Dance of the Hopeful Nihilist: Dualism in Nietzsche
April 8, 2017 at 11:55 pm
(This post was last modified: April 8, 2017 at 11:57 pm by Mudhammam.)
Hello fellow philosophers 
I wrote a short essay on Nietzsche and nihilism--existential and personal--along with some other aspects of his philosophy that I find interesting. It's for a modern philosophy class. Anyway, I was happy with it so... thought I would share it with you all. Hope you find it interesting.
Dance of the Hopeful Nihilist: Dualism in Nietzsche
“In some remote corner of the universe, poured and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’---yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, the clever animals had to die.”[1]
[1. Thus begins On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, a fragment written early in Nietzsche’s career (1873) but not published until after his death.]
As this passage aptly demonstrates, it is not without good reason that Nietzsche's philosophy has been regularly characterized as an expression of nihilism, despite the general misunderstanding that the term “nihilism” seems to evoke; it is not, as must also plainly appear in the imposing works of our philosopher, synonymous with pessimism. There are two senses in which nihilists are frequently conflated: there are existential nihilists and there are individualistic or personal nihilists. Nietzsche was an existential nihilist in that he rejected a view of knowledge in which ideals of truth, meaning, or values could themselves be considered to exist apart from the context of human language and the form of rational thought constructed therefrom.[2] Likewise, he often made the point that moral facta are not discovered through reflection but created by “the noble type of person,”[3] the Übermensch. Yet Nietzsche was by no means a personal nihilist, by which I simply refer to an individual who lacks any feeling of purpose or concern for truth or goodness.[4] In fact, his philosophy reflects the opposite attitude. Nietzsche strove not only to overcome what he perceived to be the destructive social norms of his time, inherited from the bastardization of Platonism that dominated Europe for almost two millennia; nor he did aim to reach heights at which one could then content themselves as having stepped “beyond good and evil,” with no more work to do. Rather, and like Plato, Nietzsche’s summa bonum involves an ongoing process. Moreover, like all of the great mythologies, or theodicies, upon which religious dogmatists place their hopes, Nietzsche sought to actualize that childlike faith which declares--against all appearances--that the greatest good is born out of the greatest evil. In the following essay I will explore some of the implicit tensions that arise from this dualism--captured by the ancient idea of order out of chaos--which lies at the bottom of the Nietzschean schema.
[2. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §4 wherein he speaks of “the fictions of logic” and makes the intriguing suggestion of “untruth as a condition of life.” Also, cf. The Gay Science, §121.
3. Cf. BGE, §260
4. One may also reject existential nihilism and yet believe that there is no intrinsic value in the lives of Homo sapiens. I would also consider this person to be a nihilist of the individualistic variety.]
No examination of our philosopher can avoid the contradictions that underlay his conception of reality, in part amplified by his acute insights into what may be coined “the human condition.” The most obvious example is Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence,[5] the cornerstone upon which he is able to imbibe each moment of the present life with eternal significance, i.e. infinite worth. On this assumption, and opposed to those ideologies which treat everything in this life as merely resting upon a knife’s edge between being and nothingness--fleeting, and moreover, infinitely worthless in comparison to the angelic life that is expected to reveal itself postmortem[6]--rather than advocating personal nihilism, Nietzsche believes that nothing could be more meaningful than the choices we make, than each and every action by which we proceed. Of course, the problem of human freedom takes a particularly devastating form for Nietzsche in that he brushes aside the dilemma posed by mechanistic causation and advocates for a kind of fatalism: On the one hand, each of us partakes in a private struggle to overcome the world,[7] yet on the other, at any given moment we would seem to possess no inherent authority to alter recurrences which have defined our past (and will continue to define our future) an infinite number of times over. It is only demanded of us that we accept a kind of Stoic amori fati.[8] This is the essential paradox at the center of what I am calling Nietzsche’s hopeful nihilism, an antagonism that is distinct from the quite different notion that one is able to locate or create subjective meaning in a world for which purpose is objectively absent.
