Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.
Jacobs distinguishes between Substack subscribers, who have paid to receive something, and open-web supporters, who contribute because they approve of the work he has already done. The first arrangement carries expectations; the second merely ratifies an existing relationship. This distinction may work perfectly well for him. I have no reason to suspect otherwise.
My own temperament would ignore it completely. A reader who gave me fifty dollars as thanks for past services rendered would occupy just as much space in my mind as one who paid five dollars a month for future ones. The subscriber has entered an intelligible transaction and may cancel it whenever he pleases. The donor has made a gesture of generosity for which no return was formally required. That very absence of terms would make the obligation harder to discharge. The money would follow me back to the desk. Had I gone too long without posting? Was the next piece substantial enough? Was I writing something the donor would care to read? He might intend none of these questions. I would supply them on his behalf.
Nietzsche once wrote in a notebook:
I am passionately for independence, I sacrifice everything to it — probably because I have the most dependent soul and am tormented by the tiniest ropes more than others by chains.
It’s a startling glimpse of the man behind the great booming voice. He doesn’t describe independence as the natural condition of someone whom nothing can touch. He describes it as a defense devised by someone who can be touched too easily. The severity is compensatory. He guards himself because claims have too much power over him.
This changes the sound of much that Nietzsche wrote. His attacks on pity, for instance, are usually read as evidence of callousness. Yet in The Gay Science he elaborates on the earlier notebook entry:
How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral — to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life — if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it – and from our very own conscience – to flee into the conscience of others and into the lovely temple of the religion of pity.
Nietzsche therefore attempts to harden himself at the places where he is most permeable. His philosophy sometimes sounds like a barricade constructed by a man who knows how quickly the walls might fall. “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” he wrote in a letter to Peter Gast.
The same undertone appears in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which he calls independence “a privilege of the strong.” Read in isolation, it has everything required to intoxicate an adolescent male reader: the solitary hero, the labyrinth, the Minotaur, the suffering incomprehensible to common men. One naturally casts oneself as the tragic exception.
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.
But this isn’t aristocratic chest-thumping so much as a private warning. He’s saying to himself: You may not be as strong as you wish to be. Your effort to become strong may deform you. And after making a principle of solitude, you may discover that solitude is too much to bear.
I don’t refuse money because I am beyond its influence. I refuse it because its influence would be disproportionate. I guard my independence fiercely because I know how easily I can be bound. A person who is highly sensitive to obligation may begin to experience every request as an imposition, every favor as a debt, every affection as the first loop of a leash. He may snarl, spit, and hiss at ordinary human ties because he knows they will work on him. He may become so practiced at detecting ropes that even loose threads begin to look like restraints.
Still, it is better to know one’s susceptibility than to pretend to possess a freedom one does not have. Jacobs can accept contributions while preserving, in his own mind, a clear distinction between gratitude and purchase. I cannot.