nietzsche and rée coperation and conflict

Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée: Cooperation and ConflictAuthor(s): Brendan DonnellanSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1982), pp. 595-612Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709345 .

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND PAUL REE: COOPERATION AND CONFLICT

BY BRENDAN DONNELLAN

The triangle of friendship of Nietzsche, Paul Ree, and Lou von Salome climaxed in Nietzsche's disastrous infatuation with Lou, the jealous intervention of his sister, and the traumatic break in the winter of 1882.1 The present study is less concerned with the personal aspects of Nietzsche's relationship to Ree than with Ree's influence upon the philosopher and the extent to which it catalyzed some of Nietzsche's most important thoughts during his "middle" or "aph- oristic" period beginning with Human, All-too-Human (Mensch- liches, Allzumenschliches, 1878), when he was particularly oriented towards psychological observation and the supposedly scientific analysis of the origins of moral feelings.2

Nietzsche first met Ree in 1873 through their mutual friend, Romundt,3 and soon evinced an almost paternal interest in Ree, a doctor of law, five years his junior, who had written a doctoral disser- tation in Latin on Aristotle's Ethics (Halle, 1875) and gone on to develop an avid curiosity about the moral history of mankind. Nietzsche's interest in Ree was augmented when he chanced upon a copy of Ree's Psychological Observations (Psychologische Beobach- tungen, 1875). Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche was to claim that her brother's enthusiasm for this collection of aperqus could only be explained by his joy at finding a companion in his new way of thinking, which he had long nurtured in secret.4 Although Nietzsche was well acquainted with the French moralists by the late 1860s,5 there is no

1 The most detailed presentation is provided by Rudolph Binion in his book Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple (Princeton, 1968).

2 Previous examinations of this area, or parts of it, include Lous Andreas-Salome, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Vienna, 1894), a chapter in Charles Andler's study, Nietzsche: Sa vie et sa pensee (Paris, 1920-31), and Stefan Sonns, Das Ge- wissen in der Philosophie Nietzsches (Winterthur, 1955). [Hereafter MA = Menschliches ... ; VM = Vermeschte . . .; etc.]

3 Nietzsche wrote to his friend Rohde on 5 May 1873: "A friend of Romundt's has arrived here to stay the whole summer: a very reflective and talented man, a follower of Schopenhauer, by the name of Ree." Ernst Pfeiffer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Lou von Salome: Die Dokumente ihrer Begegnung (Frankfurt, 1970), 9. (Cited hereafter as Pfeiffer.) All translations from the German are mine.

4 Cf. Elisabeth Fbrster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches (Leipzig, 1895-1904), II, 271.

5 Cf. Carl Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft (Jena, 1908), I, 237.

595

Copyright Oct. 1982 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.



596 BRENDAN DONNELLAN

indication in his works prior to Human, All-too-Human -not even in his more critically framed Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemi/3e Betrachtungen, 1873-76)-of any concern with the universals of human psychology which he found so lucidly exposed in Ree's book. His reading of Ree seems at any rate to have renewed his interest in the French pioneers of moral analysis and to have deepened it with more modern insights.

Nietzsche's new standpoint, in Human, All-too-Human, of un- compromising skepticism, and his repudiation of idealistic metaphys- ics (which had influenced his early works) had been the product of a two-year process of gestation. In October 1876 Nietzsche accepted Malwida von Meysenbug's invitation to form a study and work com- munity at her villa in Sorrento together with Paul Ree and another friend, Albert Brenner. The nine months in Sorrento, the closest approximation in Nietzsche's life to his ideal of "a monastery for free spirits,"6 were spent reading and discussing a wide range of mainly classical and French writers and preparing their next works, in Ree's case The Origin of Moral Feelings (Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen, 1877). The cross-fertilization of ideas which took place was recorded by both philosophers in tones of gallant exaggera- tion. While Ree contented himself with a handwritten dedication to Nietzsche, "To the father of this work, with the deepest thanks, from its mother," from which Nietzsche politely distanced himself,7 Ree is explicitly mentioned in the text of Human, All-too-Human as a modern practitioner of the tradition of the French moralists, the quasi- patrons of Nietzsche's new work.8 Ree exemplifies the new, rational- istic destruction of metaphysical mythologies which was the stated program of Human, All-too-Human. Nietzsche presented him as "one of the coldest and most audacious thinkers," and quoted Ree's opinion that "The moral man is no closer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the physical man"9 as an example of his incisive analyses of human behavior (MA, 37).

Nietzsche's dismayed friends indeed at first unanimously placed the blame for Human, All-too-Human on Ree, because they no longer recognized in this stern book the enthusiastic prophet of the artist and

6 Cf. Nietzsche to von Seydlitz, 24 Sept. 1876 in Friedrich Nietzsches Gesam- melte Briefe, I, ed. Gast and Seidl (Berlin and Leipzig, 1900), 412.

7 Nietzsche to Ree, June 1877, Pfeiffer, 31. 8 "La Rochefoucauld and those other French masters of soul-examination (who

have been joined recently by a German as well, the author of the Psychological Observations) resemble good marksmen who again and again hit the bulls-eye-the black bulls-eye of human nature" (MA, 36). In this and future citations to Nietzsche's works the number refers to the aphorism.

