Lonely as a Fish: Nietzsche on the Self as Metaphor

This is a draft of a paper published in Melan-Cholia: The Disease of the Soul, in Dariusz Skórczewski

and Andrzej Wiercinski (eds.), Lublin: KUL.pp. 169-206. Please cite the published version

Lonely as a Fish: Nietzsche on the Self as Metaphor

Frank Chouraqui,

Koç University, Istanbul

No philosopher (with the possible exception of Rousseau) discusses solitude as

often, vividly and passionately as Nietzsche. Yet, much of what he has to say about

solitude is never articulated philosophically; instead, in his characteristic way,

Nietzsche signifies the theoretical importance of solitude without outlining it, leaving

us with no choice but to piece together biographical events, letters and stylistic analysis

towards an elucidation of solitude as a solid philosophical theme worked-over in deep

coherence with the rest of Nietzsche’s project.

The aim of this paper is triple:

-Firstly, I aim at providing a unified—if necessarily partial—account of

Nietzsche’s thinking of solitude by examining some cryptic or disregarded texts and

letters. I argue that Nietzsche’s thinking on solitude took place in two steps, with a

transitional period in the years 1881-1883, where solitude went from being

experienced as a accidental fact of one’s psychological life to being regarded as an

ontological experience.

-Secondly, I try to suggest some of the ways in which the thought of solitude

enters into relation with other key themes in Nietzsche’s project, in particular his

rhetoric of affirmation, of futurity and his theory of writing. I argue that (especially in

the second phase), Nietzsche regarded solitude as a disease that was to be healed

through a reference to a future reconciliation of self with other and of self with self by

the intermediary of writing. In this sense, writing appears as not only a reference to an

object, but also a reference to a future.

-Thirdly, I seek to bring out the potential of the theme of solitude for

contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche’s conceptions of selfhood, otherness

and reflexivity. Throughout his career, Nietzsche regarded solitude as an ambivalent

experience of missing oneself and missing others. The distress of solitude, he believed,

came from the fact that in solitude, our own self becomes distant from us, and attached

to us only by way of language: solitude makes the self a mere metaphor for itself. This

did not prevent Nietzsche in his early years to seek to remedy solitude by seeking the

presence of others (through marriage notably, but also through the attachment to

tutelary figures, live or dead—Wagner and Schopenhauer). In the second phase

however, Nietzsche regarded solitude increasingly as a textual or semiotic problem

whereby the distance between self and self created by solitude resembled (and could be

healed by) the relationship between writer and reader, provided one carried out a

drastic existential procedure involving the overcoming of their empirical self i.e. a

reduction to text.

1. The primacy of relation

The year 1875 was possibly the greatest turning point in Nietzsche’s lifestyle;

one year after the first Untimely Meditation, and while the untimely motif was

becoming more entrenched in his work, Nietzsche’s sedentary life would come to an

end, prompted by disease and loneliness, and their constant dialectical play. Loneliness

I would like to dedicate this essay to my teacher Jean-Jacques Boullis and my friend Steve

Walker, two masters in solitude.



came first, and after having spent years sharing a house with his friends Overbeck

(whom Nietzsche joined in April 1869) and Romundt (who joined them in April 1874);

Nietzsche was left alone by both in the space of a few days (the third faithful friend of

the time, Carl von Gersdorff, had left a few days earlier, after a long visit). On April

19th

, 1875, a few days after recovering from a sickness that he himself attributed to

Romundt’s departure1; he wrote to his sister a letter which counts as his first reflection

on the question of solitude, a question that would haunt his later writings, thoughts, and

every part of his life:

“The summer will indeed turn out to be all too monotonous; can you believe

that I am already all alone. Romundt has left for good ten days ago and Overbeck has

been in Zurich since yesterday. By way of celebrating my solitary life, Mrs. Baumann

brought me a herring Häring for dinner, a regular grandpa herring, old, untimely

unzeitgemäss and all… … Romundt’s departure and the days leading up to it were a

difficult time both for life and work: it was a consolation that the loyal Gersdorff

dropped his anchor in these parts for three weeks. But he is now long gone, and so is

Adolf Baumgartner, who came for Easter, a vain Hussar and a dreadful dandy. It’s just

that he’s young and that we are old and hairy zotteligalt like this herring. …

What becomes of our good mother? And wouldn’t you both like to fly

away from your Naumburg nest?

What wouldn’t I give in order to—

Anyway, receive the cordial salutations of

Your brother,

Fridericus Intempestivus.”2

The anxiety of loneliness and the fear of its growing effects are written all over

this later, as well as the surprising variations on the motif of untimeliness (in both

German and Latin), a word Nietzsche hardly used lightly. We may be justified, I think,

in questioning Nietzsche’s use of such a qualifier to describe a herring. It seems of

course, that we may start to explain this incongruity by noting that the “intempestivus”

which qualifies Nietzsche himself, is the Latin echo of the German “unzeitgemäss”

which qualifies the herring.

So, it seems in a context of solitude, both Nietzsche himself (“Fridericus

intempestivus”) and the herring that he ate “as a celebration of his solitude,” are

declared “unzeitgemäss.” An early letter with obvious textual playfulness all round

constitutes scant textual evidence for beginning an approach of Nietzsche’s views on

solitude, but as we shall see, there is ample supplementary material to support the

following initial question, triggered by the play on untimeliness in the letter to

Elisabeth: What, if anything, does this association of the fish one eats with the self who

eats it tell us about the experience of solitude?

1 To Carl von Gersdorff (April 17

th, 1875). All quotations from Nietzsche’s letters are from

Friedrich Nietzsche, KGWB, Kritischen Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe, 1967, Walter de

Gruyter, Berlin & New York, in my personal translations. I occasionally use the Middleton

translation (Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. trans. Christopher Middleton, Hackett,

Indianapolis & Cambridge, 1996), these quotations are signalled by (Middleton) 2 To Elisabeth Nietzsche, April 19

th 1875.



Nietzsche compares himself to this herring in two ways, first, he, like the fish,

is untimely; secondly, he compares himself directly to the herring (Häring), for being

“old and hairy” like it.3 I would like to focus on three implications that I think are

contained in Nietzsche’s approach to the experience of solitude in these letters as well

as many other passages. First of all, Nietzsche always regards solitude as a certain

form of relation, and specifically, a relation to oneself. Secondly, this relation involves

a self-antagonism that is best expressed physiologically in terms of consumption and

sickness, and in terms of poisoning (the consumption that makes one sick). Thirdly,

this relation creates a separation within the self, triggering a language of self-

multiplication, of self-division, and of internal—and external—distance.

Nietzsche’s most explicit declaration of the primacy of relation takes place

twelve years later in The Genealogy of Morality (GM), II, 16, where he states that our

instincts of aggression can be re-directed but not annihilated, and that they have

primacy over individuation: in Nietzsche’s anthropology, the principle of self-identity

yields to the principle of relationality, and the isolated man is more prompt to turn their

aggression against themselves—that is to say, to establish a relation of alterity with

themselves—than to elude their relational nature.4 In terms of solitude, this suggests

3 Nietzsche often describes himself with reference to fish in general or some specific fish

species (carps, herrings, flying fish). Cf. for example the letters to Erwin Rohde Aug. 6th, 1868;

to Peter Gast, March 5th, 1884 and 14

th, Feb. 1884. It may be asked why Nietzsche chooses

herrings, and—as we shall see—fish in general, to represent loneliness. It seemed to have been

a commonplace of the time to represent another famously solitary philosopher, Spinoza,

“munching on a solitary herring.” H. L. Mencken, in his early (and faulty) biography of

Nietzsche, writes: “There are sentimental critics who hold that Nietzsche's utter lack of

geniality was due to his lack of a wife. A good woman—alike beautiful and sensible—would

have rescued him, they say, from his gloomy fancies. He would have expanded and mellowed

in the sunshine of her smiles, and children would have civilized him. The defect in this theory

lies in the fact that philosophers do not seem to flourish amid scenes of connubial joy. High

thinking, it would appear, presupposes boarding house fare and hall bedrooms. Spinoza,

munching his solitary herring up his desolate backstairs, makes a picture that pains us,

perhaps, but it must be admitted that it satisfies our sense of eternal fitness.” (Henri Louis

Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, T. Fischer, London, 1908: 56-57; my

emphasis) Although there is no evidence that Nietzsche was aware of this mythical

representation, we know that he was aware of Spinoza and of his image as a most solitary

thinker, be it only from the second volume of Goethe’s Poetry and Truth (which the young

Nietzsche read avidly) (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Warheit esp. books 14

and 16; see also the notebooks of 1887 for Nietzsche’s comments on Goethe’s views on

