The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  What if a symptom of regression lurked in the ‘good,’ likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present lived at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style, more basely?—So that morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor [Mächtigkeit und Pracht] possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers? (GM Pref: 6)

  The theme is sounded throughout Nietzsche’s work. In a book of 1880, for example, he writes that, ‘Our weak, unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a strong civilization’ (D 163). Similarly, in a posthumously published note of 1885, he remarks that ‘men of great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding, will be sought in vain today’ because ‘nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution…than what in Europe today is called simply “morality” ’ (WP 957). In these and many other passages (e.g. BGE 62; GM III: 14; A: 5, 24; EH IV: 4; WP 274, 345, 400, 870, 879), Nietzsche makes plain his fundamental objection to MPS: MPS thwarts the development of human excellence, that is, ‘the highest power and splendor possible to the type man.’

  According to Nietzsche, MPS accomplishes this pernicious end by valorizing attributes and actions (e.g. happiness, altruism, equality, pity) that are harmful to the flourishing of ‘higher men’ (as Nietzsche calls them) and demonizing (or deeming unvaluable) attributes that are essential to their flourishing (e.g. suffering, severe self-love, inequality, indifference to suffering).4 In the case of what MPS valorizes, Nietzsche argues either that the attributes and actions have no intrinsic value (when MPS claims they do) or that they do not have any extrinsic value (for the realization of human excellence). With respect to what MPS demonizes or devalues, Nietzsche argues only that these actions and attributes are, in fact, extrinsically valuable for the cultivation of human excellence (see Leiter 2002: 127–36). Throughout, his critique depends on a kind of speculative moral psychology about how certain values affect human development, a critique which we may illustrate with one example here.

  What could be harmful about the seemingly innocuous MPS valorization of ‘happiness’ and devaluation of suffering? An early remark of Nietzsche’s suggests his answer:

  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? (D 174)

  In a later work, Nietzsche says—referring to hedonists and 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’ (BGE 225). By the hedonistic doctrine of well-being, Nietzsche takes the utilitarians to have in mind ‘English happiness’, namely, ‘comfort and fashion’ (BGE 228)—a construal which, if unfair to some utilitarians (like Mill), may do justice to ordinary aspirations to happiness. In a similar vein, Nietzsche has Zarathustra dismiss ‘wretched contentment’ as an ideal (Z Pref: 3), while also revealing that it was precisely ‘the last men’—the ‘most despicable men’—who ‘invented happiness [Glück]’ in the first place (Pref: 5). To be sure, Nietzsche allows that he himself and the ‘free spirits’ will be ‘cheerful’ or ‘gay’ [fröhlich]—they are, after all, the proponents of the ‘gay science’. His point is that such ‘happiness’ is not criterial of being a higher person, and thus it is not something that the higher person—in contrast to the adherent of MPS—aims for.

  Yet why does aiming for happiness make a person so unworthy of admiration? Nietzsche’s answer appears to be: because suffering is positively necessary for the cultivation of human excellence. He writes, for example, that:

  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? (BGE 225; cf. BGE 270)

  Nietzsche is not arguing here that suffering is really intrinsically valuable (MPS does not claim that either). The value of suffering, according to Nietzsche, is only extrinsic: suffering—‘great’ suffering—is a prerequisite of any great human achievement. As Nietzsche puts the point elsewhere: ‘Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit…I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound’ (GS Pref: 3).

  We should remember that Nietzsche is primarily a critic of moral culture, not simply of particular moral philosophies. He believes that when MPS values come to dominate a culture, they will influence the attitudes of all its members, and thus influence how individuals with the potential for great achievements will understand, evaluate and conduct their own lives. (This influence, of course, operates sub-rationally and often not even consciously.) If, in fact, suffering is a precondition for these individuals to do anything great, and if they have internalized the norm that suffering must be alleviated, and that happiness is the ultimate goal, then we run the risk that, rather than—to put it crudely—suffer and create, they will instead waste their energies pursuing pleasure, lamenting their suffering and seeking to alleviate it. MPS values may not explicitly prohibit artists or other potentially ‘excellent’ persons from ever suffering; but the risk is that a culture—like ours—which has internalized the norms against suffering and for pleasure will be a culture in which potential artists—and other doers of great things—will, in fact, squander themselves in self-pity and the seeking of pleasure. Thus, Nietzsche’s aim is to free such nascent higher human beings from their ‘false consciousness’ about MPS, their false belief that it is good, rather than harmful, for them.

