability that cannot be accounted for by a subjective trait, action or sensibility” (24).  Finally, “one’s ability to negotiate this excess is itself socio-historically conditioned” (32). Due to the fact that reflexivity is primarily suffered, “the fixated subject is not stuck in the theoretical as such [i.e., it is not a matter of whether one remains ‘metaphysical’ in one’s worldview] but rather [one is stuck] in a particular form of defensive mechanism expressive of an inability to bear the negativity of history” (33).

After this somewhat opaque introduction, Chapter Two, “Convalescence, Mourning and Sociability,” examines Nietzsche’s use of the term Genesung (convalescence) in greater detail.  This chapter, in some ways, is the most successful of the entire study. It begins by comparing the key concept under consideration with Freud’s notion of “mourning.” Jackson suggests that convalescence is “a model for a gradual suffered working-through of the cultural legacy of ressentiment” (43). With this definition, Jackson briefly considers possible difficulties in drawing the comparison at hand—that mourning seems to be a psychological process oriented socially and in relation to past events, while convalescence seems to be a physical process oriented solitarily and towards the future. Each of these challenges are quickly met, with emphasis placed on the idea that convalescence is “a celebration of singularity” (46), not of solitude. As such, convalescence seeks “de-idealization”—that is, “the gradual detachment from socially enforced idealism which has been internalized” such that one tends to see oneself (to put it in Nietzsche’s words, deftly cited) “as equal to any nobody” (48). For Jackson, Nietzsche’s struggle against idealism is the struggle for singularity in confrontation with socially mandated forms of ressentiment which create communities of “any nobodies” via each subject’s internalization of these forms.

Jackson’s textual references supporting these claims, however, do not fully show how convalescence is socially engaged and how this engagement squares with what Nietzsche clearly says on behalf of his own solitude. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche’s 1886 Prefaces for the second edition publications of his works and from his novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jackson demonstrates indeed that convalescence is an important theme developing in Nietzsche’s work at this time. However, the evidence seems to show that convalescence is a solitary track for the one sickened by herd morality. In 1888’s Ecce Homo Nietzsche claims that solitude is a necessary condition for convalescence: ” My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.—But I need solitude [Einsamkeit], by which I mean convalescence [Genesung], a return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air…The whole of my Zarathustra is a dithyramb to solitude” (“Why I am so wise,” section 8). Nietzsche’s personal letters to family and friends at this time also boast of his blessed Einsamkeit. Moreover, from the novel’s opening chapter one reads that Zarathustra enjoyed ten years of solitude before returning to humanity to share his health and wisdom. Indeed, solitude will be sought and enjoyed again and again by Zarathustra throughout the novel. So, what then can be said of Nietzsche’s apparent longing for solitude and its expression in Zarathustra? Jackson interprets the novel’s climatic chapter, “The Convalescent,” to reveal that Zarathustra too is infected with ressentiment, which had been adumbrated in “his desires to teach men, to lead, to be followed, to prepare the way for the Overman” (57) and which becomes clear in his haughty attitude when conversing with his animals (52-3). The way to make sense of Nietzsche’s conceptual development of convalescence, not as a solitary experience, but rather as shared suffering is to interpret it as a kind of mourning in the face of this ressentiment, in the way formulated by Freud: “when [Nietzsche] proclaims in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that the earth shall be a place for convalescence, he seems to imply the possibility for new types of convalescent culture. Thus, if the valorization of singularity [not solitude] is central, one might say that Nietzsche’s advocacy of convalescence within a broader de-idealizing critique of culture clearly resembles Freud’s explicit linking of mourning to group psychology in the later cultural texts” (46-7).

