Nietzsche: Pity, Trust, and Community by Randall Havas (Willamette University)

Randall Havas (Willamette University)

According to one line of thought that runs through Nietzsche’s work, our failings as human beings are broadly political in nature. And what ails us politically cannot, he argues, be cured by means of morality as we usually understand it. It is in this context, I contend, that we can best hope to understand his hostility to what he calls “the morality of pity.” Nietzsche claims that pity is harmful both to the pitier and to the pitied, but he is hardly as clear as one might like about the nature of that harm. I argue that pity is inimical to the possibility of community. Community, in Nietzsche’s sense, demands of us an acknowledgement of our separateness from one another that the morality of pity aims to collapse, offering us a clear example of how, in Nietzsche’s view, morality can be used against what is best in us. To put the point in the form of a slogan: Community demands trust, not empathy. Nietzsche contends—as it might seem, not unreasonably—that we are not, on the whole, trustworthy. This reading sheds light on his more familiar and often quickly dismissed claim in Daybreak that pity is a form of contempt for the sufferer that increases rather than diminishes the overall amount of suffering in the world.

3:30-5PM PST