9 The Ree quotation is taken from UME, viii. In this and future citations to Ree's works the number refers to the page.



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND PAUL REE 597

genius in the earlier works. All accused Nietzsche for having betrayed the promise of his youthful writings, and Ree for having corrupted him by a false emphasis on belittling analysis.10 How stung Nietzsche was by the general assumption that he had been led astray by Ree is indicated in his reply to Rohde, who had asked, in his surprise, "Can a person simply discard his soul like that and assume another one? Can he suddenly become Ree instead of Nietzsche?"1

Nietzsche in return attempted to stress his uniqueness:

Incidentally: only look for me in my book and not for our friend Ree. I am proud to have discovered his splendid aims and qualities, but he did not have the slightest influence on the conception of my "Philosophia in nuce": this was complete and a good part already put down in writing when I got to know him better in the Fall of 1876. We found each other at the same stage of development . .. 12

This claim remains somewhat dubious, however, since, apart from the preparatory sketches of The Ploughshare (Die Pflugschar), written in the late summer of 1876, there is very little evidence in Nietzsche's works and notebooks before October 1876 to suggest his subsequent temporary positivism, and what there is may have been influenced by his reading of Ree's Psychological Observations in 1875 (before Bay- reuth and Sorrento).13 Inasmuch as those observations were modelled on La Rochefoucauld' s Reflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales, 1678,14 it is often difficult to distinguish between the direct influence of the French moralists, which is evident throughout Human, All-too- Human, and the indirect influence via Ree' s adoptions ofaperqus first suggested by these writers. The significance of the French moralists for both German thinkers was enormous. La Rochefoucauld and the others in his school had demonstrated that man shows an invincible lack of insight into his own motives. However noble, selfless, or idealistic an action or impulse may seem, the actual source is invari- ably egoism.15 The dauntless realism of the French stimulated both Ree and Nietzsche in their efforts to replace dubious idealistic notions of human psychology with an interpretation of motivation based on biological facts and influenced, to a varying extent, by the implications of Darwinian theories. While Ree's attempts to uncover the

10 Cf. Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari (Berlin, 1967ff.), IV, 46, 49, 50.

11 Rohde to Nietzsche, 16 June 1878. Friedrich Nietzsches Gesammelte Briefe, II, ed. Forster-Nietzsche and Sch6ll (Berlin and Leipzig, 1902), 542.

12 Nietzsche to Rohde, June 1878 (Gesammelte Briefe, II, 549). 13 Cf. Nietzsche to Ree, 22 Oct. 1875, Pfeiffer, 9. 14 Ree traces the art of uncovering the discrepancy between ostensible and actual

motivation directly back to the French moralists. Cf. UME, 102. 15 Cf. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. J. Truchet (Paris, 1967), maxims 1, 7, 11,

15, 39, 83, 115, 170, 171, 233, 236, 245, 256, 263, 279, etc.




phenomena of psychological life were restricted to demonstrating the mechanisms of self-preservation, Nietzsche did not hesitate to intro- duce a reconciliation of the higher emotional, moral, and intellectual life with its lower egoistic origins by explaining the former as sublima- tions of the basic primitive elements which it is the task of the moral philosopher to detect (MA, 1).

Many passages in the Psychological Observations on the basic phenomena of self-deception and on the pyramid of motivation from fundamentally egoistic to apparently unselfish motives closely echo in tone and substance La Rochefoucauld's discoveries about unconscious motivation: the observation, for instance, that we believe we adapt our actions to our principles, when the reverse is the case (PB, 20); or that we get to know our own motives just as seldom as those of others (PB, 31); or that no one is absolutely honest about his own motives, and most have a positive talent for dishonesty (PB,21).16

The combined influence on Nietzsche of Ree and La Rochefou- cauld can be traced repeatedly in many individual analyses in Human, All-too-Human. The first step in Nietzsche's evolution of a new concept of morality was his awareness of the discrepancy between alleged and actual motivation:

The prince who discovers a casus belli for the decision he has already made to wage war against his neighbor is like the father who foists a mother on his child, who then has to count as such. And are not almost all the publicly proclaimed motives for our actions such substituted mothers? (MA, 596).

A feature of human psychology even more pervasive than such conscious deception is the phenomenon of man's unconscious self- deception resulting from his instinctively cultivated ignorance of himself:

Self-observation. -Man is excellently defended against himself, against re- connaissance and siege by himself; usually he cannot perceive more of himself than his outworks. The fortress itself is inaccessible, even invisible, to him... (MA, 491).

Also apparently derived from La Rochefoucauld and Ree is an awareness on Nietzsche's part that human behavior is reducible to a few underlying drives. Whereas La Rochefoucauld restricts himself to the psychological concepts of egoism or amour-propre, Ree employs contemporary post-Darwinian theories to suggest a more differentiated spectrum of man's biological needs:

When seen from outside, the actions and events in man's life seem very

16 For even more cynical accounts of conscious egoistic motivation see PB, 20-21, 39, 49, 55, etc.




diverse and manifold, but, seen from within, they are almost all caused by just a small number of instincts, namely the instinct for self-preservation and acquisition, the sexual instinct, and vanity (48).