The chapter concludes by contrasting Jackson’s interpretation to those formulated by Derrida, Deleuze, and others. According to Jackson, Derrida simply compares Nietzsche to dogmatizing, idealist philosophers without endeavoring to show how (for Nietzsche) idealism emerges in ressentiment nor how it could be endured in convalescence. For Jackson, “convalescence is the condition of possibility of the sensibility Derrida valorizes” (56). Not even Derrida’s deconstructions from “play” and “dance” adequately express “the suffered achievement of convalescence” (60). As for Deleuze, the well-known analysis of “reactive” and “active” forces expressive of Nietzsche’s “will to power” finds the former “transcending itself” in the “affirmation” of the negative, which is said to be the completion of reactive forces in nihilism. For Jackson, Deleuze’s analysis “occludes the essential element of suffering in Nietzsche in favor of an appeal to a sort of abstract animism” (59). The danger here, according to Jackson, is that the fundamental task of coping with suffering is reduced to “a spontaneous moment of creation” rather than appreciated for what it truly is: “a gradual detachment from the cultural norms implicit in the subject” (59). Herein, seemingly, lies the social aspect of convalescence: social arrangements should be judged negatively if their coercive determinants are so overbearing that they stifle convalescence. Such arrangements should be encouraged when they grant “suffering…the time, place and sociality to bear itself” (63). According to Jackson, the logic of convalescence is all the same whether one thinks of coercion (as Nietzsche did) in terms of Christianity and its secular dissemination in modern society or in terms of other totalitarian structures (63).

In Chapter Three, “Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy of the Subject,” the focus turns to Nietzsche’s development of genealogy as a tool for encountering ressentiment and bad conscience in terms of the subject’s standing with other-realities. Freud is again said to be the key who will unlock “a more coherent account” of “the proto-psychoanalytic character” of Nietzsche’s “Genealogy and other works” (70). We learn now that “central” to Jackson’s thesis is the claim that aspects of Nietzsche’s thought “prefigure” relational psychoanalysis, the idea developed later in Freud that drills down on the subject’s “interactional field” of relationships as the researcher’s “basic unit of study” and that discovers loss, melancholy, and trauma to be necessary conditions for the possibility of the subject’s emerging state. In Freud’s relational psychoanalysis, “[c]onscience is the symptom of the melancholic response to the loss of the parent-child relationship. The trauma of losing our childhood and parental care produces a conscience as a defense mechanism by which I internalize the parental voice and feel its pressure as an attempt to maintain the love of the parents” (70-1). Freud’s thesis offers Jackson a “more coherent account of liberation” in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, reasoning against the “common view” that liberation from social repression is not the solitary achievement of the self-cultivating wanderer. Rather, liberation is possible only as a “socio-historical process,” given that repression too happens in this manner (71). Even “pre-subjective” factors accounting for the subject’s drive towards liberation are “imbricated in the subject’s histories” and should be interrogated as such (72).

Jackson summarizes the First Essay of the Genealogy by reminding readers that for Nietzsche value-laden concepts such as “good,” “bad,” and “evil,” are socially and historically contingent, which Nietzsche attempts to demonstrate with etymologies of the terms. At first, these concepts were grounded pragmatically in the social standing of nobles, but they became spiritualized by ancient priests who discovered society’s “slaves” to be convenient allies for the dissemination of their views and for increasing the priests’ social power. Jackson casts this familiar story within the context of the slaves’ shared social history. In this initial spiritual revolt, slaves found “a vehicle for their ressentiment toward the rulers and toward themselves as embodied, suffering, socio-historical beings” (77). For this reason, Jackson emphasizes “the concrete socio-historical conditions” of the slaves’ uprising before that revolt achieved victory through abstraction as a spiritual “type.” As an abstraction, “slave morality” is merely symptomatic of an internalized incapacity to work through the concrete reality of oppression in a concrete way. Although the slaves’ internalization and spiritualization of values has made human beings more interesting—such that a return to the original position of the nobles is impossible—they have done so by making the human being sick with trauma, self-loathing and anxiety. One of the most troubling outcomes of this history is the prevalence of the concept of “free will,” which operates in ways to preserve the herd—a symptom of the failure to negotiate suffered social histories (79-81). In Nietzsche’s analysis, “free will” is one of the “great errors” of false causality, with which we hide from ourselves a crueler and more disturbing fundamental human trait—that we sadistically take pleasure in punishing one another and ourselves (“The Four Great Errors,” section 7, from Twilight of the Idols).