[5. While many instances could be cited, cf. the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“On the Vision and the Enigma”); also, the famous demon of GS, §341, which concludes with the following challenge in the guise of a question: “How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
6. An attitude that finds embodiment in the teachings of Christ and the prophet Mahomet.
7. The impetus being “the will to power.”
8. Latin for “love of fate.”]
Another dualism that I find in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the oft expressed sentiment of rugged individuality, the rejection of so-called “modern ideas” or “progress,” present alongside a profound concern for the universal ideal of “man” and his relation to society, “the herd.” Nietzsche’s affinity for solitude is no secret. The one thinker who comes to mind as similarly having to confront a certain sense of disillusionment with the state of European civilization, including their morals and manners, and also bearing a deeply intense personality--although it must be admitted that their philosophies could not be more further apart--is the father of romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Obviously, Nietzsche was no fan of the movement that Rousseau inspired, commenting that “underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge”[9]; nonetheless, some interesting parallels and contrasts could be drawn between Rousseau and Nietzsche[10], a project that I will not attempt here--perhaps most notably the manner in which their political ideas, placed in inferior hands and heads, both resulted in utter catastrophes for France and Germany, respectively.
[9. Cf. Twilight of the Idols, §3. In §6 he writes in a sardonic tone that everything “descended from Rousseau” is “false, fabricated, bellows, exaggerated”; in §48 he adds, “I too speak of a ‘return to nature,’ although it is really not a going back but a going up--an ascent to the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one plays with, one may play with… But Rousseau--to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person--one who needed moral ‘dignity’ to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a ‘return to nature’; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its ‘immorality,’ is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality--the so-called ‘truths’ of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality!”
10. Even such mundane facts as that Rousseau’s mother died at his birth, while Nietzsche’s father passed at age five. Both also apparently had a love for the Greeks and Latins at an early age. How did these and other formative experiences affect the individualism that became central to their divergent philosophies?]
The picture of Nietzsche that I extract from his writings is that of an impassioned, isolated, introverted, and fiercely self-aware scholar of history; a man keenly interested in society and its future, overflowing with a sense of freedom and purpose to create, unveil, to live life to its full potential, whatever that may mean for a fatalistic world in which there is no apparent teleos but endless examples of the worst kind of suffering--”human pain… the deepest pain”[11]; I see in Nietzsche a prophet in the tradition of the ash-and-sackcloth rabble-rousers of old, no less enthusiastic, though one who possessed not only feeling but wit, whose insights penetrated into “the abyss” with a clarity that narrow, small-minded poets, however ingenious in their art, can never quite attain[12]--and hence, at most spawn religious sects instead of inspiring philosophical schools; Nietzsche desired to be a “breaker of tablets”[13] while impugning the priestly class and calling upon “new philosophers” to “initiate a revaluation and reversal of ‘eternal values’”[14]; an unabashed optimist in his ethic, despite the dread on the lips of his madman--signifying the state at which philosophy had reached--that “God is dead,” that the effort to find absolute (or unconditioned) truth, meaning, and goodness had and must continue to repeatedly fail! Could the idea of a hopeful nihilism, the birth of purpose from nothing but the realization that we are, in Sartre’s words, “condemned to be free,” be articulated more succinctly than in Zarathustra’s declaration that “God died: now we want the overman to live”?[15]
[11. Cf. Z, Part 3.2, §1
12. “The world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble”? Did Nietzsche gaze too long into the abyss?
