Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pursued two main themes in his work, one now familiar, even commonplace in modernity, the other still under-appreciated, often ignored. The familiar Nietzsche is the “existentialist”, who diagnoses the most profound cultural fact about modernity: “the death of God”, or more exactly, the collapse of the possibility of reasonable belief in God. Belief in God – in transcendent meaning or purpose, dictated by a supernatural being – is now incredible, usurped by naturalistic explanations of the evolution of species, the behaviour of matter in motion, the unconscious causes of human behaviours and attitudes, indeed, by explanations of how such a bizarre belief arose in the first place. But without God or transcendent purpose, how can we withstand the terrible truths about our existence, namely, its inevitable suffering and disappointment, followed by death and the abyss of nothingness?
Nietzsche the “existentialist” exists in tandem with an “illiberal” Nietzsche, one who sees the collapse of theism and divine teleology as tied fundamentally to the untenability of the entire moral world view of post-Christian modernity. If there is no God who deems each human to be of equal worth or possessed with an immortal soul beloved by God, then why think we all deserve equal moral consideration? And what if, as Nietzsche argues, a morality of equality – and altruism and pity for suffering – were, in fact, an obstacle to human excellence? What if being a “moral” person makes it impossible to be Beethoven? Nietzsche’s conclusion is clear: if moral equality is an obstacle to human excellence, then so much the worse for moral equality. This is the less familiar and often shockingly anti-egalitarian Nietzsche.
Nietzsche grew up in the belly of God and Christian morality. His father, and his grandfathers on both sides of his family, were Lutheran pastors, and Nietzsche himself went to university planning to study Theology. Theological studies has perhaps never had such a spectacular dropout – one who later ridiculed Luther as a “boor” and declared himself to be the “anti-Christian” par excellence. The young Nietzsche switched after one year at university to Classical Philology – the study of the texts and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman world – where he excelled, earning appointment to the University of Basel in 1869, even before completing his doctoral thesis. He soon met the composer Richard Wagner, and was briefly a disciple, imagining that Wagner’s music would redeem European culture from the ill effects of Christian morality. His enthusiasm for Wagner subsided after a few years, as Nietzsche’s mature philosophical views coalesced, and he grew disillusioned with Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche’s classical training had educated him about ancient philosophy; the Presocratic philosophers (with their simple naturalistic world view) were his favourites, while his disagreements with Socrates and Plato persisted throughout his corpus. But it was only by accident that he discovered contemporary German philosophy in 1865 and 1866 through Arthur Schopenhauer and, a year later, the neo-Kantian Friedrich Lange. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (which was first published in 1818, but only came to prominence decades later, contributing to the eclipse of G. W. F. Hegel in German philosophy) set Nietzsche’s central existentialist issue: how can life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, possibly be justified? Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict: we would be better off dead. Nietzsche wanted to resist that conclusion, to “affirm” life, as he would often put it, to the point that we would happily will its “eternal recurrence” (in one of his famous formulations) including all its suffering.
Lange, by contrast, was both a neo-Kantian – part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy after Hegel’s eclipse – and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, the other major reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s. Materialism exploded on the German intellectual scene of the 1850s in such volumes as Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, a publishing sensation which went through multiple editions and became a bestseller with its message that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”. (Think of Büchner as the Richard Dawkins of the nineteenth century: a popularizer of some genuine discoveries, while also an unnuanced ideologue.) Nietzsche, who first learned of these “German Materialists” from Lange, wrote in a letter of 1866, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange – I don’t need anything else”.
Nietzsche soon soured on Kant, though Kant and Plato remain his most frequent “philosophical” opponents in his writings, even if “philosophical” may mislead as to Nietzsche’s critical method. For Nietzsche’s distinctive writing style is notably anomalous in the canon of great philosophers: he writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically and always very personally; he can be funny, sarcastic, rude, scholarly, scathing, often in the same passage. He eschews almost entirely the rationally discursive form of philosophical argumentation. In the course of examining philosophical subjects (morality, free will, knowledge), Nietzsche will invoke historical, psychological, philological and anthropological claims, and never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone set out a syllogism (“Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect”, he quips in Twilight of the Idols).
Nietzsche, under the influence of the Materialists and also Schopenhauer, took consciousness and reason to play a rather minor role in what humans do, believe and value; far more important are our unconscious and subconscious instinctive and affective lives. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that what inspires “mistrust and mockery” of the great philosophers is that,
They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic . . . while what really happens is that they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract – and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such . . . .
Even Kant, recall, finally admitted that his goal was to put limits on reason to “make room for faith” – in God and in morality. But Nietzsche will not partake in this charade of offering post hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses that are really motivated by “the moral (or immoral) intentions” of the philosopher which “constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [i.e., the philosophical system] has always grown”. Nietzsche’s motivations are, by his own admission, “immoral” ones.
Superficial readers who think Nietzsche defends a “metaphysics of will to power” must ignore his own “mistrust and mockery” of such philosophical extravagance: achieving a “feeling of power” is an important human motivation, as he argues in On the Genealogy of Morality, but that is a psychological, not metaphysical, claim. For Nietzsche the psychologist, the moral views of a philosopher also “bear decided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other”. But non-rational drives can be influenced and redirected primarily by non-rational means: if you provoke, amuse and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his affects (drives are, on Nietzsche’s view, dispositions to have certain kinds of affective responses). Thus, Nietzsche’s mode of writing grows out of his view of what humans, including philosophers, are really like.