Nietzsche at first suggests, in one sequence of aphorisms (MA, 102-105), that the basic impulse of man is towards a higher form of self-preservation which instinctively seeks its own selfish pleasure (Lust). This is not, however, a temporary obeisance to hedonistic theory, since the terms in which he describes "pleasure" are in- distinguishable from his later evocations of the will to power as the fundamental instinct of man, notes of which are already struck particularly in the later sections of Human, All-too-Human.17

It is interesting that the factor of vanity specifically included by Ree in his list of basic motives, having been expanded to a far more dynamic concept than one finds in La Rochefoucauld's traditional understanding of the term (cf. Maximes 16, 33, 137, 158, 232, etc.), was to play a central role in the psychological studies of both Ree and Nietzsche. Although there is a clear line of development in Nietzsche's thought from the numerous analyses of pettier aspects of vanity in Human, All-too-Human to the self-sufficient narcissism of the superman, who becomes his own god, all the evidence suggests that his interest in this topic was first aroused by Ree's virtual obses- sion with the same topic in both his early works.18 Whereas Ree raises several practical and moral objections to vanity,19 Nietzsche has on the whole a more sympathetic attitude towards egoism or vanity, which he sees as the motive force behind all positive, self-confident behavior; it is not only an inexhaustible source of novelty and variety (MA, 79), but the ultimate motivation behind moral phenomena: "If pleasure, egoism, and vanity are necessary to engender the moral life and its noblest blossom, the sense of truth and justice in pursuing knowledge .. . who could scorn these means?" (MA, 107). Elsewhere he claims that the worst plague could not damage humanity as much as the disappearance of vanity, concluding: "Without vanity and egoism-what are the human virtues?" (WS, 285).

There are many other parallels which could be drawn between the individual psychological aperqus in Psychological Observations and

17 Cf. MA, 260, 299, 317, 329, 348, 415, 446, 478, 595, 635; WS, 26, 251, 256, 305, etc., on the more basic manifestations of the human will to power.

18 Lou von Salome mentioned a first draft of an essay entitled "On Vanity" ("Uber die Eitelkeit"), cf. Pfeiffer, 179, although it was never published, and probably formed the basis for the sections on vanity in PB and UME. Ree's last work, Philosophie, also contains a lengthy section on the phenomenon of vanity.

19 Ree sees the following harmful consequences of vanity: 1) it arouses the envy of others, 2) it is unreasonable, since an excessive concern with vanity leads to more pain than real joy, 3) it diverts energy from serious, objective endeavors (PB, 154-56).




Human, All-too-Human.20 More significant for the relationship of the two moralists, however, is the overall context in which these observations are made. An interesting aspect of Ree's first work, which runs counter to his generally humanitarian ethos, is the way in which, drawing on La Rochefoucauld's opinion that virtue is only possible in conjunction with strength, he anticipates Nietzsche's later concepts of the master and slave moralities. The first step is the realization that "good" behavior can seldom, if ever, be traced back to admirable motivation: "It is safer to infer a bad character from bad actions than to infer a good character from good actions" (PB, 28); "The best actions often have unappetizing entrails" (PB, 64). The next conclusion is that honesty and strength are implicitly superior to the self- deceiving hypocrisy of the weak: "Weaklings do evil acts and imagine that they are good. Strong natures admit to themselves the evil that they do" (PB, 33).

Ree also anticipates Nietzsche's analysis of the censorious slave mentality, which condemns the strong in moral terms in order to compensate for its lack of real power, when he comments on the connection between envy and "moralism": "To console ourselves for a person's intellectual qualities we often impute moral faults to him" (PB, 34). Similarly, he shares with Nietzsche a conviction that mediocrity is the passport to success in everyday life (cf. PB, 94). He appears, however, to dissociate himself from the attempts by La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche to reformulate morality by emphasizing strength as primary, regardless of the conventional morality or im- morality of the actual actions in which this strength expresses itself. This becomes clear when he exposes the psychological mechanism, of which the other two thinkers could be taken as higher examples, by

20 In Ree Nietzsche found, for instance, reinforcement of his negative attitudes towards love, marriage, and the female sex (cf. PB, 67, 70, 74-75; MA 389, 393, 418, 421, 427-29); a shared sense of the relationship between an individual's capability to take revenge and his personal sense of power (PB, 36; WS, 33); equal awareness of the dubiousness of convictions (PB, 36; WS, 33); equal awareness of the dubiousness of convictions (PB, 12; MA, 629-37). Other insights they had in common include the predominance of custom over morality, to the extent that custom is morality (PB, 29; MA, 96, 97), an aspect of Ree's thought which Nietzsche did not recognize (cf. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Vorrede [Preface to the Genealogy of Morals, hereafter abbreviated as GM-V] [1887], 4); their almost identical twists of the Sermon on the Mount claiming that self-humiliation is really an aspiration to be exalted (PB, 37; MA, 87); their opinion that the ascetic's suppression of sensual pleasure is an easier way out for him than moderation in pleasure (PB, 59; MA, 139). Ree and Nietzsche both use the originally Voltairean image of "dancing in chains" to describe the elegance with which the French and ancient Greek dramatists moved within their self-imposed restraints (PB, 11; WS, 14C); both were intensely aware that the reason is the enemy of the illusions necessary to life, while the heart constantly replenishes them (PB, 131; MA, 33)-to mention but a few of the points of contact between their works.




which men persuade themselves that their faults are connected with or manifestations of their virtues (PB, 57, 101). Ree shared with La Rochefoucauld an awareness of the conventional polarities of good vs. evil and of weak vs. strong, but he maintained a more orthodox position than either La Rochefoucauld or certainly Nietzsche when revealing the psychological basis for the rationalization, self- deception, and self-flattery involved in moral attitudes. Thus even the attempts of the strong to justify their own faults are not seen to be on a higher level than the other self-protective measures of the human psyche laid bare in Ree's unsparing Psychological Observations of 1875.

