Nietzsche – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

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.

If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value. But how can life be of negative value if, as Nietzsche maintains, the value of life is inestimable? This is the problem. Let us now delve into it.

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 seems 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. 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. A negative judgment shows a lack of vitality, a deficiency of will power and a privation of the will to power, which is what everything is at bottom. There is no fact of the matter as to the value or disvalue of life itself. 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: (a) Man needs salvation from his predicament in this life; (b) 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 proximity 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.

Is the value of human life objectively inestimable?

5) Can the value of life be objectively evaluated? Does it make sense to maintain that for all of us it would have been better never to have been born? Or the opposite? Schopenhauer claims that "Human Life must be some sort of mistake." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, Frederick Unger, 1975, p. 232.) Is there a fact of the matter here? Or is Nietzsche right at Will to Power #675 where he speaks of the "absurdity of this posture of judging existence . . . It is symptomatic." Symptomatic of what? Of decay, decline, world-weariness.

Does the project of judging human life with an eye to establishing that it either is or is not worth living make sense? Is there a standard apart from life in the light of which the value of life can be assessed? Or is life itself the standard? A most vexing series of questions.

The questions are logically prior to questions about the morality of procreation. David Benatar has famously argued for anti-natalism according to which it would be better if there were no more humans, and that therefore all procreation ought to be opposed as morally wrong, the deontic claim following from the axiological one. (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 12-13)

This is one tough nut to crack, and I am not sure my 'nutcracker' is up to the job. But here we go.

One relevant fact is that life is always an individual life, mine or yours or his or hers. Heidegger spoke of the Jemeinigkeit des Daseins; I will speak of the Jemeinigkeit des Lebens. Life has the property of 'mineness.' There is no living in general; it is always a particular affair, from a particular perspective, in a particular set of circumstances. Lived life is always mine or yours, etc. 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.

A second relevant fact, related to but distinct from the first, is that he who evaluates life is party to it. An interested party. The judger is not a mere spectator of his life, from the outside, as if it were someone else's, but a liver of it, an enactor, an actualizer of it. So it is not just that lived life is always a particular life, but also that a particular lived life is not an object of disinterested observation but a living in which the observing and evaluating are inseparable from the living.

Life judges life and Nietzsche's thought is that negative judgments are negative verdicts on the quality of the life that is judging. 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.

In the end, Nietzsche seems torn. He loves life and wants to affirm it on its own terms. And yet he seeks an ersatz salvation in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. "For all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity."

Nietzsche on Pyrrho: Sagacious Weariness, a Buddhist for Greece

Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis. A taste:

A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann)

Years ago I noted the strange similarity of some arguments found in Nagarjuna and the late Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus. (Memo to self: blog it!)

Philosopher’s Calendar

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844. He died on 25 August 1900. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.

Mark Anderson writes to tell me that his book, Zarathustra Stone, has been published.

Sadness at the Transience of the World

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304)

What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?

While we are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness. You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose? Something that was meant to last forever? Something that could last forever? Something that was worth lasting forever?

Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more. But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite. For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear?

Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.

But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source. His bladed intellect would not allow it. But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head: the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless.

This is no solution at all.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.

To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.

So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.

We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep. And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux. For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity." All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!

This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object? Great minds have thought so. But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other. So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'

A second way to read the Nietzschean dictum is to take it not as offering a criterion (in the epistemological sense) of truth, but as stating what the nature of truth is. Accordingly, truth just is the property of increasing the feeling of power: to say that a belief (statement, representation, etc.) is true is just to say that it increases the feeling of power in the one who holds the belief.

Now suppose we ask a simple question. Is it true that the criterion of truth is the heightening of the feeling of power? If it is, then every truth empowers, and every belief that empowers is true. But surely not every truth empowers. You find out that you have some medical condition, hypertension, say. The truth that you have hypertension does not increase your sense of power; if anything it diminishes it. Or the report comes in that you have pancreatic cancer and will be dead in six months. I should think such news would have a depressing effect on one's vitality. And yet it is true. So some truths do not enhance the feeling of power. Nor do they enhance one's power if you care to distinguish power from the feeling of power.

On the other hand, there are empowering beliefs that are not true. Hitler's belief in his invincibility was surely empowering, but it was false as events showed. Believing that he was invincible, he undertook to do what Napoleon failed to do, subjugate the Russians. Like Napoleon, he failed, and it was all down hill from there.

One can multiply such counterexamples ad libitum. Of course, in constructing such counterexamples, I am relying on the ordinary notion of truth, as old as Aristotle, that truth implies correspondence with reality, correspondence with the way things are independently of our beliefs, desires, and feelings.

Do I beg the question against Nietzsche by recurring to the old understanding of truth? If I do, then so does Nietzsche. For what is he doing with his dictum if not telling us how it is with truth? Is he not purporting to tell us the truth (in the old sense) about truth?

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power. For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed. We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

The following quotation from a very interesting Guardian piece by John Gray entitled What Scares the New Atheists (HT: Karl White):

[1] The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. [2] This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. [3]The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. [4] It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. [5] The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

Five sentences, five comments.

