Friendship is the highest form of love, according to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, because great friends inspire each other and can even push each other towards the ideal of the Übermensch. While he was sceptical that many people would be strong enough for this kind of higher relationship, Nietzsche saw friendship as essential to a good marriage. Sex, in contrast, creates complications, because a relationship based on romantic feelings is unlikely to endure a lifetime. Furthermore, the ontological differences between (...) men and women tend to turn love into a war. In order to overcome the power games in the arena of love, Nietzsche thus challenges lovers to be great friends. Drawing on Nietzsche’s plethora of aphorisms on friendship, marriage, sex and power relationships, this paper outlines how Nietzsche thought the institution of and approach to marriage could be reinvigorated in ways conducive to more successful relationships and greater human achievements. While some of Nietzsche’s ideas about marriage at first appear to be outrageous, much of what Nietzsche recommends is as relevant and challenging today as it was in his own time. Indeed, Nietzsche himself prophesied that the world would not be ready for his ideas until “sometime around the year 2000” (Fuss & Shapiro, 1971, p. 91). (shrink)

To the extent they have adopted a cafeteria-style approach to Nietzsche's trademark conceptions, kneading and molding his words into chimerical constructs, postmodernist philosophers inevitably remind us of Zarathustra's description of 'scholars': 'They work like mills and like stamps: throw down your seed-corn to them and they will know how to grind it small and reduce it to white dust' ( TSZ , II, 16). If so, how much significance might we attribute to any postmodernist's 'findings' of any textual nuances in (...) Nietzsche's relativism and stylistic multiplicity - nuances which at one moment appear intimately to apply and at the next to be hopelessly impertinent to whatever point that postmodernist is straining to make? The answer ought to be clear: By maintaining that there exist no intrinsically privileged vantage platforms vis-à-vis any text whatever, postmodernists in effect subvert their own analyses, and thus leave every work they consider unaffected. In that sense, we should be on target to advance that postmodernists are, au fond , engaged in writing for the sake of writing; indeed, what delivers them from sheer irrelevance is nothing but their clamorous advocacy of universal egalitarianism. This, however, necessarily reaffirms the nature and hankerings of the 'race' of the last man, and thus perverts the teleological direction of Nietzsche's aesthetics. Those who regard postmodernism as a regressive movement must therefore attempt to set the record straight by arguing that Nietzsche's relativism is, in fact, only a means to the eventual (phenomenal) realization of his Übermensch idea. (shrink)