A third post on Dawn/Daybreak (Mörgenrothe), referring to 174. Last few sentences of 174 can be found at the bottom of this post. I74 contains linked criticisms of sympathy and commercial society, which deserve a post of their own. For the moment, I will just look at the positive value suggested at the end of the aphorism. That is the value of creating something beautiful and restful rather than of sympathy in relation to another. The beauty is of more use, suggesting that the Hume and Utilitarian style of arguments both overlook the usefulness of creating something. This undermines the other directed nature of usefulness, sympathy, and utility in values, where we are concerned about pleasure for others rather than pleasure for ourselves. Though that pleasure, for Nietzsche, should certainly not be a maximisation of passive pleasure experiences, but rather the pleasure of activity, and self-transformation, which does not put pleasure at the centre.
The self-transformation, expressed as the construction of a walled garden, both keeps out the other person, and provides something beautiful for that other person. The aphorism ends with the idea of the ‘hospitable gate’, leaving open the question of whether the other person enjoys the beauty before entering through the gate. Are we to take the walls as beautiful, as part of the beauty of the garden, or as what conceals beauty while keeping hostile forms of the outside, storms and the dust of the roadway. The roadway has an ambiguity similar to that of the wall: it threatens the garden with its dust, but also brings the other person who can experience the beauty and the hospitality.
The implied positive value of hospitality can be opposed to the negative value of tyranny, an unmistakably political term. In ‘Of the Friend’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche opposes friendship to the slave-tyrant relation, which should lead us to think of such issues in the ethical and political thought of Cicero and Aristotle. That would take us back to the last post on Aristotle and Nietzsche. This is typical of the way political ideas appear in Nietzsche, particularly diffuse, fragmentary and ambiguous, even by his own standards. I hope to return to some of this on another occasion.
The tyrant is opposed to the hospitable, and associated with sympathy. It sympathy which is either ineffectual or a tyrannical control of another person. Sympathy in Hume and Smith is linked with ideas of commercial society, as Nietzsche has suggested (though not through mentioning those names), and also with principles of political and social liberty. Some things to explore on another occasion. For now, it can be said that Nietzsche implicitly defines liberty as being outside relations of sympathy in which someone forces help on another, and relations of hospitality, in which the pleasure of beauty is offered and accepted freely.
In the meantime, the question itself remains unanswered whether one is of more use to another [dem Anderen] by immediately leaping to his side and helping him — which help can in any case be only superficial where it does not become a tyrannical seizing and transforming — or by creating something out of oneself that the other can behold with pleasure [Genuss]: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the roadway but also a hospitable gate.
(German text at NietzscheSource)
Translated by R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997)
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