Spinoza). It is only later however, that Nietzsche encountered Spinoza philosophically, whilst

still insisting that his solitude created a supplementary link between them: “I am really amazed,

really delighted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: what

brought me to him now was the guidance of instinct. Not only is his whole tendency like my

own—to make knowledge the most powerful passion—but also in five main points of his

doctrine I find myself; this most abnormal and lonely thinker is closest to me in these points

precisely: he denies free will, purposes, the moral world order, the nonegoistical, evil; of

course the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of

knowledge. In summa: my solitariness which, as on very high mountains, has often, often

made me gasp for breath and lose blood, is now at least a solitude for two. Strange!” (To

Overbeck, July 30th 1881 my emphasis)

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge & New York, 2006).



that Nietzsche refuses the traditional view of solitude as the absence of otherness (a

view that holds only on the assumption that the individual has primacy) but instead

regards solitude as an experience of alterity of a certain type, namely, the

internalization of alterity: the alterity of the self to the self. This internalization is a

direct result of Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power whose essence is its modus

operandi, which Nietzsche characterizes as nutrition and digestion.5 The state of being

of the individual whose intentional relationship to the world has been internalized,

Nietzsche calls a sickness.6 Not only this, but it seems Nietzsche regards all sickness as

some form of self-antagonism of the type induced by solitude. In addition, it is

apparent that Nietzsche is targeting solitude as prompting self-antagonism when he

suggests that internalization only appears when the primeval blonde beast is placed in

isolation, confined by laws and morals. This isolation, Nietzsche describes as a cage.7

Although the theoretical analysis of self-consumption appears only in the

preparatory texts to 1887’s GM, the association of solitude with self-antagonism and

sickness has been a constant staple of Nietzsche’s reflections on existential states since

at least the time of the Untimely Meditations. His letters from 1875 onwards begin to

refer to his home—a home he now inhabits alone—as a “cave.” Indeed, less than three

months after lamenting Overbeck and Romundt’s departure in the letter quoted above,

Nietzsche regrets the fact that he will be away when Overbeck returns in these

significant terms: “You are now returned to me as a paradigm of recovered internality

only to find the cave empty and myself forced to have gotten away.”8

Indeed, as early as 1874, Nietzsche had taken to referring to the home he shared

with his friends and rented from the very Mrs. Baumann of herring fame (whose name

conveniently echoed that of a famous cave of the Harz mountains) the

“Baummanshöhle,” a term that would become systematic following the advent of

Nietzsche’s solitude in March-April 1975.9 Of course, the motif of the caves is not

only attached to the pun contained in the expression “Baumannshöhle” and Nietzsche

repeatedly suggests that his solitude makes his existence resemble an interstice

between two sorts of caves, one in which he dwells, and one that dwells inside him.

There is no doubt that Nietzsche insists that the sickness associated to solitude prompts

one to seek refuge in caves “When one is sick, one must bury oneself in some ‘cave,’

for this is the rational thing to do, this is the animal thing to do.”10

He declares that this

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritischen Gesamtausgabe Werke, (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin & New

York, 1967) (KGW), 7 9, 1886 6 “The conflict of the passions, the duality, triplicity, numerousness of ‘souls in a breast’: very

unhealthy, inner ruin, leading to an inside conflict.” (KGW) (14 157, 1888) The allusion is to

Goethe’s Faust I, line 112, where Faust exclaims: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner

Brust.” Nietzsche was particularly fond of this line, which he quoted in several instances

starting in the drafts of Beyond Good and Evil from 1885. See for example: KGW 43 3 of

1885, 37 16, 1885, an allusion in 40 39, 1885 and Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and

Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1998) (BGE), 244. 7 GM, II, 16.

8 To Overbeck, July 14

th, 1875 my emphasis

9 See for example: to Franziska Nietzsche, Last Sunday of January 1875, to Marie

Baumgartner 16th March, 1875; to Carl von Gersdorff, 21 May 1875; to Franz Overbeck, 21

May 1875; to Heinrich Romundt, 26 September 1875; to Carl von Gersdorff, 3 March 1876;

passim. 10

KGW, 9 103 see also the use of the same metaphor in the letter to Heinrich von Stein of

Oct. 15th 1885.



disease is also associated to inner caves: “be aware every hermit has his cave, within

himself I mean.”11

In fact, it is not only in alternation that the solitary individual is

dramatized as the host and the guest of his or her cave(s). As early as 1875, a few

months after having been left alone in the Baumann cave, Nietzsche writes:

“As for ourselves, the secret to our healing consists, due to our great inner

vulnerability and our great exposition to suffering, to acquiring a certain degree of

hardness of skin. From the outside at least, one will no longer be able to kick us

around. In any event, nothing torments me more than the idea of being caught between

two fires, one from within and one from without—the home that my dear sister is

preparing and which I shall discover in the coming days should offer me such a shell,

and I experience genuine happiness just to imagine myself in my snail shell. You

know, I shall always lovingly extend my antennae towards you and a few other rare

people, if I can afford the animal formulation.”12

All such remarks in both Nietzsche’s letters, his unpublished writings and his

published writings, were not thematized in fully theoretical terms until GM, but it is

striking how the intuitions explicit in GM have been expressed in Nietzsche’s stylistic

choices for the previous 12 years. Indeed, the two key features of Nietzsche’s analysis

of bad conscience seem to have informed his thinking on solitude since the Basel

years: solitude is the internalization of external aggression, and it creates a hollow

inside one that coincides with the hollow outside: a missing of self and a missing of

other that coincide and constantly respond to each other.

The point of Nietzsche’s use of the cave metaphor for the experience of

solitude is that as an internalization of relation, solitude creates an analogy between

one’s relation to themselves and their relation to the external world (including the

others). As a result, the solitary individual has a cave in which he or she dwells, and

another cave that dwells inside him or her. This ambivalence carried by the cave

metaphor only serves to complicate Nietzsche’s conception of solitude. In a traditional

sense, solitude is the absence of others, and the prima facie implication of this is that it

is resolved by the presence of others. On this basis, when Nietzsche suggests that

solitude introduces alterity within the self, he may be seen to be resolving the problem

of solitude at the moment it is presenting itself: one can offer oneself one’s own

presence and thereby resolve one’s own solitude. Indeed, countless letters and

published or unpublished texts assert just this: Nietzsche values his solitude, which he

regards as simply “being in one’s own company” especially inasmuch as it spares him

the most excruciating solitude, the one induced by finding oneself in the wrong

company.13

This is not to say that all solitude is valuable for Nietzsche, and there are

just as many writings in which loneliness is presented as the greatest curse of his own

life, and supposedly, in anyone’s life. For one is not always good company to oneself,

and conversely, others are not always bad company. In fact, Nietzsche constantly

regards the company of others as an antidote to the company of the self, and vice-

versa. This is, as we shall see, largely because Nietzsche’s renewed idea of the essence

of a self is no longer attached to any empirical determination: one is defined in terms

of their potential selves, and not of their actual, empirical selves. As a result, others

11

To Resa von Schirnhoffer, late March 1884 12

To Malwida Von Meysenbug, August 11th, 1875 (my emphasis)

13 E.g. to Peter Gast, 1

st Feb. 1883



might make “better selves” for one just as “personal” selves may turn out to be false

friends. As a result, solitude is given an ambivalent value: it can be either a “castle” or

a “prison,”14

and although it is sometimes “chosen,” it is also sometimes “inflicted.”15

Indeed, solitude may be embraced as the experience of being in one’s own company,

or dreaded as the missing of oneself through self-antagonism, for, as the herring

metaphor shows solitude also turns one’s friendly self into an enemy.

Any comprehensive account of Nietzsche’s views on solitude must take into

account this ambivalence: not all solitude is sickening, for Nietzsche’s writings are

replete with discussions of the difference between what we might call loneliness (akin

to melancholia and disease) and solitude (a regenerating, empowering experience). In

the remainder of this paper, I will restrict my remarks to loneliness, focusing on

Nietzsche’s strategies to heal the disease of the soul.