Ree's treatise, The Origin of Moral Feelings, published two years later and largely composed during the stay in Sorrento, represents a far more complex relationship to Nietzsche's thought, and more clearly indicates the differences that were to emerge in their philosophical approaches. Ree placed himself firmly in the positivistic tradition of Comte and in the scientific tradition of Darwin and Lamarck, taking as his premise that the moral feelings can perfectly well be traced back to natural causes (UME, viii). Nietzsche, on the other hand, despite his temporary pose in the mask of science, was more concerned with overcoming the findings of Darwin than with utilizing, let alone glorifying, them. The first pages of Ree's book immediately expose a fundamental difference between himself and Nietzsche, where he claimed that man combines two instincts within himself, the egoistic and the unegoistic (UME, 1); Ree furthermore expressed his belief in the existence of genuinely disinterested pity and disinterested maternal love (UME, 2-3). This theory, possibly influenced by the thought of Schopenhauer, was refuted by Nietzsche very clearly in Human, All-too-Human, in which the artist's, sol- dier's, and mother's capacities for self-sacrifice were not seen as "miracles of morality," but as products of a division of interests within the individual: "Is it not clear that in all these cases a person loves a part of himself, a thought, a longing, a product, more than another part of himself, that he divides his being and sacrifices one part to another?" (MA, 57).

Ree's definition of morality remains based on nineteenth-century notions of social utility:

Thus the degree to which we find a person morally praiseworthy is exactly determined by the degree of unegoistic behavior, so that the best person is he who lives only for others, and even dies for them.-On the other hand, the stronger the degree of egoism, the more strongly it is condemned (UME, 9).

At the same time, he is aware that these attitudes reflect only the latest stage of moral development. Earlier, the relevant categories were not the "selfish" vs. the "unselfish," but the "useful" vs. the "harmful."




Primitive peoples never judged the motives of actions, but assessed them according to their usefulness (UME, 15). Eventually, Ree claims, moral judgments came to be based on the intention as well as on the act. A good deed was originally praised for its usefulness, even if it was later esteemed praiseworthy in itself (UME, 17). So long as "good" and "useful" were taken as synonyms, it was inevitable that unselfish actions, which are far rarer than selfish ones, and are so- cially beneficial, were described as good (UME, 18).

At the time of writing Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche had much in common with Ree and other positivists in agreeing that the origin of moral feelings lies largely in considerations of utility (cf. MA, 139). In his key aphorism refuting the concept of moral responsibility (MA, 133) Nietzsche cites Ree's theory of utility in order to under- mine the idealistic belief in altruism. He opens up new perspectives, however, by presenting a more differentiated development of moral standards through the stages of utility (described in terms similar to Freud's later distinction between the pleasure and reality principles), honor (consideration of the usefulness of others' opinions of oneself, which is obviously also connected with the vanity theme), and, finally, a personal morality, in which one determines for oneself what is useful and honorable (MA, 94). Here the proclamation of a personal, autonomous morality, which was to become the theme of Nietzsche's later works, is very clearly foreshadowed, although the stage which he describes is still only the transition from the collective to the individual.

Another important difference between Nietzsche's and Ree's as- sessments of the development of moral attitudes lies in Nietzsche's more radical awareness of the primary relevance of conforming to traditional principles as a measure of morality. Here the individual's evaluations, which cannot (in contrast to Kant's theory) be based on universal principles, are not relevant in themselves, but only in their function of unifying customs that demonstrate allegiance to the com- munity and ensuring its survival:

Being moral, respectable, ethical means observing obedience to a long- standing law or tradition .... The basic antithesis which has led men to distinguish between moral and immoral, good and evil, is not that of being "egoistic" and "unegoistic," but: being bound to a usage or law, and breaking with it ... (MA, 96).

This theory, which apparently complements, or replaces, the alterna- tive utilitarian explanation-although the transition is not made ex- plicit by Nietzsche-was to be elaborated in The Dawn (Die Morgenrote, 1881) in the concept of "the morality of mores" (M 9; cf. M 16, 19, 20), and constituted one of the major assumptions of his demonstration of the relativity of conventional moral values.




In Human, All-too-Human Nietzsche began, moreover, to transcend the concept of utility, which, in its narrower, positivistic sense, is clearly incompatible with the consistent emphasis on the higher individualism dominating the various phases of his philosophy. He overcame the problem of utilitarian morality, which he was forced to accept in part at this stage in his work, by announcing a transition from collective to individual considerations from which the collective benefit is in turn increased: "To make a whole person of oneself, and to consider its highest welfare in all that one does-that is more productive than all these impulses and actions of pity towards others" (MA, 95).

There is a broad consensus in Ree and Nietzsche about the implications of the principle of determinism for the future of moral values. Taking the philosophical and scientific notions of causality of the previous two centuries to their logical conclusion, both are convinced that every action has its associated motive. This automatically means that the moral concepts of good and evil are, logically, meaningless when applied to actions that were bound to happen anyway. Ree finds that pangs of conscience are unnecessary, since the agent has had no control over his action, and merely judges it from the attitudes in- stilled in him by society, mistakenly imagining that his will had been free:

Most common of all are the pangs of conscience that the agent regards as reprehensible because he has committed a reprehensible action, although, so he thinks, he could have avoided it. With such pangs of conscience one considers the will to be free, and moreover does not realize that one finds egoistic actions reprehensible only out of habit (UME, 39).

