Nietzsche in Friendship
“I slowly realized that aspiring to equality with a person like this made trust impossible.”
Josie Barboriak is a 21-year-old writer from Durham, North Carolina studying at the University of Chicago. Her work is concerned with sociological questions of the relationship between the experience of learning and political, moral, and aesthetic sensibilities.
“This song sounds like ‘Idioteque,’” my partner said. Neither of us had heard it before.
“Yeah, a little,” I responded somewhat absently. I didn’t know what “Idioteque” sounded like, but I wanted to avoid revealing myself as a less-than-studious listener of a band I claimed to enjoy, so I went for what I thought was a middling option — a half-agreement. My failure in being less knowledgeable than my partner about Radiohead’s discography meant that agreement would be mindlessly sycophantic. The sort of response that ChatGPT, or a stupider girlfriend, would feed back to him. A partner is supposed to provide newness, not disappear into another person’s selfhood, I thought, so it was necessary to convey a degree of resistance for which I had no epistemic ground.
“Only a little?” He asked. He glanced over at me before returning his gaze to the highway, brow wrinkling. I’d spent much of the summer reciting numbers to him as his laptop balanced in my lap, running tests and generating charts in Python. A difference of 0.0001 from the prior iteration was a cause for annoyance or for excitement.
“No, you’re right, it really sounds like ‘Idioteque,’” I replied – a bid to end this conversation, in which I’d already sufficiently internally embarrassed myself.
He was, rightly, annoyed — why had I made a statement, then immediately pivoted to the opposite? Couldn’t I just say what I meant, or reveal that I couldn’t bring to mind one of the objects which I was nominally comparing? I didn’t want to spend thirty minutes arguing about whether the song had actually sounded like “Idioteque” or whether I was just being contrarian to feign being a more sophisticated machine than I was. I didn’t want to feel as though I was the half of the relationship that was less interesting, less knowledgeable, merely following the other person’s lead. But there we were.
When I thought about why I had acted with such insecurity, I realized my refusal to either agree with my partner or to admit that I didn’t know the song “Idioteque” was in part a reaction to a dubious arrangement I’d taken part in a few months prior, a friendship in which I’d felt as though the other person had always had the upper hand. A self-proclaimed Nietzschean who aspired to embody master morality, he had gone to great lengths to seem stronger, smarter, and possessed with better taste than everyone else. I’d aspired to equality with him, only to realize after the friendship dramatically imploded that he had never been willing to consider me an equal at all. Throughout the friendship, I had struggled to characterize and defend my involvement to others, and after it, making what had happened universally intelligible proved an even greater challenge. Even months later, in vastly different and longer-lasting sorts of relationships, I occasionally caught myself fearing that not knowing a Radiohead song would condemn me to a permanent state of inadequacy.
No one can assume that the ultimate meaning of an action or of a phrase lies in one’s specific use of it because the meanings of the words, in and of themselves, do not exist. There is only what the first person intended and what the second person experienced. I intended to demonstrate myself as an adequate girlfriend. My partner received a meaningless disagreement. The closer you are with another person, the more you are interacting, the more frequently these misunderstandings will erupt, and there is no escape from them.
These lapses in dialogue are both communication gone awry and inevitable parts of communication itself. The work of oft-maligned philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche can help us understand them. Given that speech exists, the effort of communicating puts people on an equal plane, provided they choose to embark upon it carefully and in good faith. This quest toward communication and equality in interpersonal relationships is both deeply difficult and deeply necessary.
When I took a class reading On the Genealogy of Morality, I understood the instinct behind Nietzsche’s aggressive suspicion towards language. Nietzsche points to an ambiguity in the way that systems of moral value can be read. Early in human history, there existed “master morality,” in which the noble kind of person was he who was of good quality — healthy, vigorous, and physically strong. The masters asserted themselves through strength. Strength was good, and weakness was merely an absence of strength — a void to be filled, a prey animal to be eaten. The transition into “slave morality,” Nietzsche writes, involves a linguistic deception created from a physically inferior kind of person attempting to assert themselves in the only way they can — through metaphysical rather than physical domination.