On a purely biographical level, Nietzsche’s first response to solitude was

indeed based on a traditional, empirical view of the subject: loneliness required the

presence of others, and we see a profusion of letters discussing marriage16

, beginning,

unsurprisingly in the second half of 1875 (just weeks after the departure of his

friends17

), and finishing, famously, with the Lou Andreas-Salomé fiasco of 1882.18

At first, it seems Nietzsche, spurred by his mother, sister and motherly

Malwida, threw himself in the timely sport of marriage-seeking with the ardor of a

patient seeking medicine. He writes to his sister:

“We Nietzsche and Malwida von Meysenbug convince ourselves that, in the

long run, my Basel University existence cannot continue, that to carry it through at best

would mean abandoning all my important projects and still sacrificing my health

completely. Naturally I shall have to spend next winter there, with no change in my

circumstances, but Easter 1878 should be the end of it, should the other move

succeed—that is, marriage with a suitable but necessarily affluent woman. ‘Good but

rich,’ as Frl. von M. said, this ‘but’ making us laugh aloud. With this wife I would then

live for the next few years in Rome, which place is suitable for reasons alike of health,

society, and my studies. This summer the plan should be carried out, in Switzerland, so

that I would return to Basel in the autumn a married man. Various "persons" are

invited to come to Switzerland, among them several names unknown to you—for

example, Elise Bülow from Berlin, Elsbeth Brandes from Hanover. As far as

intellectual qualities are concerned, I still find Nat[alie] Herzen the most suitable. You

did very well with the idealization of the little Köckert woman in Geneva! All praise

and honor to you! But it is doubtful; and money?”19

14

To Gast 24 Nov. 1887 15

To Gast, 23 July 1885 16

In 1873, Nietzsche had written a piece for some friends’ wedding entitled “A Monody for

Two” “with a title which should be interpreted as a symbol of good marriage.” Note how his

early idealization of marriage involved both “good solitude” (a “monody”) and company (“for

two”). (To Rohde, March 22nd

1873 (Middleton)) 17

To Mathilde Trampedach, April 11th 1876

18 In his dealings with Lou, and in spite of a (somewhat unconventional) marriage proposal;

Nietzsche is already seen longing for a new sort of companionship, beyond matrimonial. He

writes to her “in fond devotion to your destiny—for in you I love also my hopes.” A recurring

theme in his letters to Gast among others. (To Lou Salomé, end of August 1882 (Middleton)) 19

To Elisabeth Nietzsche, 25th April 1877 (Middleton)



The failure of Niezsche’s matrimonial projects is well-known, and it must be

noted that Nietzsche subsequently regarded his single status not as failure to have

married, but as an existential—perhaps philosophical—choice, a choice of staying, as

Nietzsche says about single life like he did about solitude, “in one’s cave.”20

After all,

“a married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my principle,” he declares in GM,21

and in 1885, he makes no secret of his decision: “you will realize that my mother wants

me to get married…, but she wishes it in vain).”22

This change of heart, as often in Nietzsche, is related to a pseudo-medical

concern; it is a change of treatment based upon a change in diagnosis: the problems

Nietzsche sought to solve are now perceived in a new light. If marriage was indeed an

empirical solution to an empirical problem (solitude in the trivial sense, that could be

fulfilled by the other’s presence in the trivial sense); Nietzsche’s understanding of his

solitude has gained a degree of sophistication that made marriage an impotent cure for

them: solitude is no longer the solitude of the empirical Friedrich Nietzsche, but it is

now a more essential solitude, that cannot be solved with mere presence. This change

in Nietzsche’s view of the solitary self, once again, is expressed with reference to a

host of fish-metaphors.

2. The essential reduction of the empirical self to one’s task

Nietzsche’s view of solitude took a progressive turn in the years 1881-1883, a

turn that was completed in the weeks leading up to the first Zarathustra23

. This

evolution concerns the question of the healing of solitude. In the notes for Z (1883),

Nietzsche’s rhetoric of solitude, although it remains securely bound up with images of

fish, caves and sickness, evolves to place more emphasis on the question of what

solitude calls for, namely, a resolution through the establishment of a sort of non-

empirical kinship. As early as 1885’ Z, we see the book closing with Zarathustra’s

departure from his own cave dwelling. This move, Zarathustra declares, is the

overcoming of a double suffering, which he calls his “suffering and fellow-suffering.”

This overcoming of suffering or disease, Zarathustra suggests, is not a return to

happiness, but an existential transfiguration whereby one willfully reduces oneself to

their own “work,” supported by the presence of kindred spirits (Zarathustra’s

“children”). Zarathustra declares:

“Oh you superior humans, it was of your need that the old soothsayer

prophesied yesterday morning—to your need he wanted to tempt and seduce me: ‘O

Zarathustra,’ he said to me, ‘I come to seduce you to your ultimate sin.’ ‘To my

ultimate sin?’ cried Zarathustra and laughed angrily at his own words: ‘What was it

that was saved up for me as my ultimate sin?’—And once more Zarathustra sank into

himself (versank Zarathustra an sich) and sat down on the large rock again and

meditated. Suddenly he sprang up—‘Pity! Pity for the superior human!’ he cried out,

and his visage was transformed into bronze. ‘Well then! That—has had its time! ‘My

suffering and my pitying—what does that matter! Am I striving then for happiness? I

20

To Overbeck, Thursday, Spring, 1886 21

GM, III, 7 22

To Overbeck, Oct. 1885 23

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Z), Thomas Common (Translation), The

Modern Library, New York, 1917



am striving for my work! Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra

has ripened, my hour has come:—This is my morning, my day is beginning: Rise up

now, rise up, you Great Midday!’—Thus spoke Zarathustra and left his cave, glowing

and strong, like a morning sun coming out of dark mountains.”

Zarathustra’s work, of course, is the advent of the “overhuman,” a human who

possesses “great health,” that is to say, whose soul is clear of internal conflicts of the

kind induced by solitude. Zarathustra’s work therefore includes the healing of solitude.

Indeed, in the important section called the “Convalescent,” Zarathustra’s animals call

upon him to find healing in stepping out of his cave, and bridging the distance

separating him from all things: “All things long for thee, since thou hast remained

alone for seven days—step forth out of thy cave! All things want to be thy physicians.”

To which Zarathustra responds with a meditation on solitude:

“To each soul belongeth another world; to each soul is every other soul a

backworld. Among the most alike doth semblance deceive most delightfully: for the

smallest gap is most difficult to bridge over. For me—how could there be an outside-

of-me? There is no outside! But this we forget on hearing tones; how delightful it is

that we forget!”

The hollow of the cave therefore, stands as a gap between the self and the

external world (“all things”), a gap that, by keeping out “all things,” prevents the

healing from taking place. Secondly, as I suggested above, Zarathustra believes that

this isolation from the world is tantamount to an internal relation: the world is made

separate from ourselves only through language and the “tones” of speech: “Have not

names and tones been given unto things that man may refresh himself with them? It is

beautiful folly, speaking.” The alienness, Nietzsche suggests, even though it is an

illusion of language, is also the way for man to “refresh” himself, for only external

relations can relieve one from oneself that is to say, can relieve the internal tension

induced by isolation. Words therefore present themselves as both the root and the

solution to the self-consumption of solitude.

A few lines further however, after reflecting on the trauma of having

envisioned the possibility of eternal recurrence and in particular the eternal recurrence

of the “smallest man,” Zarathustra laments that in this mental experience, “A cavern,

became the human earth to me; its breast caved in.” Words, therefore, seem to hardly

suffice to heal the sense of isolation of Zarathustra, for it is not words, but the

paramount presence of those “smallest men” that creates solitude. It seems therefore,

as was suggested above, that the presence of superior men, or kindred spirits, is

necessary for healing the disease of solitude.

On this basis, it is no wonder that Zarathustra’s later reflections on solitude

attempt to connect these two aspects of healing: healing through words, and healing

through the presence of kindred spirits. This two aspects of healing, Nietzsche

synthesizes remarkably, by reworking his original metaphor of the fish: if the young

and lonely Nietzsche regarded himself as a fish eating himself; the more mature

Nietzsche—and his “son Zarathustra,” maintain that kindred spirits must be fish too,

and his encounter with them must be achieved through a linguistic and stylistic activity

which he describes as “angle-fishing.”

In 1886, the year immediately following the publication of Zarathustra and



preceding the Genealogy of Morals; Nietzsche carefully prepared a series of new

introductions to the re-edition of his earlier works, including The Birth of Tragedy, The

Untimely Meditations, Human All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. In

addition, he pursued this effort in the preface to the newly completed BGE. This

exercise gave Nietzsche the opportunity to reflect on the role of writing and of

dissemination (through publications and republications) for both an author and his

readership. In the midst of a rigorous and separate treatment of the aims of each book,

one theme recurs: Nietzsche’s writings are like “fishhooks” which he uses to lure

kindred spirits. These writings, Nietzsche writes in gripping terms, were a way of

outplaying solitude, that is to say, in true Cave Baumann fashion, a way of relieving

himself from himself. It might be worth citing one of them extensively:

“Often, in an effort to recover from myself, as it were to induce a temporary

self-forgetting, I have sought shelter in this or that—in some piece of admiration or

enmity or scientificality or frivolity or stupidity; and why, where I could not find what

I needed, I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself (—

and what else have poets ever done? and to what end does art exist in the world at all?).