13. Ibid., Part 3.12, particularly §15-16.
14. Cf. BGE, §203
15. Cf. Z, Part 4.13, §2]
But in pronouncing the death of God, representative of all forms of absolutism, as an opportunity for man to transform himself into something greater (“Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”[16]), again, we find an incongruity. To quote once more from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche writes:
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors--in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”[17]
[16. Cf. GS, §125
17. Cf. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense in Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. Likewise, Zarathustra asks the rhetorical question: “Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between the eternally separated?” Cf. Z, Part 3.13, §2]
Is this not tantamount to the famous paradox of Eubulides, that is, is not Nietzsche behaving like a man who pronounces, “What I am saying now is a lie”? How are we to interpret (“It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…”[18]) claims about truth or morality, including Nietzsche’s, unless we assume that amidst competing individual wills there exists a reality that, though discrete experiences may involve varying degrees of lucidity and coherence (and goodness), subsists objectively and can be more or less accurately represented through “words and sounds”? This is the last great dualism in Nietzschean thought that I shall briefly discuss. It is the idea that meaningful evaluations are possible outside of a framework wherein the objective existence of truth is presumed, and that truth can be meaningfully ascertained or even asserted without the tacit acceptance of objective values. It is the myth of the “ought-is problem” first formulated by David Hume, that one supposedly cannot derive what ought to be from observing what is, when in fact we can only discover what is by first accepting that we ought to engage with the world--with ourselves, our desires, our drives; in a word, with what Nietzsche calls our will to power.
[18. Cf. Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. “Notes (1888),” p. 458.]
But what if our highest values are placed in falsehoods, and our greatest truths are monsters to be fought rather than embraced? What if our approach to the True and the Good is bound by our inability to extend ourselves further than the ideals that have been socially constructed for our digestion, useful (or dangerous) fictions? It certainly seems possible that certain truths could be so destructive that, pragmatically speaking, it would be better to remain in ignorance; it may also be the case that we require falsehoods to survive. Nietzsche’s genius, and for many, his noxiousness, rests not merely in his discernment of these distressing possibilities, nor in any effort on his part to resign himself to them; alternately, it was his wholesale adoption of existential nihilism, and with it the burden upon the individual subject as will to cultivate and relish an inexhaustible supply of creative opportunities. It is, in essence, a hopeful sort of nihilism, a nihilism that builds, compels, and instructs us to find courage, “the best slayer--courage that attacks: it slays even death itself; for it says: ‘Was that life? Well! Once more!’”[19]
[19. Cf. Z, Part 3.2, §1]
I wrote a short essay on Nietzsche and nihilism--existential and personal--along with some other aspects of his philosophy that I find interesting. It's for a modern philosophy class. Anyway, I was happy with it so... thought I would share it with you all. Hope you find it interesting.
Dance of the Hopeful Nihilist: Dualism in Nietzsche
“In some remote corner of the universe, poured and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’---yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, the clever animals had to die.”[1]
[1. Thus begins On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, a fragment written early in Nietzsche’s career (1873) but not published until after his death.]
As this passage aptly demonstrates, it is not without good reason that Nietzsche's philosophy has been regularly characterized as an expression of nihilism, despite the general misunderstanding that the term “nihilism” seems to evoke; it is not, as must also plainly appear in the imposing works of our philosopher, synonymous with pessimism. There are two senses in which nihilists are frequently conflated: there are existential nihilists and there are individualistic or personal nihilists. Nietzsche was an existential nihilist in that he rejected a view of knowledge in which ideals of truth, meaning, or values could themselves be considered to exist apart from the context of human language and the form of rational thought constructed therefrom.[2] Likewise, he often made the point that moral facta are not discovered through reflection but created by “the noble type of person,”[3] the Übermensch. Yet Nietzsche was by no means a personal nihilist, by which I simply refer to an individual who lacks any feeling of purpose or concern for truth or goodness.[4] In fact, his philosophy reflects the opposite attitude. Nietzsche strove not only to overcome what he perceived to be the destructive social norms of his time, inherited from the bastardization of Platonism that dominated Europe for almost two millennia; nor he did aim to reach heights at which one could then content themselves as having stepped “beyond good and evil,” with no more work to do. Rather, and like Plato, Nietzsche’s summa bonum involves an ongoing process. Moreover, like all of the great mythologies, or theodicies, upon which religious dogmatists place their hopes, Nietzsche sought to actualize that childlike faith which declares--against all appearances--that the greatest good is born out of the greatest evil. In the following essay I will explore some of the implicit tensions that arise from this dualism--captured by the ancient idea of order out of chaos--which lies at the bottom of the Nietzschean schema.