This theory is repeated almost word for word in Human, All-too- Human:

The feeling of displeasure after a deed is by no means necessarily sensible: on the contrary, it is certainly not sensible since it is based on the erroneous assumption that the deed did not have to take place. Man feels repentance and pangs of conscience not because he is free, but because he considers himself to be free. Moreover, this feeling of displeasure ... is a very variable factor, linked to the development of culture and customs ... (MA, 39).

In his later works Nietzsche was to react against the passivity entailed by the rigidly mechanistic outlook expressed in his Human, All-too-Human (especially in MA, 106 and 107); but, for all his glori- fication of the dynamic will to power animating all life, he remained logically convinced that the will itself is not free. In Human, All-too- Human he was already aware, however, of the paradox that insight into man's lack of moral responsibility, although at first sight a hard




blow for the idealist, in fact opens up exciting possibilities for the future development of mankind: morality and guilt will be phased out by the higher morality of wisdom and innocence:

In such people [i.e., independent thinkers]... the first attempt will be made to see whether humanity can transform itself from a moral into a wise humanity.... Everything happens from necessity. Everything is innocent, and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence (MA, 107).

Whereas Ree's deliberations on determinism restrict themselves somewhat dryly to a scientific explanation anticipating much of mod- em legal theory, Nietzsche's are merely the first steps in opening up new philosophical approaches.

A similar process can be observed in their respective applications of the theory of determinism to the problem of punishment. Ree draws the pragmatic conclusion that punishment is still necessary, even if all actions are determined, not in order to punish the committed deed, but in order to deter from wrong-doing (UME, 33-34). This was also the original purpose of punishment, but the intention was gradually forgotten, and it came to be regarded as retribution for past misdeeds (UME, 46-47). Ree claims that the sense of justice was born as a result of the two false assumptions that punishment is retribution for past misdeeds and that the wrongdoer's will is free. In other words, the sense of justice comes after punishment rather than originally moti- vating it, as is mistakenly assumed. Since so many misconceptions are involved in this emotional subject, he contends, punishment is only justifiable when it promotes the general good of society by deterring future crimes. The "sense of justice" alone, based as it is on erroneous premises, is not a sufficient justification for punishment (UME, 52).

Nietzsche, however, was in disagreement with such a simple explanation as Ree's. Far from being a generally shared characteristic, as Ree implies, justice (like revenge) is seen as originating in an economical give and take between equally powerful individuals, avoiding unnecessary strife. It was only later that the pragmatic, self-preserving origin of "just" (i.e., sensible) actions was forgotten and mistakenly associated with praiseworthy unselfishness (MA, 92). An even more startling departure from Ree's somewhat linear, undif- ferentiated presentation of the development of moral values can be seen in an aphorism which prematurely announces Nietzsche's later distinction between the master and slave mentalities. Powerful tribes and castes regarded their ability to repay good with good and evil with evil as good, while those too weak to do so were branded as "bad" (schlecht), which has practically the same meaning as insignificant or slavish. The powerless and oppressed masses, however, regarded




every threat to their safety, including even every other human being, as hostile, cruel, and evil (MA 45; cf. Nietzsche's later specific mention of this point of difference from Ree in GM-V 4). Thus, even at that early date, Nietzsche was beginning to overcome a general positivist tendency with a vision of qualitative differences in moral attitudes which is intimately connected with his nascent sense of the will to power.

Despite differences in the ideas of the two moralists, some basic insights that they shared and probably discussed with each other were to have a revolutionary significance for the history of moral consciousness in general. Perhaps the most important of all is their awareness of the relativity of the predicates "good" and "bad" which had traditionally been applied to objects instead of to individual awareness because of imprecise linguistic usage. Ree combines this insight with his basic moral criterion of utility:

Whoever applies the term "good" or "bad" to a concrete noun means to express that this object is useful or harmful. . . . Accordingly, one ought really not to say: "this object is good," but only: "this object is good for me".... Through imprecise formulation, usage attributes the relationships which things have to the things themselves as predicates (UME, 59-60).

A consequence of Ree' s ethical relativism is that it is impermissible to talk of persons being "evil" in the customary morally censorious sense; at most one can say that a person is of a certain nature or disposition which is free of any inherent moral value (UME, 62).

Intensifying Ree's argument, Nietzsche expresses his own impa- tience with the religious concepts of good and evil attributed to the nature of the world in what are for him irrelevant anthropomorphic myths:

Quite apart from all theology and the fight against it, it is apparent that the world is neither good nor bad, let alone the best or the worst of all worlds, and that the concepts "good" and "evil" only have a meaning with reference to people, and are perhaps even then not justified, in the way they are normally used . . . (MA, 28).

