On Loving Enemies and Hating Friends

The poet and translator Simon Solomon

(mon meilleur ami et meilleur adversaire)

The philosopher, says Zarathustra, must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The first part of this proposition obviously echoes the Christian imperative, but Nietzsche doesn’t mean by it what Jesus meant. For he’s not thinking in terms of forgiveness and reconciliation and peace on earth. Rather, he wants the lover of wisdom to recognise the vital need for enmity.

Unlike Hegel, therefore, he’s not positing difference only so he might then dream of synthesis. Dionysus versus the Crucified is not a dialectical opposition; the pathos of distance between terms is real and needs, if anything, to be furthered - not closed or even bridged.

But across this gulf that separates, antagonists should respect and even revere one another and know that they find their best strength in the struggle between them; to desire the extermination of one’s enemies, to think of them in vicious moral terms as evil, is profoundly mistaken and a sign of ressentiment. The noble human being always finds in their adversary something to honour (and to love), not despise and fear.

As for the second part of this proposition, Nietzsche is simply alerting us to the danger of those who love us for who we are, rather than for what we might become; for those who follow us on social media and like what we do and say, rather than challenge it; those who want the best for us, rather than wish us a life of hardship, conflict and worthy enemies.

In sum, for Nietzsche, one’s best friend and one’s greatest opponent is often one and the same person. (Oh, Simon, what would I do without you?)

How Murder of the Other Ends in Self-Destruction

Whilst an adversary is often accorded respect and even admiration, an enemy is always despised and frequently demonized. Because an enemy, unlike an opponent, is not merely set against us, but seen as fundamentally alien and other - culturally, morally, and even physically; they look repulsive and they smell bad. 

This long and shameful tradition of depicting our enemies as monstrous and inhuman - enemies who can never be defeated and assimilated into our world, only exterminated like vermin - is nowhere better illustrated than in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which displays an irrational (at times insane) level of racial hatred. What we might term the metaphysics of enmity clearly acted as the murderous dynamic of National Socialism, as well as the indispensable precondition that made genocide not only inevitable but, for many Germans, acceptable. 

Of course this hatred might be contextualized within the religious, cultural and social history of Germany. But it's never fully explained by placing it within such a context. For there is something else - something almost incomprehensible - about Nazi anti-Semitism for those who do not share this obsessive mania and the Final Solution results from a mystical as well as an ideological and biological fantasy to do with health, strength, and purity.

Ironically, of course, the idea of a master race is inconceivable without the Jews being assigned their role as the eternal Other whom it is necessary to annihilate, in order that the Aryan superman might live. But there is a further fatal irony all the time unfolding here: for this murderous fantasy is as suicidal as it is homicidal and war becomes not simply a means of eliminating a mortal enemy, but of regenerating one’s own blood via self-sacrifice. Ultimately, Hitler is as happy to shed the blood of those he promised to protect, as those he desired to exterminate. Indeed, it might even be argued that the objective of the Nazi Regime was not really the demonization and destruction of the Jews, but the idealization and subsequent sacrifice of the German people themselves.

In a brilliantly insightful passage, Michel Foucault writes:

      "The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one’s life, being exposed to total destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism’s policies. It had to reach the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly constitute itself as superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever.

      We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized bio-power in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms … coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: the Nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.”

- Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 259-60.

And this is why the Third Reich ends not only with the Final Solution, but also the infamous Nero Decree [Nerobefehl] in which Hitler calls for the total destruction of German infrastructure in the face of impending defeat and occupation, regardless of the consequences to the population.