Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "The Involuntary Seducer"

It is well-known that Friedrich Nietzsche is a precursor to modern psychology, insofar as he anticipates Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious, that there are hidden drives, needs, and desires beyond the immediacy and transparency of conscious experience. Although Freud delved into matters of human sexuality more frequently than Nietzsche did, Nietzsche ventures into the relationship between the intellect—or, rather, our public performance of being intellectual—and seduction in his short poem, “The Involuntary Seducer” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 19):

19. The Involuntary Seducer

He shot an empty word into the blue
to pass the time — and downed a woman too.

As philosophers, thinkers, and intellectuals, we like to think of ourselves as having relatively noble, even lofty, ambitions. We read and write, think and theorize, lecture and teach with the aim of doing our part for future generations, for the sake of progress in our own disciplines, and to make the world—at the risk of sounding like a Silicon Valley cliche—a better place. Yet Nietzsche, in “The Involuntary Seducer,” points to much more visceral aims of our performative intellectual activities, seduction and sexuality, while taking a typically Nietzschean jab at the vacuousness of much of what passes as intellectual activity at the same time. After all, what intellectual would feign humility enough to call his or her own words “empty” as Nietzsche does here?

Nietzsche seems to be saying that while philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals of all sorts have lofty conscious desires, their true aims (i.e., their subconscious desires) are ultimately much more down to earth: to get laid. Sean Connery’s character, William Forrester, in the film Finding Forrester, says as much when discussing the just-beneath-the-surface sexual motives behind the literary life:

William Forrester: You know those things they do,
that coffee-shop reading shit? Do you know why they do it?

Jamal Wallace: To sell books, I guess.

William Forrester: ‘Cause they want to get laid.

Jamal Wallace: Really? Women will sleep with you if you write a book?

William Forrester: Women will sleep with you if you write a bad book.

Jamal Wallace: Did it ever happen to you?

William Forrester: Sure.

The entire history of Western thought, on the surface, seems to take for granted the strong separation of the human intellect from human sexuality. Plato, that philosophical champion and seeming paragon of abstract rationality and of the immortality of the soul, makes quite a point of this in his Phaedo dialogue. In the words of Socrates as recounted by Plato:

Socrates: But I think that if the soul is polluted and impure when it leaves the body, having always been associated with it and served it, bewitched by physical desires and pleasures to the point at which nothing seems to exist for it but the physical, which one can touch and see or eat and drink or make use of for sexual enjoyment, and if that soul is accustomed to hate and fear ad avoid that which is dim and invisible to the eyes but intelligible and to be grasped by philosophy—do you think such a soul will escape pure and by itself?

Cebes: Impossible.

(Plato, Phaedo, 80b)

This tension between intellect and sexuality is further expanded on by Plato, through the words of Socrates, in the following passage as well:

Socrates: Philosophy then persuades the soul to withdraw from the senses insofar as it is not compelled to use them and bids the soul to gather itself together by itself, to trust only itself and whatever reality, existing by itself, the soul by itself understands, and not to consider as true whatever it examines by other means, for this is different in different circumstances and is sensible and visible, whereas what the soul itself sees is intelligible and invisible. The soul of the true philosopher thinks that this deliverance must not be opposed and so he keeps away from pleasures and desires and pains as far as he can….

(Plato, Phaedo, 83a–83b)

Whether Christian asceticism in the Medieval period, Cartesian dualism or Berkeleyian idealism in the modern period, Western thought has seemingly aimed toward an ideal of pure intellect freed from the shackles of desire and from the quivering of the fibers, so to speak. Yet here comes Nietzsche (and Sean Connery!) claiming that the real motivation behind the literary or philosophical life is sexual—an embodied desire to impress the opposite sex so thoroughly that a subsequent sexual encounter is all but certain to follow.

The protagonist in Nietzsche’s short poem “The Involuntary Seducer” is filled with empty words—the vacuously true claims and dazzling intellectual mumbo-jumbo parlor tricks of philosophers and metaphysicians thorough the ages. Was his goal merely to pass the time, as Nietzsche suggests, tongue in cheek? Or is the motivation behind his verbal and philosophical slings and arrows simply to “down a woman too,” as the second line of the poem suggests, and not merely the noble pursuit of truth for its own sake, or even mere verbal swordplay with one’s intellectual opponents?