Jackson’s discussion of the Second Essay of the Genealogy reiterates many of these themes: the origin of subjectivity is attributed to self-torture, while the social process of convalescence requires “bearing our suffered singularity amidst the social pressure to obliterate it, [while] creating new social conditions would facilitate convalescence” (81). Nietzsche speculates that conscience originally formed in the violent creditor-debtor relationship, which implies for Jackson that we all bear the imprint of the two sides of this coin. The material character and concreteness of Nietzsche’s history of conscience further implies that the violence attributed to conscience-formation cannot be wholly redeemed by religion or other universalist narratives. We are simply tasked with suffering and negotiating that history, while bad conscience is symptomatic of the trauma suffered in this task.

As might be clear by now, Jackson wishes to go beyond “Nietzsche’s own terminology” (84) by replacing the language of cruelty—and the pleasure experienced in this cruelty—with the language of suffering and the traumatic loss of past ways of being. “To account for this difference” between mere conscience, which is pragmatically aware of social needs, and trauma-inducing bad conscience “merely as the result of an instinct for cruelty directed inward would occlude the loss that constitutes our suffered social histories” (85). Thus, “[o]ne must read between the lines of Nietzsche’s suggestion” that the origin of conscience is the desire for cruelty turned inward in order to appreciate that conscience “is more fundamentally…a traumatic symptom” (96). For Jackson, reading between the lines in these ways is a matter of necessity. Accounts of Nietzsche’s attempts to replace the idealistic grounds of morality with natural and historical grounds can “only be coherent” if it accounts for “the more or less traumatic character of our social histories” and for the emergence of the genealogical interrogator (87). Jackson admits that the required methodological acumen in Nietzsche-reception for reading Nietzsche between the lines is rarely achieved. In its absence, a mystification of “some magical power” beyond suffered consciousness and a general confusion about Nietzsche’s accomplishments and possible contribution to social theory predominates that reception. Meeting the demands of such acumen, on the other hand, often demands seeing what may only show itself implicitly in Nietzsche’s investigations (in loss, for example, or in the “fetishization of ressentiment” in social phenomenon such as love, social intercourses, and attitudes about death). Rather than sublimate suffered history in concepts such as free will or in the longing for the reduction of pain or for victimhood, pity and so forth, “one should speak of a transformation of culture into mournful or convalescent forms…sheltered from obligatory forms of ressentiment” (98-9).

Chapters Four and Five follow the pattern of interpreting the work of Nietzsche through the “lenses” of later conceptualists. In Chapter Four, “Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal and the Status Quo,” Theodore Adorno is summoned to provide the theoretical context for interpreting Nietzsche’s implications for suffered history: “Adorno provides another frame from which to reflect on the sociality of metaphysics and in doing so an alternate path to approach Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics” (123). The focus here will be on the Third Essay from Nietzsche’s Genealogy: “[t]he connections between Nietzsche’s analysis of the ascetic priest and ‘the Culture Industry’ are undeniable” (134). In effect, however, not much has been advanced beyond the author’s interpretation of Nietzsche through Freud and (to a lesser extent) Marx. We are now encouraged to think in terms of “identity” and “non-identity,” of “constellations” instead of historical “scenes,” and the like, but the outcome is the same: “[t]o reflect on constellations would be to bear the non-identical, to deviate from the fetishization of identity thinking and the fetishized system of equivalences, which works as a culturally shared defense mechanism against the non-identical’ (123). Adorno is said to be useful in advancing Jackson’s analysis of Nietzsche in that Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is “the form of thinking in which the concept bears its own suffered social histories, in which the concept…bears the history of which it is a symptom” (108-9). Jackson finds similarities in Adorno’s critiques of identity and in Nietzsche’s primordial creditor-debtor relationship, even though Adorno himself fails to see beyond the subject-centered dynamism implicit in Nietzsche’s will to power. Nevertheless, both Nietzsche and Adorno are said to show how “contemporary ideology subjectivizes suffered history” (136).