Nietzsche uses lambs and eagles as a metaphor to demonstrate master morality as a time before self-consciousness, or self-reflection, or much of what we would today consider thought. Back then, before the existence of language to name characters and describe actions, what mattered was the action itself, the quantum of force expressed by strength. Nietzsche calls this natural tendency toward action the “will to power.” Eagles, who were strong, hunted and ate lambs, who were not strong. To be mauled by a predator was no different than to be struck by lightning — there was no agent behind the action, no one to blame. But for the lambs, the prey, existence was unpredictable, and there was no discernable cause for their suffering, so the physically weak prey animals invented our modern system of morality. They invented the subject, the agent behind the action, in order to reframe weakness as a choice to not do harm to others. They invented the idea of a universal justice system, a court through which those who cause harm could be tried and punished. And to find meaning in the suffering of the weak, they invented God.
In the current moment, we are, understandably, wary of Nietzsche. To romanticize his description of the time before language and its creation of agency, the time when master morality reigned, would be regressive by definition. One thinks of the figure of the “alpha male,” pounding his chest and eating raw meat, or of white supremacist calls for a return to an imagined past dominance of a “master race.” Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power is difficult to reckon with and may seem to give permission to our most violent, primordial instincts, or purport that “might makes right.” Few of us would like to be ruled by brute force, subject to the barest of animal metaphors in which those who are tallest and strongest prowl the land and tear out the hearts of the rest of us gentle, vegetarian souls.
Our cultural fascination with the idea of master morality, though, belies the difficulties in trying to square our individual desires to be powerful with our obligations toward being understood in collectives of equals. One hopes to develop an individual self which is equipped to effect meaningful change aligned with one’s values on the outside world. But problems emerge, particularly for the egalitarian-minded: How can one put in the hard work to progress in weightlifting or rhetoric, mathematics or cabinet-making, and take joy in one’s improvement, while preaching that all people, even those who aspire toward little, have equal value? While trying to do great work in the world, how much attention ought one pay to personal leadership disputes or worry about stepping on others’ toes? And how can one differentiate between the scolding that stifles and the critique that is necessary for development?
The advent of language, Nietzsche writes, created slave morality through upholding an illusion that meanings could be agreed upon, and that intentions could be neatly derived from the actions that had transpired — therefore, that blame and evil positions could be assigned. In suggesting that the ideas of accountability, communication, and organized religion all came from weak people trying to understand and explain their suffering, Nietzsche provokes a modern reader. To him, the stakes of living unquestioning under slave morality in the modern world are high because slave morality is marked by its stifling of the human will to power, the vitality and strength which is freely expressed by the unthinking under master morality. Slave morality’s sick, self-denying sort of morality poses a danger to the healthy: we so fear doing harm to another that we grow to hate our own life force itself.
Looking back on my adolescence, Nietzsche’s tooling of the imperfection of communication accurately diagnosed the way that the boundaries of the social world had seemed to fluctuate around me. Any run-in between two parties which resulted in bruised feelings could be read through the lens of either unthinking action or calculated intent. A brisk text reply from a new friend could be an expression of a deep personal cruelty toward an innocent victim, or the new friend may have simply been busy, and the text receiver may have been an overly sensitive malingerer imagining harms within the normal vicissitudes of a friendship. When the collective understanding of who was to blame in any given situation emerged, the origin of this understanding seemed to lie not in any sort of enshrined universal but at the whims of the rhetorical tides of arbitrary preference, of who was liked and who was not.
My generation struggles to keep close friendships. This may be due in part to the fact that spending a lot of time online gives us a crippling awareness that all action that is witnessed by another person can be analyzed through some aspect of the “performative.” One consumes an iced matcha latte, for example, for a combination of reasons whose precise proportion is unknowable to others or even oneself: the sweetness of the cool beverage within one’s mouth, the weight of slick plastic latent with ice cubes in one’s hand, the caffeinating effect, some synchronicity of the drink’s soft green color with one’s surrounding visual environment, the pleasure of being a part of a community exchanging nods as you pass on the sidewalk and their matcha matches with yours, the guilty glee of partaking in a trend.