What I again and again needed most for my cure and self-restoration, however, was the

belief that I was not thus isolated, not alone in seeing as I did—an enchanted surmising

of relatedness and identity in eye and desires, a reposing in a trust of friendship, a

blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-marks, a pleasure in

foregrounds, surfaces, things close and closest, in everything possessing color, skin and

apparitionality. (…)—Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the ‘free

spirits’ to whom this melancholy-valiant book with the title Human, All Too Human is

dedicated: ‘free spirits’ of this kind do not exist, did not exist—but, as I have said, I

had need of them at that time if I was to keep in good spirits while surrounded by ills

(sickness, solitude, unfamiliar places, acedia, inactivity): as brave companions and

familiars with whom one can laugh and chatter when one feels like laughing and

chattering, and whom one can send to the Devil when they become tedious—as

compensation for the friends I lacked. That free spirits of this kind could one day exist,

that our Europe will have such active and audacious fellows among its sons of

tomorrow and the next day, physically present and palpable and not, as in my case,

merely phantoms and hermit's phantasmagoria: I should wish to be the last to doubt

it.”24

Nietzsche concludes a previous draft of the same text thusly:

“But what did I mean with these ‘free spirits’ that I pictured to myself

everywhere, and towards whom I was throwing the fishhooks of my book? It seems to

me I would have liked—some company?”25

A few months earlier, Nietzsche had inaugurated his philosophical use of the

metaphor of fishhooks26

in Z, while not yet associating it with writings directly, there,

24

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, R. J. Hollingdale (Translation), Cambridge

University Press, New York and Cambridge, 1986 (HATH), Preface. 25

KGW, 41 9 26

To my knowledge, this was a metaphor that Nietzsche had kept in mind for at least 15 years

before using it in a philosophical context. In 1870, he wrote to his friend Erwin Rohde: “Even



Zarathustra declared that only fishhooks can overcome melancholia, which he calls,

quite literally, his “black affliction”:

“Out! out! my fishing-hook! In and down, thou bait of my happiness! Drip thy

sweetest dew, thou honey of my heart! Bite, my fishing-hook, into the belly of all

black affliction!”

He continues by pointing out that overcoming such melancholia meant catching

“the finest human fish,” and he summons his “wickedness” to

“Allure for me thy glittering finest human fish! And whatever belongeth unto

me in all seas, my in-and-for-me in all things—fish that out for me, bring that up to

me: for that do I wait, the wickedest of all fish-catchers.”27

As exemplified by the prefaces from the summer of 1885 however, the

fishhook motive presented in Zarathustra quickly became solidly attached to the theme

of writing, which is now granted a therapeutic value. In 1889’s Ecce Homo (EH),

Nietzsche reflects on BGE, the book directly following Z, and writes:

“Included here is the slow search for kindred spirits, for those who out of

strength, could lend a hand in the task of destruction. — From then on all of my

writings become fishing hooks: perhaps I understand as well as anyone how to fish?...

If nothing got caught, it is not my fault. There were no fish...”28

Nietzsche’s purpose, it becomes increasingly clear, has now become to attract

those he calls the “kindred” or “free-spirits” and who are defined no longer in an

empirical manner, as the “superior” men, but instead, in terms of their shared purpose.

In this context, it may be worth focusing for a moment on the relation Nietzsche

entertained with his musician friend Gast. For it was in his correspondence with Gast

that most of the themes related to Nietzsche’s experience of solitude and to his

mutating understandings of kinship and selfhood are put in the starkest, most explicit

light. Nietzsche regarded Gast as a kindred spirit, who had the ability not only to share

Nietzsche’s own project, but also to carry it further. As a result, in countless occasions,

we see Nietzsche deliberately blur the distinction between himself and Gast, as well as

the distinctions between his own work and the work of his friend, and all combinations

if we do not find many people to share our views, I still believe that we can fairly—not without

losses, of course—pull ourselves up out of this stream and that we shall reach an island on

which we shall not need to stop our ears with wax any more. Then we shall be teachers to each

other; our books will be merely fishhooks for catching people into our monastic and artistic

community. We shall love, work, enjoy for each other—perhaps this is the only way in which

we can work for the whole.” To Erwin Rohde, 15 Dec. 1870. See also KGW, 3 1 1882 and

10 12 1883 and the contemporaneous letter to Peter Gast, Aug 26th, 1883: “Please do me the

favor of believing that I never wrote a single line ‘for the sake of fame’: all the same, I did

believe that my writings would represent a good bait Köder. For in the end, the teacher’s

instinct is acute in me. And I need fame insofar as it would earn me students.” 27

Z IV, “On the Honey Sacrifice” 28

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (EH), in Ecce Homo and the Antichrist, (trans. Thomas

Wayne) Algora, London, 2004.



of these four elements (Gast as a person, Nietzsche as a person, Gast’s work,

Nietzsche’s work). At the same time, Gast often represents the healing of solitude for

Nietzsche, again, in multiple forms. The interest of elucidating the place Gast in

Nietzsche’s mental landscape is to clarify in what terms it can be said that the healing

of solitude is dependent, as Zarathustra suggests, on a reduction of both self and other

to a common essence as task.

First of all, is Nietzsche’s own reduction to his own work. Nietzsche repeatedly

thanks Gast for his patient copy-editing of his own texts by giving an existential

meaning to Gast’s corrections. They are not the corrections of a text, but truly,

Nietzsche suggests, the corrections of Nietzsche himself, or to be more precise, they

are corrections brought to Nietzsche himself insofar as they are connections made to

the text and the text only. To my knowledge, this is a metaphor Nietzsche uses over the

course of more than eight years. In early 1879, Nietzsche writes: “Now, my dear and

helpful friend, all you have left to do is to apply to my own person the corrections—

.”29

In 1887, he reiterates the same thanks with the same metonymy: “many thanks for

all the grief that have caused you all the corrections!!! Who knows, perhaps I shall not

have anything to correct anymore, apart from my own self.”30

So Nietzsche seems to

consciously regard himself as reducible to his own work.

Further, it is striking that Nietzsche, in his conviction that his existential

predicament was undistinguishable from Gast’s, also reversed the metaphor to reduce

Gast himself to his work. Upon receiving a score of Gast’s whose final editing had

caused much discussion between the two friends, Nietzsche declares it “a beautiful

piece of life, ‘perfectly calligraphied’”31

in allusion to a letter from three weeks prior

where Nietzsche not only remarked on the beautiful calligraphy of the score in

existential terms, but also offers a rare development of his thinking regarding the

relations between a work and its author:

“What good, singular new things you announce! That your quatuor,

embellished with some calligraphic perfection is lying here before you and that

because of it you bless this winter! At bottom, one should be very demanding when

one insists on sanctifying one’s life through works; that is to say, one unlearns the art

to please men. One is too serious, you can feel it; there is a background of diabolical

seriousness behind a man who insists on respecting his own work…”32

For indeed, both Nietzsche and Gast found their own life “sanctified” by their

work, an existential choice (an “insistence”), which transformed their own being into

their work, and only increased their isolation from a certain kind of “men” those that

demand to be pleased, those that anyway, are bad company.

Yet, it is also this very transformation which established the kinship between

those superior men that Nietzsche regarded himself and Gast as being. First of all,

Nietzsche regards Gast, as mentioned earlier, as his “only fish,” that his to say his sole

“reader” (with all the normative implications of this term, emphasized by his

contrasting Gast to “his readers” in the plural—those that don’t “get” him).33

In true

29

To Gast, March 1st 1879

30 To Gast, June 8

th 1887

31 To Gast, 1

st May 1888

32 To Gast, April 7

th 1888

33 To Gast, April 19

th 1887



angle-fishing fashion, this reader may be Nietzsche’s catch, but this is only because

this relation is reversible. Indeed, Nietzsche rhetorically reduces himself to Gast just as

often as he reduces Gast to himself. In 1885, he declares that he takes “a near-personal

interest in the conditions of Gast’s work and his life,”34

that “it would be like failing

myself to fail you in such circumstances” and further, that the fact that Gast’s name did

not appear on the title page of Nietzsche’s own Genealogy of Morality made him

“perplex” out of “vanité,” as if Nietzsche’s own ego was hurt by being unable to share

credit with his alter ego.35

This complementarity of their works is in fact constantly

rehearsed by Nietzsche (who insists that the final choir of his Human All Too Human,

entitled, characteristically “how beautiful to stay silent together,” can be sung to the

melody of one of Gast’s recent pieces36

) to the point that he establishes a constant

game of pronouns, where “me” turns into “you” and “you” into “us” in countless

letters of the 1880s.37

Early in their friendship, Nietzsche felt the need to justify his

nascent habit for assuming that he and Gast must be indistinguishable:

“I would wish that you granted yourself some ‘vacation’ in the midst of your

labors, and that you would transcribe this notebook, all in your own time, and without

any regard for matters of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ between you and me—a distinction

which, according to the Pythagorean ethics, does not exist among friends! And it must

be so! Let it be said in full confidence and secrecy: whom did I write my last book for?

For us.”38

The lines that separate the man Nietzsche from the man Gast seem to become

blurred to the extent that they both gradually become identified with their task, which

they happen (in Nietzsche’s view at least) to be sharing. This, task, as suggested above,

possesses the form of a future projection, making the self shared by Nietzsche and

Gast, extatic by nature. This task is the present representation of a future, virtual unity

between men (Nietzsche and Gast), and of men with their own selves. For Nietzsche

regards Gast as an attempt to achieve the same future as himself, the same “becoming.”

