Month: June 2010

Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from what I have read of his book, does not address.

1. Talk of salvation presupposes, first,  that there is some general state or condition, one in which we all find ourselves, from which we need salvation, and second, that this general condition is profoundly unsatisfactory.  In The Birth of Tragedy, section 3, Nietzsche invokes "the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus" who, when asked by King Midas about that which is most desirable for man, replied that the best of all is utterly beyond human reach: not to be born.  The second best, if one has had the misfortune of being born, is to die soon.  Now it is clear that some such negative assessment of life, or of human life, is a precondition of any quest for salvation, no matter what form it might take, whether Buddhist, Stoic, Christian, whatever.  The negative judgment on life as a whole need not be as harsh as the Silenian one, but without some negative judgment or other as to the value of life the question of salvation  makes no sense.  To take the question seriously one need not believe that salvation to some positive state is possible; but one has to believe that the general state of humanity (or of all sentient beings) is deeply unsatisfactory, to use a somewhat mild term. 

2. But here's the rub.  It is well known  that Nietzsche maintains that the value of life is inestimable.  As he puts it in Twilight of the Idols ("The Problem of Socrates," sec. 2) : der Wert des Lebens nicht abgeschaetzt werden kann.  His point is that objective judgments about the value of life are impossible.  Such judgments can never be true; they count only as symptoms.  Saying nothing about life itself, they merely betray the health or decadence of those who make the judgments.  Buddha, Socrates, and all those belonging to the consensus sapientium who purport to say something objective about this life when they pronounce a negative judgment upon it, as Buddha does in the First Noble Truth (sarvam dukkham: all is suffering) merely betray their own physiological decline.  There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life.  There is only ascending and descending life with the value judgments being no more than symptoms either of life ascending or life descending.  Thus spoke Nietzsche.

3. The tension, then, is between the following two Nietzschean commitments: (1) Man needs salvation from his present predicament in this life; (2) The value of life cannot be objectively assessed or evaluated.  The claims cannot both be true.  The need for salvation implies that our predicament in this life is of negative value, when this cannot be the case if there is no fact of the matter concerning the value of life. 

4.  Finding contradictions in Nietzsche is not very difficult, and one could even argue that the conflicting trends of his thought show its richness and its nearness to the bloody bone of the predicament in which we find ourselves; my present point, however,  is that Fraser's essentially correct claim that Nietzsche's work is "primarily soteriology" needs to be qualified by his fundamental thesis  about the inestimability of life's value, which thesis  renders soteriology impossible.

5. Well, is the value of life objectively inestimable?  A most vexing question.  Life is always an individual life, mine for example.  Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens.  There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair.  What's more, every individual life is stretched on the rack of time:  one does not live one's individual life all at once but bit by bit.  If there is a problem about how any given individual life can judge the value of life in general, then there will also be a problem about how any phase of an individual's life can judge the value of that individual's life as a whole.

I am tempted to give the gastroenterologist's answer to the question whether life is worth living.  It depends on the liver.  Joking aside, the point would be that there is just no objective fact of the matter  as to whether or not life in general is worth living.  You either experience your particular life as worth living or you don't.  If you do then your particular life has value, at least for the moment.  There is no  standard apart from life, and indeed apart from the life of the individual, by which the value of life could be measured.  No standard apart from life does not imply no standard: individual life is the standard.  The value of life's being objectively inestimable therefore does not imply that its value is merely subjective.  The implication seems to be that the individual life is an absolute standard of value in which subjective and objective coalesce.

6. "But aren't there certain general considerations that show that no life is worth living or that no life is worth very much?"  And what would those be? 

a) Well, there is the fact of impermanence or transience.  In a letter to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche himself complains, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  I feel your pain, Fritz.  Doesn't universal impermanence show that nothing in this life is worth much?  How important can anything be if it is here today and gone tomorrow?  How can anyone find value in his doings and strivings if he faces up to the universality of impermanence?  Does not the certainty of death mock the seriousness of our passions and plans?  (Arguably, most do not honestly confront impermanence but vainly imagine that everything will remain hunky-dory indefinitely.  They live in illusion until driven out of it by some such calamity as the sudden death of a loved one.)  But on the other hand, how can impermanence be taken to be an argument against worth and importance if there is no possibility of permanence?  As Nietzsche says in Twilight, if there is no real world, if there is no world of Platonic stasis, then there is no merely apparent world either.  Is it an argument against this life that it fails to meet an impossible standard?  And is not the postulation of such a world a mere reflex of weakness and world-weariness?  Weltschmerz become creative conjures up spooks who preside over the denigration of the only world there is. 

b) And then there is the fact of misery and affliction.  (Simone Weil is one of the best writers on affliction, malheur.)  Don't we all suffer, and doesn't this universal fact show that Silenus was right after all:  better never to have been born, with second best being an early death?  But again, and taking the side of Nietzsche, is it not the miserable who find life miserable, the afflicted who find it afflicting?  The strong do not whine about pain and suffering; they take them as goads to richer and fuller living.  Or is this just Nietzschean romanticism, a failure to fully face the true horror of life?

These questions are not easy to answer!  Indeed, the very posing of them is a difficult and ticklish matter.