  Who are these higher human beings who manifest human excellence according to Nietzsche?5 Nietzsche has three favourite examples throughout his corpus: Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself! What makes these figures paradigms of the ‘higher’ type for Nietzsche—beyond their great creativity (as he says, ‘the men of great creativity’ are ‘the really great men according to my understanding’ (WP 957))—are a variety of attributes (see Leiter 2002: 116–22). ‘Every choice human being’, says Nietzsche, ‘strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority’ (BGE 26). Unsurprisingly, then, the great or higher man lacks the ‘congeniality’ and ‘good-naturedness’ so often celebrated in contemporary popular culture. ‘A great man…is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar’ (WP 962). More than that, though, the higher type deals with others (when he has to) in a rather distinctive way: ‘A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary resting place’ (BGE 273). Thus, ‘a great man…wants no “sympathetic” heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always intent on making something out of them’ (WP 962).

  The great man approaches others instrumentally not only because of his fundamental proclivity for solitude, but because he is consumed by his work, his responsibilities, his projects. ‘What is noble?’ Nietzsche again asks in a Nachlass note of 1888. His answer: ‘That one instinctively seeks heavy responsibilities’ (WP 944). So it was with Goethe: ‘he was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself’ (TI IX: 49). But the higher type does not seek out responsibilities and tasks arbitrarily. ‘A great man’, says Nietzsche, displays ‘a long logic in all of his activity…he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise
and reject everything petty about him’ (WP 962). This is the trait Nietzsche sometimes refers to as having ‘style’ in ‘character’ (GS 290). (Note that this famous passage (GS 290) merely describes those—‘the strong and domineering natures’—who are able ‘“to give” style’ to their character; it does not presuppose that just anyone can do so.) Indeed, Nietzsche understood his own life in these terms:

  [T]‌he organizing ‘idea’ that is destined to rule [in one’s life and work] keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads…Considered in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual…I never even suspected what was growing in me—and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection. (EH II: 9)

  Higher men also embrace what Nietzsche calls the idea of ‘eternal return’. In Beyond Good and Evil, he describes ‘the opposite ideal’ to that of moralists and pessimists like Schopenhauer as ‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity’ (BGE 56). He thus evinces what Nietzsche often calls a ‘Dionysian’ or ‘life-affirming’ attitude, that is, he is willing to affirm his life unconditionally, including, in particular, the ‘suffering’ or other hardships it has involved. (Someone who says, ‘I would gladly live my life again, except for my first marriage’, would not affirm life in the requisite sense.) Thus, we may say that a person affirms his life in Nietzsche’s sense only insofar as he would gladly will its eternal return: that is, will the repetition of his entire life through eternity.6 Nietzsche calls ‘the idea of the eternal recurrence’ the ‘highest formulation of affirmation that is at all attainable’ (EH III: Z-1; cf. BGE 56). Strikingly, Nietzsche claims that precisely this attitude characterized both himself and Goethe (cf. EH III: CW-4; TI IX: 49).

  Finally, higher human beings have a certain distinctive self-regard. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche once again answers the question, ‘What is noble?’, this time as follows: ‘It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank…: some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble soul has reverence [Ehrfurcht] for itself’ (BGE 287). Self-reverence—to revere and respect oneself as one might a god—is no small achievement, as the proliferation of ‘self-help’ programmes and pop psychology slogans like ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ would suggest. Self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-laceration are the norm among human beings; to possess a ‘fundamental certainty’ about oneself is, Nietzsche thinks quite plausibly, a unique state of affairs. ‘The noble human being’, says Nietzsche, also ‘honors himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness’ (BGE 260).

  It should be apparent now why creative geniuses like Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche himself are the preferred examples of the higher human being: for the characteristics of the higher type so-described are precisely those that lend themselves to artistic and creative work. A penchant for solitude, an absolute devotion to one’s tasks, an indifference to external opinion, a fundamental certainty about oneself and one’s values (that often strikes others as hubris)—all these are the traits we find, again and again, in artistic geniuses. (It turns out, for example, that Beethoven had almost all these characteristics to a striking degree; for discussion, see Leiter 2002: 122–23.)

  We are finally in a position to see the connection between the flourishing of geniuses like these and the problem of suffering that Nietzsche took over from Schopenhauer. The challenge presented by the latter, recall, was how life could be worth living given the pervasiveness of pointless suffering. The animating idea of Nietzsche’s response remains 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’ (BT: Attempt 5). This phrasing echoes famous claims from the original work more than a dozen years earlier: ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (BT 5; cf. BT 24, GS 107). This kind of ‘justification’, whatever precisely it amounts to, is equivalent in Nietzschean terminology to taking a ‘Dionysian’ perspective on life (cf. BT: Attempt 4; EH IV: 9). As Nietzsche puts it in a late work, Twilight of the Idols: ‘Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility…that is what I called Dionysian’ (TI Ancient: 5). This Dionysian attitude is plainly an instance of being able to will the eternal return.