He writes:

“You are the only one in whose future I have faith, and whose becoming has

anything to do with my own becoming, this is why it is sometimes permitted to ask you

for advice.”39

Under any other circumstances, Nietzsche repeats, taking advice from “external

people” is unadvisable, for it distracts one from one’s own path. In the case of true

kindred spirits however, this path is the same, and receiving advice from one’s friend is

equivalent to receiving advice from oneself. Similarly, Nietzsche considers his future

to be free of the empirical determinations that burden him (limitations in time—

longevity, and abilities), and sees Gast as a promise of the achievement of his own

34

To Gast, Dec. 10th 1885

35 To Gast, August 30

th 1887

36 To Gast, April 15

th1887

37 See especially, to Gast, 30 March 1881; 15

th March 1882; 6 Dec.1885; 21 April 1886; 15

April, 1887 38

To Gast, 30 March 1881 39

To Gast, 17 April 1883



destiny: “It is required that others succeed better at everything, my life and my thought

alike. Do not respond to this.”40

Throughout his life, Nietzsche regarded loneliness as illness and suspected all

illness to be related to loneliness. It is not surprising therefore that he began associating

Gast so closely to his own healing: with Gast, he had achieved a companionship that

transcended the empirical selves (empirical selves as empirical others may or may not

make for satisfactory companions) and thereby healed loneliness at the appropriate

level: if loneliness is indeed a quest for a shared essence, finding a companion who

shares the same essence (i. e. the same task), is indeed the completion of one’s quest,

and the healing of one’s loneliness. Nietzsche writes to Gast:

“In the same way as what concerns me affects you more strongly and more

unpleasantly as anyone, I believe that what comes to me from you must be most

soothing to me, than what comes from others; here between us, are completely

charming links!”41

Indeed, in the months following the publication of HATH, Nietzsche expresses

to Gast how their kinship signifies a shared mission:

The general impression that my most recent work has produced on you, you my

first and last reader so far—this you are definitely as regards Human all too Human—,

corresponds so much to my most intimate wishes that I infer that our soul kinship

(Seelen-Verwandschaft) is at play here. Dear friend, you know however that the more

your adhesion (zusamenstimmen) and your wishes agree with mine, the more you will

have to carry my burden too, and that one day you will have to complete, well, oh so

well, what I have done, badly, as an attempt. I cause you much pain—I think of this as

often as I think of you.”42

Likewise, Nietzsche declares explicitly that Gast’s presence has the power to

heal his disease:

“The very thought that soon I will be in Venice and by your side reinvigorates

me and delights me. It is like a promise of healing for a patient long sick and who has

been suffering with patience.”43

So it seems that in full coherence with the hints contained in the herring letter

of 1876, loneliness is both a disease in the characteristically Nietzschean sense of a

division within the self (a missing of the self), and a separation from the world and the

others, both of which can be healed in one stroke, should one encounter a true kindred

40

To Gast, 5 Oct. 1879. In his moments of self-disappointment, Nietzsche repeatedly sought

comfort in the idea that Gast (and his good health) will succeed where he himself has failed

(due to the empirical constraints of ill-health). See for example, to Gast, 23rd

July 1885. On the

conflation between his own success and Gast’s, see letters to Gast of 22nd

Oct 1883 and 7 Aug.

1885. 41

To Gast 3rd

September 1883 42

To Gast, 30th September 1879

43 To Gast, March 30

th 1885



spirit. Nietzsche explicitly stresses that a healed relationship with oneself requires a

healed relationship with other:

“One stops truly loving oneself well when one stops training oneself in loving

others. This is why the latter—this ceasing—is unadvisable (this, from my personal

experience).”44

In the end of August 1881, Nietzsche wrote to Gast a letter which ties together

the association of loneliness with sickness, the healing of one’s relationship to oneself

by way of one’s relationship to another, and the conditionality of this healing upon

one’s willingness to apply an essential reduction of the empirical self to a self

characterized by a future task. He writes strikingly of the irrelevance of his empirical

being to the project that inhabits him like a fatality, and of his hopes that Gast can

succeed where he himself has failed:

“Myself, on the whole, most often appear to myself as a scribbling that some

unknown power would draw in order to try out a new pen. … as for you, dear friend,

you should not be a man of aphorisms, you have higher aims, you are not content, like

me to make one divine the relation and the need for relations,—your duty is to show

your art achieved anew! … Think about this carefully: in any event, our task consists

in stimulating, in pushing towards the ‘over there’ and it is of little importance to know

whether we ourselves shall reach it!”

It is in fact the very anonymity that “scribbles” through Nietzsche which

ensures the substitutability between himself and Gast, supports Nietzsche’s hopes that

Gast will carry their task further than himself, and thereby allows Nietzsche to regain

health, that is to say, the full enjoyment of himself. The letter continues that when he

considers Gast’s art achieved:

“I enjoy a plenitude of my own nature that is in every way exemplary. You are

so far the only one to ever have given me such enjoyment, and this is the case only

since I’ve known your music.”45

Indeed, Gast and Nietzsche are bound by a project that transcends their

empirical being, a being which becomes distinguished from their essence, for this

essence is not transcended but satisfied by this community of projects. This common

task shared between two different empirical people leads to one’s fulfillment of

oneself, it heals the self-antagonism created by loneliness. For it is not the presence of

some other empirical being that heals the essence of Nietzsche (let alone his empirical

being), but Gast’s work, his project, his “music.”

We may therefore surmise that in his quest for a healing to the dark affliction of

loneliness, Nietzsche is brought to a new view of identity: if it is true that loneliness is

the missing of oneself, and that its cure is to be found in others whom we share a

purpose with, I think we may suggest that Nietzsche now identifies himself no longer

with his personhood, but rather with his mission itself, Nietzsche now thinks of himself

44

To Gast, July 18th 1880

45 To Gast, End of August 1881



in anonymous terms by borrowing the very anonymity that was using him as its

scribbling tool. In EH again, Nietzsche uses the entire section entitled “why I am a

destiny” (consider: not the pedestrian “why I have a destiny”) to the purpose of

effectuating the reduction from an empirical self (the one he often ironically calls

“Herr Nietzsche”) to its meaning, and therefore to its mission (after all, Nietzsche

declares EH to be a sort of testament: “I have a terrible fear that one day I will be

pronounced holy: one can guess why I bring out this book beforehand, it should

prevent them from doing mischief with me...”46

). He opens the section with this

devastating declaration:

“I know my lot. One day my name will be connected with the recollection of

something enormous—with a crisis like never before on earth, with the deepest clash

of conscience, with a decision solely invoked against all that had until then been

believed, demanded, hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite.—”47

In other words, the person who seeks healing for his or her loneliness, needs

first to reduce themselves to an identity that can be shared, for Nietzsche, this means a

mission, and as Dynamite, his mission is “to break open the history of mankind.”48

We may remember how for Nietzsche the presence of others was not

necessarily an appropriate cure for solitude, and how indeed, being thrown into the

wrong crowd might elicit even deeper feelings of loneliness. The entire untimely motif

in Nietzsche’s writings serves as a constant reminder that one had better stay alone

46

EH “Destiny” § 1 47

Nietzsche drew inspiration from a review of BGE by J. V. Widmann published in Der Bund

on Sept 16-17th

1886. Four days later, Nietzsche writes to Gast: “The Bund devoted to my book

a scathing article signed by its chief editor J. V. Widmann, entitled ‘Nietzsche’s Most

Subversive Work.’ His judgment in a nutshell: ‘it is dynamite.’” (To Gast, Sept. 20th 1886) A

few days later, Nietzsche relates the same event in a characteristically less dramatic tone to his

friend Malwida von Meysebug: “To conclude, I shall write out for you a few words about me

which appeared in Der Bund (September 16 and 17). Heading: ‘Nietzsche’s Dangerous Book.’

‘The stocks of dynamite used in the building of the Gotthard Tunnel were marked by a black

flag, indicating mortal danger. Exclusively in this sense do we speak of the new book by the

philosopher Nietzsche as a dangerous book. This designation entails no trace of reproach

against the author and his work, as that black flag likewise was not meant to reproach the

explosives. Even less could we think of delivering the lonely thinker up to the crows of the

lecture room and the rooks of the pulpit by pointing to the dangerousness of his book.