I highlight the matcha latte because sometime in the past few months, it became a signal, and anyone motivated by one of countless reasons unwillingly became a participant in a cultural moment. Younger people meeting in person for the first time are likely to do so at a coffee shop, and to choose a matcha latte, a sweet and pastel-colored drink aligned more than coffee with a certain girlishness, reveals one’s sensitive, artful soul. Suddenly, the drinker of matcha is vulnerable to being branded a malicious actor, a performer who merely pretends to enjoy things for some nebulous purpose — a sense of coolness? Romantic admirers in droves? The performative is, paradoxically, both a bid for distinction and for connection — like an attempt at friendship, a continuing arrangement between two people whose substance is the statement: I have chosen to associate myself with this particular person. Such a statement belies an appreciation of both the experience itself and of the kind of person it shows one to be.
In the same way, when we are conscious that we are being witnessed, interpreted, and potentially misinterpreted, the prospect of trying to genuinely communicate with or understand another person is perilous and paralyzing. The fear lies in being judged by a hidden third person, an audience to whom one’s words and actions could be uncharitably relayed. With the sudden manifestation of social law, one comes to a realization that they have broken the rules of a game they didn’t know they were playing, and the safer option may seem to withdraw from playing at all.
Linguistic ambiguity renders us vulnerable to misinterpretation, and our conceptions of hierarchy and power differentials impede our attempts to understand and be understood. Nietzsche delves into these problems with the knowledge that language, which may at first appear to put all on an equal plane, is apt to be manipulated by forces that are contrary to our ideals of equal treatment, justice, and transparency.
Many college students can tell you that undergraduate organizations and the intricacies of the power struggles and friendships within them could fill books. Sports teams in particular display the paradox of individual effort and collective greatness. A successful team consists of members who support each other to improve. In training, each individual dedicates their presence and energy, and having people with whom to share this exertion realizes it. In cooking and eating together, a good meal fed to a teammate contributes directly to your shared vitality. In competition, you execute a beautiful motion only through moving in sync with others’ bodies. In this selective space, even if you would find one’s essay feedback suspect or believe another’s taste in music is an affront, you still trust them completely. And sometimes, you win, and winning means something because you all did it together.
Despite the reputation student athletes often get for being overly normative, the centrality of physical exertion means that we are people familiar with pain. We do it because it is hard, because anything really worth doing is hard. Some of us compartmentalize that intensity into the sport and live relatively well-adjusted, ordinary lives outside of it. But the possibility for flirtation with the void, the hours occupied by only one’s own effort, means that such spaces can also collect particularly hardcore types.
I met such a fellow at a team breakfast, arguing spiritedly about the modern world in a way which reminded me of nothing more than Theodore Kaczynski. Sensitive and dramatic, he made a show of exercising until collapse, coding until exhaustion, drinking until failure, then not at all. He seemed, like me, to value reading, learning, effort, loyalty, art, music, taking care of others; the corollary of these apparent cares was to despise perceived instances of their opposites with conviction. From this exacting eye none were excluded. It wasn’t long before I counted him as one of my best friends.
There were ways that his provocations felt radically honest, even refreshing. My entire life, people had been telling me that I was too hard on myself. Here was someone who seemed to demonstrate another way: that I needed to push further.
The time I spent with him, though, was characterized by a particular reading of Nietzsche. He would say certain things, and I would feel hurt, and he told me, time and time again, that in being hurt at all I was conforming with slave morality. You are only hurt, he said, because you are choosing to be. When pressed, he told me that he respected me, but also, that it was ridiculous that I’d even ask for this assurance, since wasn’t the sheer abundance of time spent talking proof enough? Words didn’t mean anything, he’d say, actions meant something.