Long ago I figured out that my own seductive power was verbal. I certainly wasn’t blessed with a physical form that the opposite sex seemed to be innately drawn to. And thus, if I were ever to be successful in my pursuit of the opposite sex—and thus successfully copulate on a regular basis, as Sean Connery suggests—the art of seduction would have to be a verbal and intellectual game and not a merely physical one. Thus I learned to write poetry and letters, to polish my speech rhetorically, to imbue my spoken words with some flair and a Machiavellian seductive gleam in my winking eye even as I pursued the loftiest of goals as a thinker, writer, and philosopher. I learned to use my strengths and downplay my weaknesses, as that weakest of all mortal beings, the philosopher, must ultimately do to have a fighting chance with the opposite sex. Lo and behold, I discovered the great seductive power of the written and spoken word, and of not-so-very-pure intellect on display for the objects of my desire to see—for I’ve always been a better Nietzschean and an existentialist than a Platonist and an ascetic!

What a fascinating read the history of the sex lives of the canon of philosophers must be! Which philosophers in history, from Thales and Pythagoras and Heraclitus (particularly Heraclitus, who certainly must have known the flames of passion with his emphasis on the consuming fires of change; I suspect Heraclitus downed more than a Presocratic woman or two himself with his Presocratic riddles!), to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, to Saint Augustine (who was clearly no stranger to sexuality, at least in his early days as recounted in his Confessions) and Aquinas and Anselm, to Descartes and Hume, to Leibniz and Spinoza and Kant—to say nothing of later philosophers who were more open and explicit about their own sexuality and exploits—were successful at satisfying their sexual needs by means of the seductive power of their own writing? And which were so pure in their intellectual endeavors—in some Socratic or Platonic sense—that they were clueless to the way in which their writings and words somehow caused arousal in at least a subset of members of the opposite sex—if only in those rare sapiosexuals individuals sensitive to such means of arousal?

Which philosophers remained Platonic through and through, and which philosophers did so only in an exoteric way, in their public writing and teaching, and which were unabashed hedonists esoterically in the bedroom (or in their adventurous locations of choice)? Would it undermine the entire history, project, and intellectual integrity of philosophy if we were to find out that, just beneath the covers, philosophers are really just a bunch of horn-dogs striving—and mastering to a greater or lesser degree—the Nietzschean art of intellect-as-seduction, the ultimate “revenge of the nerds” perhaps?

Although Nietzsche’s poem “The Involuntary Seducer” is written in the third person, arguably the poem refers to himself as the protagonist, as the following passages from Nietzsche’s autobiography, Ecco Homo, suggest:

All deprecation of the sexual life, all sullying of it by means of the concept ‘impure,’ is the essential crime against life—is the essential crime against the Holy Spirit of Life. (Nietzsche, Ecco Homo, “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”)

May I venture to suggest that I know women? This knowledge is part of my Dionysian patrimony. Who knows? Maybe I am the first psychologist of the eternally feminine. Women all like me. . . . (Nietzsche, Ecco Homo, “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”)

In that last passage, Nietzsche comes close to downright bragging about the number of women he has downed with his verbal and written arrows. In this perhaps Nietzsche and I are Dionysian kinsmen after all. Why then do we philosophers keep thinking and writing, thinking and writing, thinking and writing, as if driven by the form of Dionysian madness that Nietzsche himself knew all too well? I think we all know the answer to that given this (and Nietzsche’s) Dionysian revelry of the embodied intellect. As the old saying goes, “It ain’t over till it’s over . . . .” And while Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard may have tried to disown the seductive power of his own words by relegating it to the merely aesthetic life (as opposed to the ethical or religious one), it’s a rare breed of philosopher who can fully come to conscious terms with the unconscious Dionysian and hedonistic drives behind his or her loftiest ambitions as a thinker, writer, and speaker. So much for pure intellect and its disembodied Platonic soul.

In the entire history of philosophy I can think of only one philosopher who has successfully and unreservedly blended his intellect and his sexuality: Epicurus, who once (perhaps—but hopefully not!—apocryphally) orgasmed 18 times on a bed full of virgins. Good for him. We should all be so lucky. Perhaps if philosophers throughout history had warmed up to the same psychological insights Nietzsche had, the history of philosophy would be a lot more steamy—which it probably is, in truth, if one goes digging for it; let’s be honest—and a lot less morbid!