Intellectual explosives, like the material sort, can serve very useful purposes; it is not necessary

for them to be used for criminal ends. Only one does well to say clearly, where such explosive

is stored, ‘There is dynamite here!’” (To Malwida von Maysenbug, 24 Sept. 1886 (Middleton))

It is worth stressing the contrast between Widmann’s painstaking efforts to dissociate the

author from the work (the work being called dangerous should not be seen as a critique of the

author) and Nietzsche’s enthusiastic identification with his own work and with its dangerous

aspects. In fact, not only the man/work distinction disappears in the expression from EH, it

does so by obliterating the man and subsuming him entirely into the work, the meaning of

one’s life becomes one’s essence: “I am not a man, I am dynamite—.” 48

“I have, on my side, some good news to share with you. ‘Ecce Homo’ was sent the day

before yesterday to Leipzig publisher C. G. Naumann after I weighed it one last time on the

gold scales to satisfy my conscience. It goes so much beyond the notion of ‘literature,’ that

even in nature, no point of comparison exists. It literally blows up the history of mankind into

two—the superlative of dynamite.” (To Gast, Dec. 9th, 1888)



than in bad company. The problem, for Nietzsche, is therefore, as often, a selective

one: how can we distinguish the true kindred spirits from the rabble and what kind of

reduction of ourselves has the potential to seek out the appropriate company?

3. The essential reduction: healing through metaphor

Again, it is Nietzsche’s fish metaphor that might provide a hint, for Nietzsche

rejects two types of fishing, in order it seems, that only the worthy fish be caught.

Zarathustra for instance, seems to have no time for net-fishing, and he contrasts this

fishing technique, which risks gathering bad fish,49

with his favored angle fishing. In

the Fourth part’s first section, entitled the “Honey Sacrifice,” Zarathustra asks himself

how he can select those worthy of his teaching, and those worthy of healing his

solitude. Honey, his animals declare to his approval, “is the sky-blue lake of his

happiness,” and the bait for those worthy of him. Throughout the section, this honey is

compared to gold of precious and rare value. In a letter to 1887, Nietzsche confesses to

what extent the taste for gold is a selective criterion for him. As he announces the

arrival of the second editions of the Gay Science and Daybreak, he exclaims:

“How much have I endured, and how parsimoniously has life distillated its

drops of gold unto me!—All the same I, like you, believe in these drops of gold, and I

am disdainful of those artists whose tongues do not possess any taste for it.”50

Yet, Nietzsche insists, he is no longer looking for happiness, what he now

strives for is “his work.” Zarathustra then climbs to a mountain-top and sends his

animals away, to regain his “solitude.” There, he declares:

“Especially the human world, the human sea:—towards it do I now throw out

my golden angle-rod and say, open up, thou human abyss! Open up and throw unto me

thy fish and shining crabs! With my best bait shall I allure myself today to the strangest

human fish … Thus may men now come up to me … I have today ascended this

high mountain to catch fish. Did ever anyone catch fish upon high mountains? …

Here laugh, laugh, my hearty, healthy wickedness! From high mountains cast down thy

glittering scorn laughter! Allure for me with thy glittering the finest human fish! And

whatever belongeth to me mir Zugehört in all the seas, my in-and-for-me mein An-

und-für-mich in all things—fish that out for me, bring that up to me: for that do I wait,

the wickedest of all fish-catchers.”51

Only in high mountains, Zarathustra contends, can one fish effectively for the

“strangest” and “finest” “human fish,” for attaining altitude requires an effort that only

the finest can deliver. Other gods, Zarathustra claims, might wish to “cast their nets

into the human sea,” but he himself chooses to fish with bait and hooks—not nets—

and only in mountain lakes. Unlike angling, net-fishing is not selective, and Nietzsche

regards his refusal of net-fishing as a reversal of Christic fishing. Not all are worthy,

49

Z, III “On the Poets” 50

To Gast 22nd

June 1887, Nietzsche’s emphasis 51

Z, IV, “The Honey Sacrifice”



Nietzsche reckons, and in order to catch only the “finest” fish, one must not catch the

helpless and passive fish as in a net. On the contrary, the acquisition of kindred spirits

is a shared process where the fish chooses the fisherman in an active way.52

Indeed,

only those fish that can enjoy the taste of Zarathustra’s refined bait will be “allured” to

it; angling is a selective device, and so is Zarathustra’s decision to fish only in high

mountain lakes.

The second remarkable element in this text is Nietzsche’s use of the term

“belonging” gehören. By the time of Z, this idea of ownership (the insistence on

“what belongs to me”) of the kindred already had a history in Nietzsche’s writings. In a

letter from 1878, he writes:

“Now I am shedding off everything that does not belong to me, beings, be they

friends or foes; habits, commodities, books; I shall live in solitude for some years, until

I earn the right (and probably the obligation) to return, more mature and ready, as a

philosopher of life … I avoid the half-friendships and partisan connections, I want no

disciple. May everyman (and every woman) be but their own disciple.”53

This refusal of disciples, of course, echoes Zarathustra’s rejection of net-

fishing: if the kinship is not the result of a shared goal, then it risks being the enrolment

of the fish into the projects of the fisherman. In 1888, Nietzsche writes decisively:

“What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold?

You seek followers? Seek zeros!”54

It is in no way those zeros that Nietzsche seeks to

allure. The idea of ownership, which Zarathustra reiterates, doesn’t suggest that one

subdues the fish they catch but rather, that the kindred spirits naturally belong to each

other without being reduced to each other. For in the same way as one may be affected

with “habits” that “do not belong to” one, one may be distinct from what belongs to

them. On the basis of the new identification of the self to a goal, the sharing of the goal

across individuals becomes enough to claim ownership.

In fact, for Nietzsche, as these letters demonstrate, this new sense of ownership

is intended to problematize the idea of the subject himself: if possession is meant in

empirical, material terms, then how could one “shed oneself” of some “habits”? How

can one, in other words, attain ownership by losing aspects of the self that from a

trivial point of view, do indeed belong to one? Nietzsche’s idea of ownership already

transcends the empirical self: something may belong to us that we are not in possession

of (indeed, that we are not even aware of) and likewise, we may be in possession of

things (“habits,” for example) which do not belong to us, and only intrude over our

being.

These two aspects of ownership—possession and belonging—echo the

52

Nietzsche regards his communication with his readers as a shared task: only those that work

hard at it can access understanding. In 1886, he thanks Gast for his painstaking proofreading of

GM in those terms: “I am very happy that you are acquiring a taste for my new book as well.

Admittedly, you shall be the only one, give or take—but I take comfort in the thought that for

once I’ll be able to say: ‘if you others don’t understand anything of my writings, this is only

due to the fact that you haven’t done enough for them!’ … it is only fair that you find my

works more accessible than anyone else, for you have striven towards them to a greater extent

than any of the gentlemen my friends!” (To Gast, 20 July 1886) 53

To Mathilde Maier, 15th July 1878 (Middleton) second emphasis mine.

54 TI, “arrows” § 14



ambiguity of solitude: if, as I suggested earlier, one may be bad or good company for

oneself, it is precisely because the self that is our company may or may not truly

“belong” to us. Likewise, Nietzsche often seeks relief in his closest friends for they

rescue him from himself, a self that doesn’t belong to him, and restore him to himself,

because indeed, they belong to him more than some aspects of himself.55

Belonging, therefore, does not seem to be enough, for if one needs to fish for

those that belong to one, it is precisely because this belonging is not truly fulfilled until

completed by a procedure Nietzsche calls “fishing.” What is the nature of this fishing

that reunites the latent belonging with an actual experience that offers healing?

Zarathustra suggests that one finds those that belong to one by fishing and being

fished, that is to say, one must follow one’s taste in both senses of the word: our taste

shall lead us to those we have a taste for just as well as our taste will attract those that

have a taste for us. It is only if this reciprocity is maintained strictly that one will avoid

the unbalanced relationship of fanaticism that Nietzsche saw proliferating around

Wagner, it is only when one’s taste for fish and one’s taste of fish become rigorously

complementary that a true sense of belonging, unmarred by possession or subjugation,

may lead to a productive, healing relationship of shared presence.

In a different context, Nietzsche spells out the relation of complementarity that

Zarathustra sought to establish in those very texts where he spoke of gathering the men

of the heights. Shortly after the publication of the first Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes to

Gast that humans may be like complementary colors to each other, and thereby,

elevating for each other:

“What you write to me regarding the ‘complementary beings’ is also related to

this domain, to your Venitian sense of color: myself, I could very well imagine some

beings who, compared to others, stand as redemptors, as goals and as justification—but

I haven’t found anyone of the kind. I do believe that some men belong to the heights

and some to the depths, and many degrees of separation; it is indispensible for a

superior man, not only to stand on a superior plane, but also that he has the feeling of

this distance and sometimes even shows it—it is indispensible only insofar as his

superiority is acting, and thereby elevating. If I understand the first Zarathustra

correctly, he is precisely trying to address those men.”56

This shared taste, which is a taste for what belongs to both friends, that is to

say, a taste for the task that they are, can only be brought out by fishing, and we must

remember that the “gold” and “honey” that the character of Zarathustra uses as bait

translates in Nietzsche’s non-fictional language into texts, writings and books. Before

returning to the experience of shared taste, it may be useful to examine in one sense

Nietzsche regards the refinement of one’s taste in Zarathustra in terms of a philological

refinement: the finest, fish, Nietzsche believes, are philologists.