[2. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §4 wherein he speaks of “the fictions of logic” and makes the intriguing suggestion of “untruth as a condition of life.” Also, cf. The Gay Science, §121.
3. Cf. BGE, §260
4. One may also reject existential nihilism and yet believe that there is no intrinsic value in the lives of Homo sapiens. I would also consider this person to be a nihilist of the individualistic variety.]
No examination of our philosopher can avoid the contradictions that underlay his conception of reality, in part amplified by his acute insights into what may be coined “the human condition.” The most obvious example is Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence,[5] the cornerstone upon which he is able to imbibe each moment of the present life with eternal significance, i.e. infinite worth. On this assumption, and opposed to those ideologies which treat everything in this life as merely resting upon a knife’s edge between being and nothingness--fleeting, and moreover, infinitely worthless in comparison to the angelic life that is expected to reveal itself postmortem[6]--rather than advocating personal nihilism, Nietzsche believes that nothing could be more meaningful than the choices we make, than each and every action by which we proceed. Of course, the problem of human freedom takes a particularly devastating form for Nietzsche in that he brushes aside the dilemma posed by mechanistic causation and advocates for a kind of fatalism: On the one hand, each of us partakes in a private struggle to overcome the world,[7] yet on the other, at any given moment we would seem to possess no inherent authority to alter recurrences which have defined our past (and will continue to define our future) an infinite number of times over. It is only demanded of us that we accept a kind of Stoic amori fati.[8] This is the essential paradox at the center of what I am calling Nietzsche’s hopeful nihilism, an antagonism that is distinct from the quite different notion that one is able to locate or create subjective meaning in a world for which purpose is objectively absent.
[5. While many instances could be cited, cf. the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“On the Vision and the Enigma”); also, the famous demon of GS, §341, which concludes with the following challenge in the guise of a question: “How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
6. An attitude that finds embodiment in the teachings of Christ and the prophet Mahomet.
7. The impetus being “the will to power.”
8. Latin for “love of fate.”]
Another dualism that I find in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the oft expressed sentiment of rugged individuality, the rejection of so-called “modern ideas” or “progress,” present alongside a profound concern for the universal ideal of “man” and his relation to society, “the herd.” Nietzsche’s affinity for solitude is no secret. The one thinker who comes to mind as similarly having to confront a certain sense of disillusionment with the state of European civilization, including their morals and manners, and also bearing a deeply intense personality--although it must be admitted that their philosophies could not be more further apart--is the father of romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Obviously, Nietzsche was no fan of the movement that Rousseau inspired, commenting that “underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge”[9]; nonetheless, some interesting parallels and contrasts could be drawn between Rousseau and Nietzsche[10], a project that I will not attempt here--perhaps most notably the manner in which their political ideas, placed in inferior hands and heads, both resulted in utter catastrophes for France and Germany, respectively.
[9. Cf. Twilight of the Idols, §3. In §6 he writes in a sardonic tone that everything “descended from Rousseau” is “false, fabricated, bellows, exaggerated”; in §48 he adds, “I too speak of a ‘return to nature,’ although it is really not a going back but a going up--an ascent to the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one plays with, one may play with… But Rousseau--to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person--one who needed moral ‘dignity’ to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a ‘return to nature’; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its ‘immorality,’ is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality--the so-called ‘truths’ of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality!”
10. Even such mundane facts as that Rousseau’s mother died at his birth, while Nietzsche’s father passed at age five. Both also apparently had a love for the Greeks and Latins at an early age. How did these and other formative experiences affect the individualism that became central to their divergent philosophies?]
