Nietzsche on Reading Philosophers and Posthumous Friendship in Beyond Good and Evil 27–28

Abstract This article presents a close reading of BGE 27 and 28, which concern how to read philosophical books and the kind of friendship such reading makes possible. In BGE 27, Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds of readers who have different paces of thought and life, comparable to rivers, frogs and tortoises. While he implies a hierarchy by saying some are “at best” comparable to frogs, he does not state explicitly which type is best. Most commentators assume “rivers” are ideal, but the article argues that Nietzsche is deliberately misleading; though he provokes this misinterpretation, he actually implies that “tortoises” are the best readers. Tortoise-like readers are often posthumous, reading authors who are already dead, but they enjoy a kind of friendship with the deceased unavailable to most contemporaries, who lack the right “nature.” The transition from BGE 27 to 28 reflects the shift from “good friends” among the living to true friends among the dead. The article also explores the idea of posthumous friendship in Nietzsche more broadly and suggests that his ideal of friendship as “shared joy” ( Mitfreude ), rather than “compassion” or “shared suffering” ( Mitleid ), is best realized in posthumous friendship with philosophers, which takes the form almost exclusively of shared joy.