Nietzsche’s insistence that the appropriate fishing should take place in high

altitude and with rods and hooks as opposed to nets amounts to his anti-democratic

55

See the letters to Gast, of 30 March, 1881 and 14th August 1881: I regard it as a reward that

this year has brought to me two things that belong to me and are infinitely close to me: your

music and this site Sils-Maria.” Note Nietzsche’s emphasis on “your,” that stresses the

paradox intended in his use of the word “belonging.” 56

To Gast, August 3rd

1883



(and literally anti-Christian) emphasis on selection: only a select few (those that belong

to a “brotherhood”) must be fished and they shall be selected according to two criteria:

firstly, they must be active in their own capture (this is why they must climb to the top

of the mountain and actively hook themselves—net-caught fish does not get caught as

a result of their behavior; only as a result of their presence—Nietzschean fishing seeks

to fish the absent, recall, it is a fishing intended to heal solitude); secondly, they shall

be chosen according to their tastes: only a select few will be attracted to the bait

Nietzsche or Zarathustra uses. These fish, in other words, are already pursuing their

own quest, and they are refined enough to seek certain flavors. Indeed, in most of the

texts where he presents himself as an angler, Nietzsche reiterates the importance of

having perceptive readers, adepts in the arts of philology and exegesis. His readers, he

suggests, must be active and subtle in their interpretation. Such need for interpretation

represents a stylistic selective device aimed at discouraging undesirable fish-readers. In

1882, Nietzsche establishes the philological nature of hierarchy:

“Higher human beings distinguish themselves from the lower by seeing and

hearing, and thoughtfully seeing and hearing, immeasurably more—and just this

distinguishes human beings from animals, and the higher animals from the lower. The

world becomes ever fuller for someone who grows into the height of humanity; ever

more baited hooks to attract his interest are cast his way. … But a delusion remains

his constant companion: he thinks himself placed as spectator and listener before the

great visual and acoustic play that is life. He calls his nature contemplative and thereby

overlooks the fact that he is also the actual poet and ongoing author of life …. As the

poet, he certainly possesses vis contemplativa and a retrospective view of his work; but

at the same time and above all vis creativa, which the man of action lacks …. It is

we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not

yet there …. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized, drilled,

translated into flesh and reality”57

This text presents three key ideas: firstly, “superior men” are distinguished by

their refined “tastes.” Such tastes make them relate to reality in the way that fish relate

to bait: for these men, everything that is real is attractive (one may remember that a

few aphorisms earlier, Nietzsche had presented his first discussion of his all-affirming

thought of Amor Fati). Such men, Nietzsche suggests, are able to see “bait” where

more common men would see nothing. Secondly, Nietzsche notes, this attraction to the

baits of reality is not fully passive or “contemplative.” On the contrary, we must note

that it is only in the encounter between a reality to be beholden and an active creation

that transfigures it (an encounter that Nietzsche calls throughout book IV of GS,

“affirmation”), that reality becomes true bait to the superior men. Finally, Nietzsche

declares that those superior men not only transfigure reality to make it attractive and

alluring; they also complete it by giving it “flesh.”

With regards to Nietzsche’s selective problem of solitude, we can see how the

theme of angle-fishing in mountain waters translates into the selection of superior men,

and therefore allows the solitary philosopher to gain “company.” Nietzsche is very

clear that bad company is no company at all, and he contends that the company of the

57

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Reginald John (R. J.) Hollingdale (Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2001) (GS), § 301



inferiors only leads to a deeper sense of loneliness (To Gast, Feb. 1

st, 1883). As a

result, the company he seeks is a company of equals. To Nietzsche, this translates into

a reciprocal model of bait-fishing which he begins to elaborate in GS 301: Nietzsche or

Zarathustra’s wish to present themselves as bait relies only on the fish’s ability to see

bait where there is bait (their philological talent). This bait-fishing therefore, appeals to

the activity of the superior men. On the other hand, the fishing of Zarathustra and

Nietzsche is an active endeavor, and it wouldn’t be accurate to see the angler as fully

passive either. The activity of the angler, of course, appeals to the passivity of the fish

who lets themselves be caught at the moment that they actively pursue the bait. Indeed,

if we recall Nietzsche’s dramatic staging of his “old herring,” the metaphor of

consumption is maintained in the metaphor of angle-fishing (as in all discussions,

implicit or explicit, of the will to power), only to be complicated: it is because the fish

eats the bait that the angler eats the fish58

, but we must also see that for Nietzsche, bait

and angler are one and the same: the angler places pieces of himself on the hook, pieces

of the new self that he is: a self as text, or in Zarathustra’s case: of their happiness qua

their task qua his essence. In the same way as the fish’s activity relies on the angler’s

passivity and vice-versa, we may see that the relations between fish and angler are

constantly reversed. If it is true that for Nietzsche, the absence of others signifies the

missing of the self (as in the herring letter), we may surmise that there is a great degree

of porosity between self and other, between fish and fisherman, a porosity that now

rests on the new ground of identity established by Nietzsche: the identity of task. After

all, Nietzsche’s solitude was celebrated by a ritual supper in which the consumer

identified with the consumed.

This having been established, we may return to Nietzsche’s third point in the

aphorism quoted above: superior men give “flesh” to a higher, transfigured humanity.

They do so, Nietzsche writes, by lending their own flesh to this new reality. Their flesh

however, was already there before the transfiguration (or else there would be no flesh

to lend to the new reality), and it was there by virtue of the fact that they were real,

real, as it were, of the old individual and empirical reality. By granting the new reality

“flesh” therefore, we must note that the superior men become not only the vessel for

the transfiguration of reality; they also became transfigured themselves by offering

incarnation to this new, superior reality. One may remember indeed, how the caves of

sickness created by the self-antagonism induced by isolation become described as

uteri, and this self-antagonism itself, described as a chance at transfiguration in GM, II,

16, for this solitude is “a sickness much like pregnancy.59

There is a new being—that is

to say, a new sense of “being”—at work in this self-consumption.

This should send us back on our way to elucidating Nietzsche’s hermeneutics

of taste. Nietzsche regards texts as the best way to seek out what “belongs” to one and

a way to bring out a common taste for/taste of a certain task. As discussed above

Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of taste is a hermeneutics of belonging insofar as it is a

58

In a striking letter to Gast, Nietzsche exposes one of his projects, that he has already decided

not to publish, but which he hope to trade against one of Gast’s own compositions in these

terms: “he who is kind to me and tries to bait me with the music of Gast, may be permitted to

read my work privatissima.” (To Gast, 14th Feb. 1885.) Less than a year earlier, Nietzsche had

responded to Gast’s invitation to come to Venice and attend one of his executions: “With this

project, you have thrown a bait my way, a bait to which I, as an old musical carp, cannot fail to

bite; yes, I shall come to Venice expressly.” (To Gast, 5 March 1884) 59

GM, II, 16



hermeneutics of absence: it is because those that belong to us are absent that they need

fishing, for they need to be brought into our presence to become able to heal our

solitude. In this regard, Nietzsche is naturally drawn to a method of fishing that bridges

the gap between the absent and the present, a method that he finds satisfied in writing.

Nietzsche repeatedly notes that his own style of fishing must be blind, and indeed, this

is one of the virtues of the angle-metaphor that it satisfies this requirement: an angler

cannot see through the water, and thus cannot decide in advance what fish is to be

caught. Writings, in this sense, with their faint presence, seem to satisfy the

requirement to bridge the absence separating those who belong together: a writing is

always sent out blindly, without deciding in advance who the reader will be, and once

picked up by a reader, it is only as a faint presence of the author, a presence in absence.

When Nietzsche seeks those that he identifies with, he also seeks out those that

identify with him (recall that they have a taste for each other that is determined by their

taste for themselves), and he builds this act of identification into the basis of an

existential aesthetic: one chooses to be what one has a taste for, and in so doing, he or

she gains the company of kindred spirits that can reconcile him or her with him or

herself. Nietzsche can only regard writing as bait insofar as writing is but a trace of the

writer, it is the presence of his or her absence, and possesses the ability to lead one

from absence to presence; that is to say, in trivial terms, from absence to the writer to

presence to the writer, but also from absence from themselves to presence to

themselves. What writing achieves, Nietzsche notes, is not only the unification of

superior beings through a community of readers held together by a common task, it is

also the achievement of this very task: for Nietzsche did not regard his own task as

separate from his activities as a writer-angler: his books were there to fulfill a task

which was, indeed, nothing other than to find those that would share this task. This is

not a circular project however, for we must recall that the act of fishing/being fished is

a reductive act whereby one reduces themselves to what belongs to them, that is to say,

whereby one sheds their empirical self in order to gain a self made of meaning: being

caught means finding oneself in the bait thrown at one, that is to say, (hence

Nietzsche’s insistence that the “finest fish” are keen philologists), being able to

identify not with a person (of what concern is “Herr Nietzsche” to anyone?), but with a

text.