In the final chapter, “Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object Relations Psychoanalysis,” Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott are enlisted to show that Nietzsche anticipated the basic themes suggested in the title—that “suffered relationality” is “the genesis of subjectivity,” a position which “inverts the metaphysical view that assumes forms of subjectivity endowed with animistic power” (143). Moreover, it is claimed that Object Relations Theory provides “a context from which to bring similar aspects of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing into focus” (149). Here, a parallel is drawn between Klein’s analysis of the infant child’s pre-subjective experiences of its “split-world” encounter with its mother’s breasts and Nietzsche’s development of convalescence (150-1). Nietzsche’s provocations towards convalescence regarding the “death of God” follow lines similar to the infant’s struggle in moments of “partial reflexivity.” Meeting both challenges in healthy ways require a “good stable care-giving environment…within which wholeness may be borne, bit by bit, slowly without defense, without the need for libidinally charged, de-infused bipolarity” (156). Convalescence, then, is like the experience of “a healthy playful infant whose environment would facilitate the bearing of anxiety of motile negotiation of wholeness without trauma” (159). Similarly, the section on Winnicott focuses on the phenomenon of play as “transitional,” negotiating the problems of emerging subjectivity and encounters with objectivity. Some of the “most obvious” concepts linking Nietzsche and Winnicott are said to concern the concept of play (160), offering the child “a protected environment which allows the crossing of borders of self and other, of idea and reality—without a bad conscience” (162). Bad environments, on the other hand, sustain and exacerbate trauma. Hence, as with convalescence, the child’s transitional experience in play is said to require a good environment to facilitate a healthy period of growth in what confronts the subject as a watershed moment in its development.

Jackson’s study brings light to what certainly seems like an important concept in Nietzsche’s later thought: the idea of “convalescence,” which is occasionally heralded by Nietzsche with great fanfare (as he was apt to do with other conceptual innovations) but which is unfortunately underdeveloped in his writings. With Nietzsche, there is no sustained discussion of “convalescence,” as one finds for example with concepts such as the “Apolline and Dionysian worldviews,” “master and slave moralities,” “bad conscience” and so forth. Nor is there even much analysis of convalescence in the secondary literature, as there is for example with “genealogy” and “the death of God” (one notable exception to this observation, overlooked by Jackson, is the work on convalescence by Gianni Vattimo). Hence, reading Nietzsche’s conceptualization of convalescence as a “proto-psychoanalytic” tool for interrogating and coping with our “shared suffered history” would seem to hold promise for understanding previously overlooked aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. However, Jackson’s study confronts the reader with a number of difficulties, some of which I have already noted. The biggest challenge emerges in the very plausibility of the notion of interpreting the work of one thinker “through the lenses” of others, which this study attempts to do almost exclusively. There is very little offered in the way of Nietzsche-scholarship here: there are hardly any references to his historical context, influences, notebooks, or correspondences. There are only a few brief notes and comments on Nietzsche-reception. The result is that this study gives contemporary Nietzsche scholars only the author’s conceptual associations, which are occasionally interesting but not always persuasive. The author’s frequent use of the subjunctive mood when drawing inferences from his examinations appears to signal an awareness of these hermeneutic problems. Nevertheless, the study’s focus on Nietzsche’s interest in the evolutionary history of the human psyche is consistent with the growing interest in Nietzsche’s usefulness for conjuring a post-metaphysical philosophical “therapeutics,” and on this score it offers innovative takes on some key, diagnostic concepts in Nietzsche’s satchel for post-metaphysical convalescents.

 

© 2019 Dale Wilkerson