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.In one sense, however,the unreality of playfulness is clearly a blessing.In Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche points out that in play (including the theater) we can enjoy heroismand tragedy in a way that will not kill us. But instead of dismissing this as “pretense,” Nietzsche rightly insists that play is “natural” (whereas seriousness is not) and (anticipating Freud) it is a way of “rearranging theworld.” It is also instructive in “making do with what you’ve got,” a benignversion of Nietzsche’s amor fati, because in play we learn to “recycle” the furniture of our lives in all sorts of creative ways, experiment with life andwith our emotions in all sorts of ways, and transform ourselves in the pro-cess.Unfortunately, much of Nietzsche’s own sense of play in his writings isnot childish so much as adolescent, designed to shock and outrage, or it issophisticated display, designed to bring a smile to the lips of only those whorecognize his sources and his allusions.Nevertheless, I think that there isno doubt that we can recognize in Nietzsche’s attempts to be playful hisadmiration of that virtue and his hardly hidden agenda of converting phi- LIVING WITH NIETZSCHElosophers and shifting philosophy away from the weight of “seriousness”toward the spirit of playfulness.SolitudeFinally, we need to discuss Nietzsche’s repeated celebration of solitude.Thisreflects more than his own more or less voluntary solitude and the literaryexample of his solitary Zarathustra.Solitude represents independence andseparation from the “herd” in its most manifest form.Think of those oldAmerican images of the Marlboro Man, physically alone, utterly self-contained (but ignore what else that image represents).But solitude doesnot mean just being alone, and it certainly should not be confused withloneliness.Being alone is not a virtue.It is just a fact and, for most of us, a source of insecurity, occasionally a source of relief, sometimes a real liability.Loneliness, by contrast, is essentially a kind of felt deprivation (and weshould note that one can feel lonely even in the presence of other people).But solitude is something of an achievement.I sometimes give an assignment to my students (with all of the requisite mental health warnings).I askthem to spend twenty-four hours by themselves—no friends, no telephone,no radio, no television, no recorded music, no computers or e-mail or In-ternet, and no distracting “projects.” They are to remain alone with them-selves and their thoughts.Afterward, many of my students tell me that thisis the first time they have really been alone in their lives.Most of my stu-dents give up after six hours or so, not out of boredom but out of growinganxiety (often rationalized as boredom).It is hard to be alone.It is a virtueto be self-contained, or so, at any rate, does Nietzsche (and American my-thology) consider it.Solitude is a true test of independence, or what wemight very cautiously call one’s autonomy.The virtues are often conceived (e.g., by Aristotle, by Hume, and by Mac-Intyre) as social functions.Indeed, it is hard to imagine a virtue for any ofthem that exists in a hermit or a person without a country or community.In Nietzsche, by contrast, the virtues are best understood in an extremelyindividual context.Indeed, many of his traditional virtues (such as cour-tesy) rather painfully reflect the necessity of acting properly in the presence of other people.But this very necessity implies reluctance and a preferencethat it not be so.Thus we think of courtesy as constrained, constrained bythe need to behave ourselves rather than inspired by our love of our fellowhuman beings and our joy at being with them.Most of Nietzsche’s distinc-tive virtues, by contrast, are exemplified in solitude, and, sometimes, onlyin solitude.This is true, I would suggest, even of virtues that might moreusually be taken as obviously social virtues.The image of a dancing Zara-thustra, for example, is not set in a ballroom or a disco, much less a raveparty.The virtues exemplified by dancing are, to the contrary, very muchthe virtues of a hermit, dancing alone.(Of course, it is not clear that Zara-N I E T Z S C H E ’ S V I R T U E Sthustra ever actually dances.He rather praises dancing, talks about dancing, and “walks like a dancer.” Nevertheless, one can safely assume that,were he to dance, he would not be dancing the tango.)There is no doubt, of course, that Nietzsche’s insistence on solitude hadmuch to do with his own sense of vulnerability.But I do not think that thisshould be viewed as a personal weakness on his part.Recent research andargument has thrown suspicion on the very nature of character and virtue,and thus virtue ethics.Several classic studies in social psychology, includingthe well-known Milgram experiment (subjects administering near-fatalshocks because the authority in question told them to), and experiments byP.G.Zimbardo (separating students into jailers and prisoners and watchingthem quickly degenerate into sadists and victims) and by J.M.Darley, andC.D.Batson (theology students rushing past a desperate man after hearinga “good Samaritan” lecture). The tentative conclusion, argued into a full-blown philosophical thesis by Gilbert Harman and John Doris, is that we areall extremely vulnerable to outside influences (authority and peer pressure).Therefore the virtue-ethics emphasis on character is quite naive and mis-placed. Nietzsche recognized this, and not only in himself.Thus solitude becomes an answer, a way of maintaining one’s nobility and characterwithout the threat of other people.It is, perhaps, one of the most worrisome problems of Nietzsche’s philoso-phy, his continuing suggestion (and sometimes more than that) of a deepmisanthropy
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