But after the slave revolt, slave morality is inescapable. To act as though one can opt out of its system of assuming intention is its own kind of deceit. The Nietzschean problem of agency recurs: was he unable to grant me the mutual recognition of a friendship due to a personal limitation within him, or was he consciously choosing to withhold it due to a judgment of my inadequacy? I slowly realized that aspiring to equality with a person like this made trust impossible.
While an element of the animal remains inevitably in our present-day communications, one cannot put any stock in speech at all; as a result, one cannot trust another’s intention completely. The aspirational master allows others to think as they will think and does not seek to disrupt their thought processes beyond what conforms with his purposes. He is not above deception; whatever he can do to elevate his sense of authority is right. In his worldview, other people become animals — something higher to be feared and worshipped, or something lower to be used and guided. In this absence of equals, every interaction must be analyzed as a power grab.
The idea that power is the essence and the only possible end of communication itself leads one to disavow communication as connection. Words, one might think, are only useful for deception. Since the existence of words creates an illusion that agreed-upon meanings, meanings which are true for all people, could exist independently of an individual’s perception, a shared reality can easily be manipulated through a lie. The lie is the glitch in the fabric of this social reality, that one person can state that an event happened in a particular way and that event, and the implications thereof, can become saturated in a social world without ever having taken place.
The existence of the lie makes the modern-day Nietzschean exhibit paranoia. In this friendship, I agonized over whether I could trust him, confided in him my personal frustrations with others, confided in others my fears about him, woke from dreams that he was chasing me with some inexhaustible epistemic force. I sensed that there was a grand and beautiful plan happening beyond my perception, and I sought hopelessly to become more than an appendage to it. The choice of the social world was between constant fear and willful ignorance, and I tried for too long to choose the latter.
Throughout the friendship, I subscribed to what could be called the private logic of the idiot. All my grievances with him I considered deeply personal. My friends and loved ones were horrified at what I told them of our conflicts and proclaimed the friendship “toxic” or “unhealthy.” I was reluctant to do what felt like letting others think for myself, and I prided myself at having looked beyond his abrasive exterior to what I thought was some center worthy of my attention. It was only when I saw how he used the tactics of slave morality, how he’d been collecting grievances about my character over the course of months and was presenting me to others through various caricaturing lenses, that we had a dramatic falling-out. I knew then he may never have been my friend at all.
The implications of this reading of Nietzsche make it clear that, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, evil is a failure of the intellect. Almost no one can accept hurting or deceiving another being without projecting an inferiority or a sort of hierarchy which makes it right to take them as an appendage to your greatness. You don’t lie to, about, or around someone you consider an equal. So, I had clearly failed in my bid for equality with him, and in the months after our falling-out, I began trying, on my own this time, to understand what it had meant.
In the wake of such confusion, which I’d understood as the acute peak of the personal, it turned out that this whole experience could be made to fit in a box that was sanctionable by institutions. It turned out that I wasn’t the only person who’d been meaningfully hurt, perhaps unjustly wronged, by him. So, while reintegrating into a social whole, I was forced to transmute what had happened somehow into the language of the ethical and universal, the language of the law. This creation of the justice system can be understood as part of Nietzsche’s movement into slave morality. It can see only the downstream effects of a motion and points a finger of blame back upstream, towards a perceived origin of harm.
The thing that mattered, the nice lady said on the phone, was whether I thought that I had been hurt by him in ways that fell under certain legal categories. The legal categories were words alongside which I’d never thought to examine anything I’d experienced — namely, sexual harassment. What she’d said felt like the wrong formulation of the question. What had been wrong was much more complex than particular strings of words said in some blend of jest and cruelty, joyful exploration and narrow-minded slight. The question presumed me as a prey animal, whose function the system was to defend, when in fact I had thought of my continued presence in the friendship through repeated abrasion as an evidence of both open-mindedness and strength.