  So how does an aesthetic experience of the world ‘seduc[e]‌ one to a continuation of life’ (BT: 3), as Nietzsche puts it, how does it elicit in us a Dionysian attitude? For that is the essence of ‘aesthetic justification’ for Nietzsche, namely, that it makes one want to live, it makes one experience the terrible truth about human suffering not as an objection to life, but as something necessary to it.7 The key here is to appreciate Nietzsche’s understanding of aesthetic value, an account which, unsurprisingly, is articulated in opposition to Kant’s. Kant makes two kinds of mistakes in Nietzsche’s view, one about art, the other about knowledge. Nietzsche writes: ‘Kant intended to honor art when, among the predicates of the beautiful, he privileged and placed in the foreground those that constitute the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity’ (GM III: 6). But ‘impersonality’ and ‘universal validity’ are marks of neither art, nor knowledge. Indeed, Nietzsche ridicules Kant’s idea that the mark of aesthetic value is that it ‘pleases without interest’ (GM III: 6), endorsing instead Stendhal’s formula, namely, that ‘the beautiful promises happiness,’ that is, it produces ‘the arousal [Erregung] of the will (“of interest”)’ (GM III: 6). Nietzsche soon makes the connection between aesthetic and sexual arousal even more explicit two sections later: ‘the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic condition’, he says, ‘might have its origins precisely in…“sensuality” [Sinnlichkeit]’ though it is now ‘transfigure[d] and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus’ (GM III: 8). This experience of the ‘sweetness and fullness’ of aesthetic experience is one for which the metaphor of ‘seduction’ seems especially apt. ‘Intoxication’ (Rausch) is Nietzsche’s other preferred metaphor for it,8 as in this passage from Twilight:

  Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no art. …Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the most ancient and original form of intoxication. There is also an intoxication that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong affects; an intoxication of the festival, the contest, of the bravura of performance, of victory, of all extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction…or under the influence of narcotics. …The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength. (TI ‘Skirmishes’: 8)

  The characterization of ‘intoxication’ in terms of ‘the feeling of fullness and increasing strength’ echoes the characterization of aesthetic experience from the Genealogy noted earlier. In both cases, the experience stimulates what we might call ‘feelings of aliveness’, counteracting therefore the depressant effect of confrontation with the terrible truths about existence. ‘Art is the great stimulus to life’, as Nietzsche says in Twilight (‘Skirmishes’: 24), but it achieves this in the same way that sexual arousal and intoxication do: by creating certain powerful feelings with a positive valence, feelings that stimulate the subject and attract him to life.

  Aesthetic experience, in short, is arousing, it produces a sublimated form of sexual pleasure. And it is surely constitutive of a pleasurable experience, sexual or
otherwise, that it attracts us. I shall refer to this as Nietzsche’s minimal hedonic thesis, according to which pleasurable experience draws us towards its object, rather than away from it. That is, of course, compatible with other motivations dominating the minimal hedonic one, and also compatible with objects incompatible with hedonic experience also attracting us. But the hypothesis on offer is that, per the minimal hedonic thesis, aesthetic experience produces affective arousal sufficient to thwart the nihilistic impulse, the impulse to give up on life because of the terrible truths about it.

  But what aesthetic value could life possibly exemplify such that it produces the pleasurable effect of Dionysian ecstasy that sustains our attachment to life? Here is the crucial connection with Nietzsche’s critique of morality: in a culture in which moral norms predominate, nascent creative geniuses like Goethe and Beethoven will not realize their potential. And if they fail to realize their potential, then we shall be deprived of what we may call the ‘spectacle of genius’, that is, the spectacle of human achievement that induces aesthetic pleasure, whether in the clearly aesthetic realm (for example, Beethoven) or on the historical stage (for example, Napoleon). Life without music is a ‘mistake’, Nietzsche famously says in an aphorism from Twilight, and the point can be generalized: life without the spectacle of genius could not arouse aesthetic pleasure, and so would deprive us of a ‘justification’ for existence, that is, a desire to live and enjoy that aesthetic experience. Since suffering is essential for the realization of genius—as we learned from Nietzsche’s speculative moral psychology—the ‘justification’ of existence in the sense just described will require the affirmation of suffering as well.

  10.5 TRUTH, KNOWLEDGE, AND PERSPECTIVISM

  We come finally to one of the more perplexing aspects of Nietzsche’s writings, his various remarks about truth and knowledge. Even if we put to one side a very early essay that he never published (probably wisely) called ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’,9 it is still the case that his ‘perspectivism’ (as it is commonly known) poses interpretive difficulties. The difficulty arises from the fact that, on the one hand, Nietzsche makes claims that seem to deny that any perspective on the world has any epistemic privilege over any other, that is, has objectively more warrant or justification; and that, on the other hand, he repeatedly makes claims for which he appears to profess an epistemic privilege, that is, he appears to maintain that they constitute knowledge and so, among other things, must be true.