The picture of Nietzsche that I extract from his writings is that of an impassioned, isolated, introverted, and fiercely self-aware scholar of history; a man keenly interested in society and its future, overflowing with a sense of freedom and purpose to create, unveil, to live life to its full potential, whatever that may mean for a fatalistic world in which there is no apparent teleos but endless examples of the worst kind of suffering--”human pain… the deepest pain”[11]; I see in Nietzsche a prophet in the tradition of the ash-and-sackcloth rabble-rousers of old, no less enthusiastic, though one who possessed not only feeling but wit, whose insights penetrated into “the abyss” with a clarity that narrow, small-minded poets, however ingenious in their art, can never quite attain[12]--and hence, at most spawn religious sects instead of inspiring philosophical schools; Nietzsche desired to be a “breaker of tablets”[13] while impugning the priestly class and calling upon “new philosophers” to “initiate a revaluation and reversal of ‘eternal values’”[14]; an unabashed optimist in his ethic, despite the dread on the lips of his madman--signifying the state at which philosophy had reached--that “God is dead,” that the effort to find absolute (or unconditioned) truth, meaning, and goodness had and must continue to repeatedly fail! Could the idea of a hopeful nihilism, the birth of purpose from nothing but the realization that we are, in Sartre’s words, “condemned to be free,” be articulated more succinctly than in Zarathustra’s declaration that “God died: now we want the overman to live”?[15]
[11. Cf. Z, Part 3.2, §1
12. “The world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble”? Did Nietzsche gaze too long into the abyss?
13. Ibid., Part 3.12, particularly §15-16.
14. Cf. BGE, §203
15. Cf. Z, Part 4.13, §2]
But in pronouncing the death of God, representative of all forms of absolutism, as an opportunity for man to transform himself into something greater (“Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”[16]), again, we find an incongruity. To quote once more from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche writes:
“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors--in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…”[17]
[16. Cf. GS, §125
17. Cf. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense in Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. Likewise, Zarathustra asks the rhetorical question: “Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between the eternally separated?” Cf. Z, Part 3.13, §2]
Is this not tantamount to the famous paradox of Eubulides, that is, is not Nietzsche behaving like a man who pronounces, “What I am saying now is a lie”? How are we to interpret (“It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…”[18]) claims about truth or morality, including Nietzsche’s, unless we assume that amidst competing individual wills there exists a reality that, though discrete experiences may involve varying degrees of lucidity and coherence (and goodness), subsists objectively and can be more or less accurately represented through “words and sounds”? This is the last great dualism in Nietzschean thought that I shall briefly discuss. It is the idea that meaningful evaluations are possible outside of a framework wherein the objective existence of truth is presumed, and that truth can be meaningfully ascertained or even asserted without the tacit acceptance of objective values. It is the myth of the “ought-is problem” first formulated by David Hume, that one supposedly cannot derive what ought to be from observing what is, when in fact we can only discover what is by first accepting that we ought to engage with the world--with ourselves, our desires, our drives; in a word, with what Nietzsche calls our will to power.
[18. Cf. Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1982. Print. “Notes (1888),” p. 458.]
But what if our highest values are placed in falsehoods, and our greatest truths are monsters to be fought rather than embraced? What if our approach to the True and the Good is bound by our inability to extend ourselves further than the ideals that have been socially constructed for our digestion, useful (or dangerous) fictions? It certainly seems possible that certain truths could be so destructive that, pragmatically speaking, it would be better to remain in ignorance; it may also be the case that we require falsehoods to survive. Nietzsche’s genius, and for many, his noxiousness, rests not merely in his discernment of these distressing possibilities, nor in any effort on his part to resign himself to them; alternately, it was his wholesale adoption of existential nihilism, and with it the burden upon the individual subject as will to cultivate and relish an inexhaustible supply of creative opportunities. It is, in essence, a hopeful sort of nihilism, a nihilism that builds, compels, and instructs us to find courage, “the best slayer--courage that attacks: it slays even death itself; for it says: ‘Was that life? Well! Once more!’”[19]
[19. Cf. Z, Part 3.2, §1]
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