To place the events under the legal category made sense, though. Seeing the phrases collected made it impossible to ignore that, rather than an equal, he considered me a woman, a label which carried a slew of personal baggage around weakness and duplicitousness — just the qualities that align with slave morality. What’s more, he had presented tailored stories to others about my character which seemed to align me with these limiting qualities. I’d had no way of knowing if he actually believed these things, or what purpose a rhetorical strategy involving prodding me with gendered stereotypes was intended to serve. Was it pushing me to come up with intellectual defenses of my belief that two people could be equals within the closed environment of their relationship, regardless of the bodies and cultures into which they had been born? And should these societal factors, in interpersonal communication, be ignored, conceded to, or acknowledged while attempting to move past them?
The purpose of the justice system had been to place me within a sort of protected category and to defend me on the basis of being within that category. I didn’t want to think about it as though I had been harmed as a woman, because that framework itself felt reductive. It wasn’t my womanhood that had been harmed. Rather, my personhood had been limited, and womanhood had been the blunt rhetorical instrument used to do it.
Such societal inequalities cannot be ignored in the quest for interpersonal equality, and they cannot be completely addressed using a justice system, either. Consider the ambiguity of a joke. Joking about such societal inequalities could be a part of questioning them, seeking to expose prejudices as ridiculous — how laughable it is that someone could discount a whole person on such a simple basis! But a set of words that constitutes a mutually enjoyable joke between one pair, understood over months within the texture of the relationship, would be an unforgivable transgression with another.
Though the universality of the law is inadequate and we cannot escape the knowledge of how difficult it is to understand another person, there must nevertheless be ways to hold each other accountable. More potent than a fear of being caught out as an oppressor ought to be a fear of actually curtailing another person’s humanity, a desire for another’s humanity to meaningfully exist to you. Eagles and lambs, as animals, would have nothing to say to each other. But if they were mutually communicable, if they could meet eye-to-eye and recognize a fellow soul and a shared intention, the act of eating another thinking and acting being would be truly evil. Instead, the animals would be allies and predation could no longer exist. To accept interpersonal incomprehension is to accept violence. That is the effect of the dehumanizing motion of the refusal to communicate.
Universal understanding for all people, as the justice system purports to do, is impossible, but the interpersonal relationship lies between that and total incommunicability. Here, when words become a twisted mode of expression of power, the oft-mentioned “power dynamic” can be read as a “knowledge dynamic.” Who is in charge? Who knows better? With time, who will be proven right about the way the world works? And who is assumed by an outside observer to be the aggressor or the victim? Such questions plague friendships.
Most relationships between two people begin with a power dynamic, whether it is one that is inherent to the relationship’s structure (parent and child, teacher and student, trainee and superior) or one that is implicit due to societal dynamics. This dictum seems to be true for all cases barring that of identical twins of roughly equal level of schooling, attractiveness, and parental favoritism. Norman Rush’s novel Mating, in which a male author writes one of the best female narrators in contemporary literature, is centered around the protagonist’s quest to find “equal love, between people of equal value” — whatever that means. This manifests in her desire for an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, one which involves long treks through the desert to find and impress her intellectual equal, a man who is older and world-renowned in their shared field — a man who is, in many societal categories, more powerful than she. Why, she asks, even in the most enlightened unions, do we fear “the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity?” She insists that it has to be cultural.
I, too, take this belief as a starting point. Yes, language has its problems, but to give up on communicability completely is to give up on any understanding of equality with any other person. There has to be a way of doing this right, doing it in a way that is two-sided. If that spectre of the master-slave relationship is ultimately cultural, then, on a small scale, with the proper sort of inquiry, it must be able to be dissolved.
Nietzsche’s will to power can give us a way to understand this process of mutual recognition. We choose to align ourselves closely with certain people often due to a strong feeling that says: you are moving the world in the right way. You are moving the world with recognition of the same cause as I. You are the kind of person there needs to be more of, and you are the kind of person I want to protect. Just as Nietzsche writes, this feeling often becomes visceral; one takes pleasure in another’s devouring of a meal or in their listening deeply to a song or sweating in victory. You forget the social categories. They become flesh of your flesh.
