CCHA Talk on Nietzsche and Carrie Bradshaw

First, some notes on my title. In my original draft for the proposal I had a question mark at the end of the title as if I were going to answer the question, is Carrie Bradshaw Nietzsche’s Superman? The question mark really fits the gist of what I want to say about Carrie Bradshaw, because I’m not sure Nietzsche would actually think of HBO’s fictional sex-columnist as the successor to humanity prophesied by his Zarathustra. In fact, I’m pretty sure he would NOT think of her in such grand terms. But there’s no question mark at the end of my presentation title because one of my colleagues suggested it made it seem like I was responding to a question lots of people were asking, but, of course, I’m responding to a question no one is asking. Still, I do hold up Carrie Bradshaw as at least a partial incarnation of Nietzsche’s ideals and I want to present her to you in that way.
In my “Introduction to Humanities” class we spend the first four or five weeks of the semester discussing ethics, but I try to do so in a way that would not duplicate the good work done in typical ethics classes in our philosophy department. Instead, we begin with Plato’s “Euthyphro” and then spend a few weeks with Nietzsche before watching Woody Allen’s film, “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Certainly Nietzsche’s own oeuvre is vast enough on its own to keep some “Intro to Humanities” students busy for a few weeks, but I find that for most of my students, Nietzsche’s writings are among the most difficult texts they’ve ever read. (They are not much comforted when I tell them that as primary philosophical texts go, he’s not that hard. When compared to Hegel or Kant he seems downright fun.) To help them engage the text I sometimes assign Mark T. Conard’s article, “Thus Spake Bart.” (In The Simpsons and Philosophy, 2001)
In that article Conard wonders which Simpson would be a better model of virtue, Lisa, or Bart? He writes:

Now, while Nietzsche rejected and even laughed at the traditional ideal, the so-called "good person," the compassionate, religiously virtuous person, he forged something of his own ideal: the free spirit; the person who rejects traditional morality, traditional virtues; the person who embraces the chaos of the world and gives style to his character.

Could it be that from a Nietzschean perspective we've been admiring the wrong character? Might Lisa Simpson be part of what Nietzsche calls world-slandering weariness, decadence, slave morality, resentment? Sure, it's fun to be bad, but might there be something healthy and life-affirming, something philosophically important about it? Could Bart Simpson be, in the end, the Nietzschean ideal? (pp. 60-61)

Conard’s conclusion is “no,” Bart Simpson is not Nietzsche’s Superman because, for Conard at least,

the Nietzschean ideal culminates in the figure of the Übermensch, or overman, the being who has achieved this very difficult project of making an artwork out of his life, the self-creating being. Nehamas says: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed around the idea of creating one’s own self or, what Schacht says: “. . . the ‘overman’ is to be construed as a symbol of human life raised to the level of art. (p. 68)

Conard stresses that the Superman is not the same as master morality, or some kind of bullying brute, but “more the artist, the self-overcoming, self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life.” Conard concludes that this is NOT Bart Simpson.
But does popular culture offer another model for this ideal, someone who is not a slave to some kind of “written-in-stone” ideal, but who is, instead, this kind of self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life? I would suggest that there is such a figure: Carrie Bradshaw.
Sure, Carrie is not a perfect representation of Nietzsche’s ideal. She sometimes caves-in to self-doubt, compromises herself, and makes mistakes, but I don’t think that would cause Nietzsche to reject her—at least not from the category of “free spirit” (and he might actually agree that she is at least an intimation of the Übermensch)—because these qualities, these “failings” if you will, are, after all, what make her human. But even with these human weaknesses, Carrie does seem to embody some key aspects of the Nietzschean ideal.
First, she does not accept any values as “given,” but neither does she cave into nihilism. In fact, the whole structure of the show is built around her attempt to find, clarify, and construct her own set of values. In a typical episode, Carrie and her friends, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, are confronted with various choices, dilemmas, and difficulties that send Carrie to her trusty Apple Notebook. She muses over the problems they are facing and then poses a question, usually a question of value. We then see her pursue this question throughout the rest of the episode until she finally reaches some kind of clarity, perspective, or value. She does not find, nor does she even seek, THE authority that could clarify her situation and provide her with a fixed, universal set of values. But this failure to engage in any kind of universally-binding authority never leads her to conclude that her world is devoid of meaning and value. On the contrary, she engages in Nietzsche’s anti-nihilism project, revaluing values by positing herself as the source of those values.
Second, we might think of her as a kind of Übermensch because she has style. In his notebooks Nietzsche wrote:
One thing is needful.-To "give style” to one's character-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! (Will to Power, 371)

Carrie Bradshaw definitely has style . . . and taste. She “gives style” to her life and in the process creates values. Probably the thing I find most engaging about Sex and the City is that, in general, the characters do not “learn valuable lessons about life” and “discover deep moral values.” On the contrary, what they discover is their own sense of style and the importance of that style in giving one’s life meaning and purpose.
I admit it, Carrie Bradshaw is probably not the ideal being Zarathustra had in mind. She is, after all, human, all to human, struggling just like the rest of us. Still, I can’t help but wonder, in a world in which people cling tenaciously to the authoritative universal-values-granting institutions that have given birth to the culture wars—in other words, in a world in which values have become political, that is, without any personal value—could we all learn something from a free-spirited sex columnist who blows half her salary on a really nice pair of shoes?

[Clips are from “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” ]