Elsewhere he discerns an historical development of moral feelings which is identical, point for point, with Ree's. First, actions were called good or bad according to their useful or harmful results, regardless of the motives; then more serious logical error arose: the actions themselves and finally the character of the agent were regarded as inherently good or bad, due to the linguistic usage which confuses the effect of a phenomenon with its nature or cause. Like Ree, Nietzsche believes that the attributes "good" and "bad" are used according to the same anthropocentric logic, whether they are applied to physical




objects or to human actions: in each case the observer ascribes to the object in question as its inherent nature the aspects that he perceives and which most affect him (MA, 39).21

A significant departure from the previous history of philosophy is the way in which Ree and Nietzsche both assimilate the process of cognition itself to the biological facts of life rather than regarding cognition as a separate, independent faculty in the idealistic tradition of their predecessors. Each in his own way reduces the human instinct for knowledge to general drives in all walks and aspects of life. Ree characteristically sees intellectual activity by no means as objective cognition of the true and beautiful, but as the most important function of self-preservation,22 whereas Nietzsche, since the publication of his treatise Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (Uber Wahrheit und Lige im aupermoralischen Sinne, 1873), analyzes the impulse for knowledge as a primary manifestation of the will to power.23 While Ree's assessment of the impulse to acquire knowledge might again be seen as a direct development of Darwinian biology, Nietzsche once again poetically portrays the implications of the scientific theories of

21 Nietzsche discerns the following stages in the history of the concept of "moral responsibility": first, actions were called good or evil only on the basis of their useful or harmful consequences; then the origin of these terms was forgotten, and the actions themselves were thought to possess the quality "good" or "evil"; next, good and evil were read into the motives of the actions; finally, the predicates good and evil were no longer attributed to the individual motives, but to the whole nature of a person (MA, 39). Ree parallels this in part when he observes that at first he was named good who helped others, and he was called bad who harmed them; later one did not simply judge whether someone happened to be useful, but only called those actions beneficial to others' good which were performed from unegoistic motives (UME, 61-63). Both Nietzsche and Ree point out the error of logic implicit in using the attributes good and evil, which are no more justifiable than calling a stone, in itself, hard (MA, 39), or cinnabar, in itself, red (UME, 63).

22 "The original function of the intellect was not purely objective perception. It was developed in the struggle for existence, in other words, those apes, man-apes, or ape-men survived and succeeded in reproducing which, due to their greater intelli- gence, were best fitted to escape their enemies, to procure food, and to drive away their rivals. The history of intellectual abilities thus demonstrates that our perceptive capacity primarily exists for the satisfaction of our instincts, and by no means for the purely objective knowledge of the true and beautiful" (UME, 92).

23 Fragments such as the following indicate that for Nietzsche intellectual curiosity and the accumulation of knowledge were functions of the instincts and the will: "In knowing, too, I only feel my will's delight in begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is only because it has the will to beget." Kritische Gesamtausgabe, VI, 107. "We suppose that intelligere must be something just, good, and conciliatory, something fundamentally opposed to the instincts, whereas it is only a certain relationship of the instincts to each other." (Die Frbhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science, hereafter abbreviated as FW] [1882], 333): "The so-called instinct for knowledge can be traced back to an instinct to appropriate and conquer." Krit- ische Gesamtausgabe, VIII, 118.




his century and replaces mere survival with a quasi-mythological vision of the aspiration of the self for more power as also the basic motive behind man's highest activity, the quest for knowledge. While Ree lacked the imaginative vision of Nietzsche, the influence of Ree and other positivists was crucial in leading Nietzsche to a philosophy based on a naturalistic interpretation of life. His philosophy proceeded from common origins rather than from the unjustified separa- tion of abstract thought from man's physical existence as assumed by his German philosophical predecessors.

Despite their determination to advance the boundaries of realism, in assessing their own intellectual vocations both Ree and Nietzsche envisaged as the highest cultural ideal a philosophical life in which considerations of personal or collective utility are reduced to a minimum. They described their aims in ways suggesting a cult of knowledge for knowledge's sake, though they remained aware that logically knowledge, too, must be motivated. Ree insisted that moral knowledge has its own justification regardless of its potential benefit or harm: for a philosopher nothing can be holy but the truth (UME, 140). Like Nietzsche, Ree took the courageously unpopular standpoint that the thinking person represents a higher stage of development than the moral person (UME, 141; cf. MA, 107, quoted above, where Nie- tzsche envisaged a progression of mankind from morality to wisdom and enlightenment). When Ree described "disinterested" knowledge (without explaining how this knowledge has suddenly become disinterested) he evoked the ethos of the peaceful pleasures of a purely intellectual life which releases man from the painful strivings of the will. He differed from Nietzsche only in his lack of the imaginative intensity expressed in the last aphorism of "First and Last Things," where Nietzsche portrays the free spirit's renunciation of life's demands. Such fearless detachment from conventional assumptions Nietzsche imagined would be realizable in a serene character purified of common emotions and desires (MA, 34).

Even when they were composing their respective works, however, Ree and Nietzsche were bound to become aware of the differences in their range and intentions. This can be seen when Ree concedes, somewhat ambiguously, that Nietzsche not only shared almost all his views but also possessed many beyond these to which he had no relationship.24 This remark could be taken as an oblique attempt to distance himself from Nietzsche's incipient revaluation of morality, which was clearly heralded, if not systematically elaborated, in many passages in Human, All-too-Human. Nietzsche, too, dissociated himself, but in a far more condescending manner, when he ironically

24 R6e to Nietzsche, June 1877, Pfeiffer, 30.




praised Ree above all for the logical development of his treatise, and responded to the paternity ascribed to him in the "all-too-amiable" dedication of the copy of The Origin of Moral Feelings sent to him by Ree "with an incredulous smile."25

Despite the polite exchange of tributes upon receipt of each other's books, the future courses of their philosophical careers were set in drastically different directions. Ree proceeded in repeatedly obses- sive and arid attempts to explain the origin of moral feelings and the judicial mechanisms of society in the positivist terms of his time, employing a mixture of anthropology, biology, sociology, and legal history. Contrariwise, after Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche developed an increasingly dynamic and intuitive concept of man's ''moral" life which involved lavishly bold speculation concerning the history of morality. His subsequent intellectual adventures went even to the point of mythologizing, rather than offering logical, docu- mented proof in the scientific spirit so often invoked, however rhetor- ically, at the time of Human, All-too-Human.