If one can imagine extending this will, even just to one other person, categories of prejudice can be sublated or transformed. Trust, which is nothing if not an implicit agreement in intention between two people, is a natural part of this relationship. The highest level of communicability implies a continuing relationship founded on respect of another’s human ability to grow. It’s a sort of respect that comes with intellectual humility. It’s a paradox of knowing that deception exists while still allowing oneself to feel another’s intention alongside one’s own; one extends the self with respect to intention (I can trust that you mean well) while respecting the aspect of the other (I expect you to surprise and, at times, surpass me).
So what are the boundaries of the quest for communicability? What kinds of particular treatment pave the groundwork for interpersonal equality? First, one must recognize that, both consciously and unconsciously, one’s relationship to power impacts the way one will communicate within a particular conversation — both in the way one presents one’s arguments and in the fact of what causes one offense.
One is socialized to move through the world in a way related to how one’s physically apparent characteristics fit one into a complex map of social, economic, and ethnic hierarchies. As a result, various spectres exist in one’s mind of what one could appear as if one is not careful. Women, for example, have been socialized to avoid conflict by speaking indirectly, talking around issues or behind others’ backs for fear of being called a “bitch.” The interpersonal power dynamic cannot be extricated from wider societal ones. The sociological object of study is entitlement, which therapists or activists often refer to as “taking up space.” Often those closer to the wealthy, white, and male end of the societal web are granted experiences that inspire self-confidence in the speaker, a relic of continual security within institutions and reinforcement of the belief that one’s voice is a vehicle for a contribution which is always-already worthy. When one speaks up in an academic setting, for example, is one demonstrating a thought process and making a point that enriches others’ experiences, or is one skating by on ego and merely filling the air with one’s own voice? No outsider can know what one was trying to do, and no insider can know what effect one’s words will ultimately have.
All of this compounds to the continual question, which one must ask with respect to both oneself and the person with whom one is trying to connect: in which ways has the tendency of this person toward self-affirmation been curtailed? Or, in which ways has this person been affirmed, but in a shallow way that leaves them vulnerable to arrogance? This is not to say that there is some default state to which people can return, leveled out from the additions and subtractions and inversions of societal conditioning. But the conscious quest to continue examining within oneself and another person and seeking to meet them as an equal is a worthy one. Such an effort can supplement the universal hurdles of a justice system and move towards attending to each other as individuals in our particularity.
There are some straightforward ways to even the playing field in a relationship involving inequality. When one person begins in a mentor role for another, she might later affirm the former mentee of his good qualities and tell him that she values him as a friend. Such clarity in communication — specifying that both people make worthy contributions to the friendship — is useful when inequality was inherent to the previous relationship structure (which has since been outmoded). More subtle methods of navigating such a relationship involve forgiveness and understanding rather than a rejection of the entire person or a sullen silence at the first instance in which one believes one has been slighted. As long as both people remain willing to communicate and willing to put in the effort to attempt to understand and be understood, the relationship can move forward on an equal plane.
A world in which none are equals is a lonely one because it is a world in which no person can ever truly communicate. As Norman Rush writes, we must avoid relating to the metaphor of “marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.” The fear of growing old in a relationship is a fear of the two of you sitting side-by-side, each alone in mutual assurance that the person who ought to be closest to them in the world actually cannot understand them at all.
Late at night, near the end of one such car ride, my partner told me he didn’t think of me as a girl, but rather, simply as me. Studying sociology, I’d often wondered what percent of the relationship that grows between any given two people could be statistically predicted by the historically-situated, census-designated facts that describe each of them, and how much of my relationship with my partner was determined by the fact that he was a man and I was a woman. There were tears of joy then; he’d understood something essential about me. Were my tears a result of a girlish reaction, or was it my reaction as an individual? In its best moments, an interpersonal relationship can make such a distinction irrelevant. It becomes a safe platform for a demand for goodness and equality in the wider world. It becomes an example of what is possible.
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“I didn’t want to feel as though I was the half of the relationship that was less interesting, less knowledgeable, merely following the other person’s lead. But there we were.”
That sounds so tender and human—wanting to be met as an equal, and realizing how vulnerable it feels when the balance shifts. There’s a quiet courage in naming that truth.