On this view, our conscious selves are largely illusory – “consciousness is a surface” Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo, one that conceals the causally efficacious, but unconscious, drives. “The greatest part of our spirit’s activity . . . remains unconscious and unfelt” (The Gay Science), while “everything of which we become conscious . . . causes nothing” (The Will to Power). When we speak of the “will” or of the “motive” that precedes an action, we are speaking merely of “error[s]” and “phantoms”, “merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness – something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them” (Twilight of the Idols). Humans are, on Nietzsche’s view, neither free nor morally responsible for their actions.
But the illusion of free will is not the main reason he rejects Judeo-Christian morality. “It is not error as error” as he says in his stylized autobiography Ecce Homo that he objects to in such morality. Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is more radical and illiberal: any culture dominated by Judeo-Christian morality, or other ascetic or life-denying moralities, will be one inhospitable to the realization of human excellence. What if, as he says in On the Genealogy of Morality, “morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?”
Consider his objection to moral views that demand that we eliminate suffering and promote happiness. In Dawn, he writes, “Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the sympathetic affections?” In Beyond Good and Evil a few years later, he objects to utilitarians that, “Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible . . . . ”
Does a focus on happiness really make people “ridiculous and contemptible”? Nietzsche offers a more ambitious explanation in Beyond Good and Evil:
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
Most suffering is nothing more than misery for its subject, and most happy “comfortable” people are not exemplars of human excellence. Nietzsche surely knew this. (He was no “tourist” when it came to suffering – even before his disability-related retirement from Basel in 1879 and continuing on until his final mental collapse in 1889, he suffered from excruciating physical maladies, probably due to untreated syphilis). What Nietzsche noticed is that suffering, at least in certain individuals (including himself), could be the stimulus to extraordinary creativity – one need only read a biography of Beethoven to see a paradigm example. But even if Nietzsche has correctly diagnosed the psychological mechanism at work, why should a morality of pity for suffering present an obstacle to sufferers realizing their creative potential? Nietzsche’s crucial thought is that in a culture committed to happiness and the elimination of suffering as its goal, nascent Nietzsches and Beethovens will squander their potential in pursuit of both those aims, rather than in pursuing creative work. After all, if it is bad to suffer, then all your efforts should be devoted to avoiding suffering; and if it is good to be happy, then, that should be the aim of everything you do. But human excellence is compatible with neither the pursuit of happiness nor the flight from suffering.
If Nietzsche’s speculative psychology is correct, then we arrive at a startling conclusion. In a hedonistic and sympathetic culture, which devalues suffering and prioritizes its relief, the glorious spectacle of human genius will be missing from the world: no Beethovens, Nietzsches or Goethes. But absent these creative geniuses, Nietzsche thinks we cannot respond to Schopenhauer’s existential challenge.
Schopenhauer, recall, deemed life not worth living given the inevitability of pointless suffering. The animating idea of Nietzsche’s response to Schopenhauer remained steady from the beginning to the end of his career: as he puts it in the new 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” one that “seduc[es] one to a continuation of life”. Crucially, Nietzsche’s account of aesthetic experience is wholly opposed to Kant’s idea that experience of the beautiful is “disinterested”. Nietzsche endorses Stendahl’s formula for aesthetic experience, namely, that “the beautiful promises happiness”, that is, it produces “the arousal of the will (‘of interest’)” as he writes in the Genealogy. The description of aesthetic experience as involving “arousal” is not at all accidental: as Nietzsche writes later in the Genealogy, “the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic condition . . . might have its origins precisely in . . . “sensuality” though it is now “transfigure[d] and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus”.
Aesthetic experience is, in short, arousing, a kind of sublimated sexual experience. “Art is the great stimulus to life” (Twilight of the Idols), one that arouses feelings that make its subject want to be alive. But life can only be aesthetically pleasing (in other words, arousing) if we continue to enjoy the spectacle of genius, precisely what Nietzsche thinks Judeo-Christian morality threatens. What “makes life on earth worth living”, Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil are things like “virtue, art, music, dance, reason, intellect – something that transfigures, something refined, fantastic, and divine”. But if these kinds of excellences of human achievement are not possible in a culture devoted to hedonistic satisfaction and obsessed with eliminating all forms of suffering (from the trivial to the serious), then we will have no response to Schopenhauer’s nihilism.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche envisioned such a culture, one dominated by those he called “the last men”, who know nothing of “love” or “creation” or “longing”, who are unable to “despise” themselves because of their “wretched contentment” while wallowing in their own mediocrity. The last man “knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision”. “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.” “We have invented happiness”, say the last men, “and they blink.”
Nietzsche here diagnoses capitalist modernity, which has Donald Trump as its current ruler, Twitter with its 24/7 “derision” as its appendage, and the world market that tells us what “happiness” really is and its price. In such a world, perhaps Schopenhauer is right?
Brian Leiter directs the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. His new book Moral Psychology with Nietzsche is forthcoming.
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