Nietzsche's paroxysms of jealousy and despair over Ree's affair with Lou von Salome in 1882 at least released him from maintaining discretion about the ever-widening gap between his outlook and Ree's. In March 1883 he reported to Franz Overbeck that he had put an end to an unfortunate relationship from which many disastrous misunderstandings had arisen, by refusing to allow Ree's "main work," The Genesis of Conscience (Die Entstehung des Gewissens, 1885), to be dedicated to him, adding that he no longer wanted his own work confounded with anyone else's.26 A month later he complained to Malwida von Meysenbug that he had encountered "such superfi- ciality of judgment, reaching the point of stupidity, that I was confounded with Ree. With Ree!!!"27

Ree's book, which did not appear until 1885, had already been conceived in its main details a short time after his book, The Origin of Moral Feelings; it develops problems examined in the previous work and closely follows the ideas revealed to Elisabeth Nietzsche in 1879,28 showing that Ree had not progressed beyond a narrowly positivistic attitude. Ree's book traced the origins of conscience back to the history of punishment for death and injury, which had been en- forced in primitive society to prevent the disruption otherwise caused by the blood revenge exacted by the victim's family. Punishment was

25 Nietzsche to R6e, June 1877, Pfeiffer, 31. 26 Nietzsche to Overbeck, 17 April 1883, Pfeiffer, 481; cf. also Nietzsche to

Overbeck, 13 March 1883, Pfeiffer, 307. 27 Gesammelte Briefe, III, ed. Forster-Nietzsche and Wachsmuth (Berlin and

Leipzig, 1904), 605. 28 Cf. R6e to Elisabeth Nietzsche, 8 August 1879, Pfeiffer, 59.




basically intended for the protection of society against disruptive individuals, and its primary aim evolved into deterrence rather than revenge. Ree regarded conscience as a result of education and long- established customs, producing the association of certain values with certain actions, which in themselves are morally neutral. The values themselves were originally based on the social usefulness or harmful- ness of actions. The concept of retribution arose later than that of punishment for an action when the fact that punishment was imposed for an action (originally as a deterrent) was taken as proof that the action itself was worthy of punishment and thus to be paid for in pain. Ree thus regarded the sense of justice as an historical consequence of punishment, and that it was long habit which led to the mistaken notion that it is of supernatural origin.

While still on speaking terms with Ree, Nietzsche had objected to the excessively logical method which he had adopted to attempt to reconstruct the history of moral responsibility. In his opinion such an attempt could only be made with the imagination, and should take into account the phenomenon of the "herd pangs of conscience" which Ree had totally neglected.29 Whereas Ree's theories restrict themselves to the consciously framed legislation enacted by society and its later misunderstanding by individuals, Nietzsche goes far beyond this by postulating the existence of a collective consciousness.30

The section on the history of morality in Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Bbse), and more specifically the three treatises of The Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral), both published in 1886, constituted the final reckoning with Ree's methods and conclusions. While Nietzsche acknowledges in the preface to The Genealogy of Morals, written in 1887, the impetus given to him a decade before by Ree to deal with the history of morality, he attempts to deny any specific influence, claiming that at the time he had said "no" to The Origin of Moral Feelings sentence for sentence and argument for argument (GM-V 4). He would now have his readers believe that the main moral theories of Human, All-too-Human repre- sent a point by point refutation of the ideas of Ree's book, ignoring the

29 Cf. Nietzsche to Lou von Salom6, 7 Sept. 1882: "I recommend to you and our friend R6e ... to reflect about the origin of the sense of responsibility. The individual consciousness of the member of the herd, together with his pangs of conscience, which are herd pangs of conscience, are extraordinarily difficult to grasp with the imagination-and it is completely impossible to deduce them logically." Pfeiffer, 226.

30 This almost Jungian concept dominates the second treatise of The Genealogy of Morals, but it is already anticipated in the fifth book of The Gay Science: "My theory ... is that consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence, but rather to his communal or herd nature; that, consequently, it is subtly developed only in its relationship to communal and herd utility .. ." (FW, 354; cf. Pfeiffer, 453.)




obvious similarities (loc. cit.) and condescendingly explains how he tried to draw Ree's "sharp and impartial eye" to a better view: a real history of morality based on ascertainable facts. Ree, however, had remained entrenched in his Darwinian hypotheses, combining theories of the survival of the fittest with modern moralistic sensibility "in a way which was at least entertaining" (GM-V, 7).

