Wisdom as Woman Free Associations
So what becomes of the Zarathustra extract at the head of the treatise's opening page?24 I suggest that its lot is improved by my hypothesis. Liberated from the absurdly overtaxing double role of having some seventy pages of deliberation on a topic it does not even mention spun out of its meagre frame and thereby providing the hint from which a conception of textual Auslegung is to be learned, it can revert to its more plausible function as a pure epigraph or motto, of the kind sometimes used by Nietzsche elsewhere, and not, of course, by him alone. The first book of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation is prefixed by a motto from Rousseau, 'Sors de l'enfance, ami, reveille toi!'—and we are not obliged to regard the ensuing defence ofidealism and theory ofknowledge as an exegesis of those few words. Nietzsche's The Gay Science of 1882 is not an exegesis of the quotation from Emerson on its title page, nor is its 1887 edition an exegesis of the different motto in verse that Nietzsche substitutes for it. It is conventional for such epigraphs to be pregnant and oracular,
23 Another strategy from here would be to construe the talk of'commentary' as merely a playful façade for some less straightforward relationship. This seems to be the line taken by Scheier (1994: 454—5). Scheier imagines Nietzsche 'looking for some lines he could pretend to have interpreted' in the Third Essay (my emphasis), and speaks of his 'calculated ''rationalization'' of the intense relation between the verse ... and the third part of the Genealogy as the ingenuous interpretation of an ''aphorism'' '. We know that Nietzsche loves masks, but he does not have to be behind one all the time, and this reading strikes me as rather desperate.
24 Note, however, that, as Clark reports (1997: 613), the epigraph was originally on a separate title page.
putting the reader temporarily off balance, gesturing away from the work they preface, creating a tension with it, or providing an indefinitely large space for associations.
One easily accepted significance of the 'wisdom is woman' motto is that it points to something outside the Third Treatise, but called for by it, namely an antagonist for the ascetic ideal. When late in the treatise Nietzsche asks, 'where is the opposing will in which an opposing ideal expresses itself?' (GM III. 23), the 'warrior', who does not appear in the essay itself, stands ready as the opponent—carefree, mocking, violent—to the ascetic, priestly men of learning, who are seen in contrast as meek, non-impulsive, and self-renouncing, burdened by their solemn pursuit of knowledge, and reverential towards truth. As Kelly Oliver puts it: 'The ascetic ideal is not the mocking warrior loved by wisdom. The ascetic ideal is impotent. It is not manly. It is not hard enough to love a woman.'25
Elsewhere Nietzsche uses different terms to pose a similar contrast. For example, in The Gay Science he had recently written the passage we earlier associated with the critique of Ree:
a weakened, thin, extinguished personality, one that denies itself and its own existence, is no longer good for anything good—least of all for philosophy. 'Selflessness' has no value in heaven or on earth; all great problems demand great love, and only strong, round, secure minds who have a firm grip on themselves are capable ofthat. [...] even if great problems should let themselves be grasped by them, they would not allow frogs and weaklings to hold on to them; such has been their taste from time immemorial—a taste, incidentally, that they share with all doughty females.
A kinship between this passage and the 'wisdom as woman' sentence is perhaps suggested in the German by the opening words here: the selfless personality is eine geschwächte, dünne, ausgelöschte—a phrase whose musicality seems to mirror the unbekümmert, spöttisch, gewaltthatig of the Zarathustra epigraph. In terms of style and import this Gay Science extract might have served roughly as well as the motto for the Genealogy's Third Treatise, at least if made a bit shorter and snappier. Let me propose the following edited version:
Weakened, thin, extinguished—such men are not to philosophy's taste. Its problems demand great love, and of that only a strong, round spirit is capable; they do not permit frogs and weaklings to hold on to them—a taste they share with doughty females.
This motto, in inviting comparison with the gaining of a woman's love, could perhaps have been used, like the 'wisdom is woman' excerpt, to deny success in intellectual endeavour to the selfless and disinterested and vouchsafe it to the robust and self-assured, hinting at a counter-ideal we must begin to build for ourselves.
However, Nietzsche chose the 'wisdom is woman' epigraph—and I am happy to acknowledge its potential to deliver a set of resonances that are uniquely its own. For one thing, it reinforces the link between the Genealogy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra which Nietzsche is keen to promote in a number of ways. In the Preface to the Genealogy (section 8), expressing the assumption that the reader 'has first read my earlier writings', Nietzsche singles out Zarathustra as the work with which the reader should enjoy an extreme intimacy. The epigraph reminds us to look back again to Zarathustra, if we need reminding. Also in its new context the extract lies adjacent to the ending of the Second Treatise, which yearns for the coming of the 'human of the future who will redeem us [...] from the previous ideal', the younger, stronger figure who is none other than 'Zarathustra the godless' (GM II. 24 - 5). Zarathustra personifies a future ideal of which the Genealogy offers only slender clues, though we are liable to think first of the two great ideas in Zarathustra, the Übermensch and the eternal return.26
We can seek further insights by turning to the place in Zarathustra from whose midst the 'wisdom as woman' passage is taken, the section entitled 'Of Reading and Writing', which has been proclaimed nothing less than 'the literary program of the philosopher Nietzsche'.27 There Nietzsche has Zarathustra say, 'I love only that which is written with blood' and 'Aphorisms (Spruche) should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature' (Z I. 7). These peaks provide an exalted station, a distance from which one can laugh mockingly at what others take seriously, as does the 'warrior'.2® So Nietzsche's chosen epigraph transports us into a context which again evokes allegiance to warlike writing and calls
26 On this, see Loeb (2005). 21 Scheier (1994: 454).
2® This aspect is brought out by Oliver (1993: 17).
for a powerfully robust reader. And of course Nietzsche himself is openly writing a polemic (eine Streitschrift, the subtitle of the whole Genealogy), and in that sense adopts a warlike pose. He is making war on the ascetic ideal, and correspondingly a 'warrior' style of writing is the antithesis of the method of the ascetic scholar. These connections allow the epigraph to throw light on the manner of Nietzsche's writing and the manner of reading it calls for, but without forcing the treatise into the uncomfortable mould of'commentary' upon it.
We need demand no single, settled significance for such an epigraph, and there is no lack of further angles we might superimpose upon one another. For instance, Oliver suggests it is the reader who must 'make war' on the Third Treatise: 'Nietzsche allows his reader to... take up the place of the warrior and do violence to the text.'29 She also reflects that the aphorism assigns an active role to the 'woman' that is wisdom—it is wisdom that wants the male 'warrior', who despite his 'violence' is assigned a comparatively passive role vis-a-vis wisdom—and so disagrees with Nehamas's idea that 'the conception of the writer as warrior, and not the identification of wisdom with woman, is the crucial feature of this aphorism'.3° As one becomes alert to other passages in Nietzsche's works where 'woman' is a metaphor, not only for wisdom, but for life, and for truth,31 many fascinating connections suggest themselves. Metaphors are rarely superficial or gratuitous for Nietzsche, and anyone who seeks to appraise Nietzsche's far from one-dimensional views on women and his relevance for the feminism of his day and ours will probably wish to consider this aphorism in both its contexts.
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