Here, we can find a refined view of what Nietzsche regarded as his task: if the

task is not circular, it is because in the process of identifying with a text (that is to say,

with the project carried by a text), a reader’s essential reduction (that is to say, their

reduction to their task as essence) becomes accomplished. From that moment on,

Nietzsche believes, a new ground becomes established that is able to vanquish

loneliness: if we manage to regard ourselves as a meaning (in the texts where he calls

his task the bringing about of the Übermensch, Nietzsche often repeats that the

Übermensch is the “meaning of the earth”), then all isolating and differentiating

aspects of our selves (i. e. all “individuation”) naturally fall apart.

The letter from 1876 regarded loneliness as the alienation of one self that

becomes the object of one’s own aggression, and of one’s thinking. Nietzsche was

complaining that loneliness made one miss oneself, as a part of oneself was receding

into meaning. In the decade following this founding experience of loneliness,

Nietzsche discovered that loneliness was not to be annihilated in a conservative sense

for there was no point in replacing the absence of company with the presence of

company (in the form of a wife perhaps). On the contrary, loneliness should be used as



a prompt for creating a new form of existence, an existential aesthetics whereby one

could be transfigured into text, and on that new acquired level, reconnect with the self

that was once lost into the realm of meaning, that is to say, into the realm of the absent

constantly presented by meaning. If Nietzsche’s essential reduction is indeed a

reduction of the self to its task, it is also a reduction of the empirical self to the self that

is text, and a healing of the founding distress of losing oneself into metaphoricity, an

experience Nietzsche defines as loneliness.

Indeed, at the very time that Nietzsche “sheds what doesn’t belong to him,” in

the draft for a letter to Richard and Cosima Wagner he writes:

“Even though, as I have said, I am not aware of anyone who shares my views at

present, I do have the vanity to believe I have thought not as an individual but as a

collective being—the strangest feeling of solitude and multitude, a standard-bearer

marching at the front line, oblivious of whether the knight’s troop is following him or

even still existing.”60

The multiplicity, of course, is the multiplicity of those “knights” (knights of the

“gai saber,” or “free spirits”) whose knighthood and distinction comes from their

shared goal, a goal that, in turn, warrants their shared identity. In 1884, Nietzsche

reiterates the metaphor of a knighthood, unified not by personal links, but by a

common quest, and whose works, he believes, come from the “same tree.” He writes to

Gast:

“In the end, my dear and esteemed friend, whatever hurdles may lie in our way,

we both belong to the brotherhood of the ‘gaya scienza’ and this should give us both

some courage in this good year which dropped from the same tree your ‘Lion’ Gast’s

“The Lion of Venice” and my ‘Zarathustra.’ The rest—is wait, for you and for me.”61

What is, therefore, this transfiguration, which is meant to transfigure the human

and reality all at once, and to establish a brotherhood of equals among the superior

men? As discussed above, the establishment of such brotherhood can only be

successful when the other and the self coincide (for solitude is only healed when the

self no longer misses the self). This, Nietzsche contends, requires a preliminary mutual

reduction, a reduction of the self to the other, and of the other to the self. This mutual

reduction, of course, is but an echo of the mutual encounter of the fisherman with the

fish, and indeed, their mutual catching. Such a reduction, however, requires a new

sense of identity whereby the members of the community of equals cease to identify

with their individuality (for this individuality is empirical, and irreducible) and begin to

identify with their shared essence, an essence Nietzsche calls a task, a burden, and a

goal. Only through a future, Nietzsche contends, can humans truly enter a healing

relation with each other, for it is only the future that they share: and this future takes

place in the present on the mode of a task (indeed, Nietzsche was well aware that the

presentisation of the future, is always achieved through text).

We may understand further what Nietzsche has in mind when he talks of baits

that some will see and others won’t: the bait, Nietzsche believes, is the promise

contained in the new air that his books breathe into their select readers. Only the

60

To Richard and Cosima Wagner, early 1878 draft. 61

To Gast, Sept. 2nd

1884



superior shall be attracted to this bait for only they understand the necessity of a

redeeming future, only they are lonely and languishing for a future, only they, like the

infamous herring and like Nietzsche himself, are untimely.

If this future is indeed what unifies the new order of beings that Nietzsche

imagines for sharing his company, this means not only that they have traded an identity

based on individuality (an empirical identity) for one based on purpose, but further that

what maintains their kinship is not their empirical individuality, but their work.

This work, Nietzsche constantly maintains, both requires and warrants a

community of such free-spirits existentially committed to achieving it. As requiring it,

it must be prepared in the present, yet, Nietzsche insists, it only exists in the present in

incomplete forms, subjective (longing, tastes) or objective: as textual representations. It

is the encounter between the two, of course, that Nietzsche represents as angle-fishing.

Nietzsche makes it clear that taste and longing are an attribute of one’s nature, and a

function of nobility.62

It is the text therefore, that constitutes the link running through

the community, making it a community of readers and writers. This has important

bearings on the question of the healing of solitude: if solitude is to be healed, Nietzsche

contends, it is with present reference to a future that eludes the empirical individual: it

is through textual meaning.

It is now time to return to Nietzsche’s first crisis of solitude, as dramatized in

the episode of the herring supper: if the illness of solitude is experienced as a

deprivation of self, and if it is healed through textual meaning, we can only conclude

that Nietzsche regards the regaining of the self as a semiotic experience: the self

regained is not the self once lost (i.e.: an empirical self), but a certain, healing

reference to the self. Indeed, in Nietzsche’s extensive discussions of sickness, health

and convalescence, healing is never represented as the return to any previous (and most

likely mythic) state of being (however healthy it might have been). Accordingly, the

healing of solitude does not return one to their original self, but it marks the

completion of a transfiguration of the self: the self is now entirely transfigured into

meaning. Indeed, as I argued above, this completion is possible only after one has

made the existential step to identify with a meaning in the first place. On the basis of

this self-reduction to shared meaning, all the members of the new guild become

complementary to each other, and able to provide healing to each other.

There is more: the internalization of distance that constituted Nietzsche’s

founding experience of loneliness leads to an internal discharge of energy that

threatens to destroy the self (qua the principle that differentiates the internal from the

external), and therefore requires external expression in order to avoid for the internal to

become external (for the two selves, still de jure akin to each other, to overstretch the

elasticity of the self, which accommodates for externality within internality) and for

externality to overcome internality in the explosion of the self. For Nietzsche, the

choice is either to perish outwardly, to perish inwardly, or to operate a “bleeding”

through writing.63

Nietzsche’s experience contains the physiological insight that

solitude motivates its own healing, for it naturally leads to the transfiguration of the

self through text, that is to say, through an unstable but satisfactory ground of

62

BGE “What is Noble” 63

To Gast, April 17th 1883, see also KGW 34 [36] (1874) and the letter to Gast of March 30

th

1885: “Ah! If you only knew how lonely I am on this earth! And how much one needs to play

a farce in order to refrain from spitting in the face of somebody every now and again, out of

satiety.” (my emphasis)



ambivalence between activity and passivity, a ground rigorously in-between internality

and externality, between self and other, whose instability projects it towards a future as

a task. Nietzsche’s confession that his writings are fishhooks should be taken together

with his insistence (displayed in the same texts) on the necessity of philological

interpretation (as warranted by his rejection of net-fishing): it is not only his writings

that rely on this ambivalent ground where internal and external, active and passive, self

and other lead into each other; for Nietzsche, it is writing itself, with its constant

horizonal projection towards some supposed (but never posed) meaning or task, that

ensures that one’s existential ambivalence (made most critically acute) finds rest on a

new level, that of meaning, which becomes an existential category in Nietzsche’s

thinking.

By repressing our instincts and turning them inwards, solitude makes one’s self

recede into difference, leaving our sense of self weakened and faint, holding on the

thread of metaphoricity. In loneliness, this metaphoricity is but the sign of our

existential failure to be ourselves: metaphorically, I may stand for myself, but

existentially, there is always an empirical part of me that is dissatisfied by having to

encounter itself only through reference. This is Nietzsche’s view of the disease of the

soul.

The healing however, comes from the disease (as all true healing is self-

overcoming): the introduction of the self as meaning in the life of the individual

represents a sublimation of our entire existence, leading to unheard-of possibilities of

discharge, both outwards and inwards. For Nietzsche, the healing comes from our

taking possession of what belongs to us, a slice of the world of meaning that is suitable

for ourselves, and shared with a few distinguished others: taking possession of it

represents both the healing of ourselves (as we become pure meaning and shed our

empirical selves, we reduce the self that is missing and the self that is missed to the

same semiotic order), and the entering of a genuine relation with others: as we become

an appropriate metaphor for ourselves and recuperate ourselves—entirely this time—in

this way, we also become an appropriate metaphor for others; recuperating them in the

same way within a slice of metaphorical meaning that transcends (that is to say,

satisfies) our individual natures and projects them towards their essence, our shared

task.

Lonely as a Fish: Nietzsche on the Self as Metaphor

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