Nietzsche's own examination of the problem of the origin of "guilt, bad conscience, and such things" in The Genealogy of Morals takes a dramatically different course from Ree in both tone and substance. The essential problem of primitive humanity-to breed an animal that could make and keep a promise-was solved by branding prescriptions into the human consciousness by means of the most cruel penalties (GM, II, 1). There are still basic similarities to Ree, however, in Nietzsche's explanation of the origin of punishment in the primitive belief that harm could be compensated by making the of- fender suffer an equivalent amount of pain. Nietzsche invoked the same contractual relationship as that of debtor to creditor, a concept obviously similar to Ree's theories of blood revenge and blood money,31 although Nietzsche characteristically psychologized and mythologized it by viewing cruelty as the festive instinct of man (GM, II, 3-6). Unlike Ree, however, Nietzsche does not view justice as originating in desire for revenge: justice is a sign of power, not of retaliation (GM, II, 11). He emphatically distances himself from the tendency visible in Ree and other genealogists of morality to seek "purpose" in punishment, even if its present utility can be conceded (GM, II, 12).

Nietzsche's own explanation of the "bad conscience" anticipates Freud in many ways. When primitive man was forced to live in a society, his primeval aggressive instincts were unsettled, and turned in upon himself (GM, II, 16). The origin of bad conscience was the suppression by a master race of the instinct for freedom in its subjects (GM, II, 17). It, and its derivatives, "self-sacrifice" and "selfless- ness," are in effect the inverted sadism of those too weak to vent their aggression on others (GM, II, 18). The primary source of guilt lies in primitive man's intuition that he owes everything to his origins-at first to his ancestors, and then, through mythologizing them, to the gods. The original concepts of guilt and duty to a deity became moral- ized into the bad conscience (GM, II, 19-21). Above all, the tone and the philosophical context of Nietzsche's treatise transcend the dry scientific objectivity of Ree, who applied no value judgments to the phenomenon of conscience. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the bad conscience represents a horrifying sickness of man, a repression of his natural instincts hampering his further development, and is thus

31 Cf. The Genesis of the Conscience, 52-87.




denounced by him with all the polemical vehemence at his command. The bad conscience is seen overall as a perverted ideal leading ulti- mately to nihilism, from which man can only be redeemed by the coming superman (cf. GM, II, 24).

In the final assessment of his own work in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche claimed that the praise bestowed upon Ree in Human, All-too-Human really referred to himself, and measured the "hopeless" among his readers by their readiness to understand the whole book as "higher Ree-alism (EH-MA, 6). Ree meanwhile continued along the tracks already set in his earliest works. He finally wrote what he considered to be his major opus, Philosophie (published posthumously in 1903) in comparison with which, according to his prefatory notice, his earlier writings were "immature youthful works," and then tried to buy up his previous books to destroy them. Philosophie does not, however, reveal significant progress in his persistent concern with moral judgments, conscience, and punishment. Nietzsche had definitively clari- fied his diametrically opposite theories on these subjects in The Gene- alogy of Morals, and henceforth turned his attention to the future, proclaiming the coming victory of the triumphantly uninhibited will to power over the nihilism proceeding from the debilitating moralism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Ree, with his determination to find a tangible, usually utilitarian, origin in every moral impulse and institution, had trapped himself in a maze of legalistic speculation in line with the socio-biological theories of his time. Nietzsche indulged in far bolder, more imaginative and differentiated but completely unprovable speculations of his own based on caste distinctons to demonstrate that the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition was a negative development in the history of mankind which could only be overcome by unleashing the energies of the superior individual. While each tried in his own way to overcome the hold of conscience upon himself, the systems and solutions which they evolved correspondingly reflected each one's original personality. Ree's rationalism consisted in an attempt to prove to himself that every action is inevitable and thus free from absolute moral judgments. This liberated him from condemning either himself or his fel- low humans and enabled him to develop a tolerant humanism not incompatible with his theoretical pessimism. Nietzsche, powerfully agitated by unresolved tensions and impulses, was forced to trace a noble pedigree for them and an ignoble one for the reproaches of his conscience in an attempt to justify and assert the former. Ree used his exposure of the misconceptions and illogicality surrounding modern man's assumptions to support a pragmatic, eudemonistic philosophy of life based on a minimum of discomfort, while Nietzsche's intensely sublimated sado-masochistic crisis led him to scorn immediate personal advantage for an ethos founded on painful struggle, and to




legitimate the projection of his own master and slave mentalities into the supposed moral history of mankind.

Nietzsche's heroic ethos could only temporarily adopt the methods of the positivists in order later to substitute a psychohistorical explanation which was in effect his adjustment of history to the needs and urges of his own personality and its higher egoism based not on personal advantage but on the untrammelled expression of his aggressive emotional and intellectual vitalism. Ree had never strayed from the role of the "disinterested" sociohistorian or scientist (the mentality of which Nietzsche himself had analyzed in The Genealogy of Morals as a further development of moralism), whereas Nietzsche was forced by his far greater gifts and needs to go to extreme lengths to provide a personal mythology subduing the tyrannical superego and channelling the chaotic, potentially self-destructive id to achieve tran- scendent balance and vigor in the triumphantly asserted ego. The attraction of opposites to which he alluded when describing his relationship to Ree lasted for a surprisingly long time, perhaps because Ree's cold, rigorous thought appealed to another strongly pronounced aspect of Nietzsche's own personality, his asceticism. Personal and intellectual incompatibility and Nietzsche's incapacity to tolerate rivals inevitably led, however, to a break which was subsequently affirmed by his polemical and condescending criticism of Ree. Thus Nietzsche did not do full justice to the challenging issues raised by his colleague, who had nonetheless helped the development of Nietz- sche's own system of moral philosophy.

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