1. Yes.

2. Granted, the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. But this is consistent with their racism having other sources as well. So it doesn't follow that it is an "unlikely tale" that the Nazis drew inspiration from Nietzsche. I say it is very likely. See Nietzsche and Nationalism Socialism.

3. Spot on!

4. Agreed, atheists can be moral. Indeed, some atheists are more moral that some theists — even when the moral code is the Decalogue minus the commandments that mention God. The question whether an atheist can be moral, however, is ambiguous. While it is clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of satisfying moral demands, it is not clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of recognizing moral demands in the first place. It is an open question whether an atheist, consistent with his atheism, could have justification for admitting objective moral demands.

5. Before one can ask which morality an atheist should serve, there is a logically prior question that needs asking and answering, one that Gray glides right past, namely,

Q. Is there any morality, any moral code, that an atheist would be justified in adhering to and justified in demanding that others adhere to?

If a negative answer is given to (Q), then Gray's logically posterior question lapses.

Most of us in the West, atheists and theists alike, do agree on a minimal moral code. Don't we all object to child molestation, female sexual mutilation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft, lying, financial swindling, extortion, and arson? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. But if an innocent person is falsely accused and convicted, we judge that something objectively wrong has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. There are plenty of gray areas. The existence of gray, however, does not rule out that of black and white. Surely, in the West at least, there is some moral common ground that most atheists and theists, liberals and conservatives, stand upon. For example, most of us agree that snuffing out the life of an adult, non-comatose, healthy human being for entertainment purposes is objectively wrong.

What (Q) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. I myself do not see how naturalism is up to the task of providing an objective foundation for even a minimal code of morality.

But of course one could be an atheist without being a naturalist. One could hold that there are objective values, but no God, and that ethical prescriptions and proscriptions are axiologically grounded. (N. Hartmann, for example.) But let's assume, with Nietzsche, that if you get rid of God, you get rid of the Platonic menagerie (to cop a phrase from Plantinga) as well. It needs arguing, but it is reasonable to hold that God and Platonica stand and fall together. That is what Nietzsche would say and I think he would be right were he to say it. (The death of God is not an insignificant 'event' like the falling to earth of a piece of space junk such as Russell's celestial teapot.)

No God, no objective morality binding for all. Suppose that is the case. Then how will the new atheist, who is also a liberal, uphold and ground his 'enlightened' liberal morality? John Gray appreciates the difficulty:

Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. [. . .] Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism. If they are philosophers, they will wheel out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert that those who think liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion are guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are not falsified because they originate in errors. The far-reaching claims these thinkers have made for liberal values can be detached from their theistic beginnings; a liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism.

Gray is right. Let me spell it out a bit.

Consider equality. As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, economically. By no empirical measure are people equal. We are naturally unequal. And yet we are supposedly equal as persons. This equality as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment. Kant, for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end. A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit. For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil. A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person. And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons. Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435) "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity." Dignity is intrinsic moral worth. Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite — in that no price can be placed upon it — and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one we must return to in subsequent posts.

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form. But what do these pieties have to do with reality? Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure. We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals. (Rationality might just be an evolutionary adaptation.) We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents. But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal). And given how bloody many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious? Are they not just highly complex physical systems? Surely you won't say that complexity confers value, let alone infinite value. Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex? And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal. What then is a person? And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions. We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person. We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father. Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source. We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above? If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves. We find this notion morally abhorrent. But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God? "We just do." But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition. What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So there you have the Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists. No God, then no justification for your liberal values! Pay attention, Sam. Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism. The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it. The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

A reader opines:

I like animals because I think they're a higher form of life. They have no pretenses about what they are; a dog can achieve levels of serenity and fulfillment of which I cannot conceive by merely being a dog and doing dog things. Myself, on the other hand, I could be the next Einstein with the face of James Dean and still very likely be miserable all my life.

I like animals too, but not because they are a higher form of life. They are lower forms of life. The ascription of pretentiousness to a cat or dog is of course absurd, but equally so is the ascription of serenity and fulfillment to them if these words carry the meaning that we attach to them. It is because man is a spiritual being that he can pretend and fake and dissemble and posture and blow up his ego like a balloon to blot out the sun. And it is because man is a spiritual being that he can know serenity, fulfillment, and in rare cases the peace that surpasseth all understanding. Man has not only the power of thought but also the mystical power to transcend thought. All of this is beyond the animal. If you disagree, then I will ask you to produce the mathematical and metaphysical and mystical treatises of the dolphins and the apes. Who among them is a Paul Erdös or a Plato or a Juan de la Cruz? As Heidegger says somewhere, "An abyss yawns between man and animal."

On the other hand no animal knows misery like we do. Barred out heights, they are also barred our depths of wretchedness and despair.

So while I have many bones to pick with John Stuart Mill on the score of his utilitarianism and his hedonism and his psychologism in logic and his internally inconsistent attempt at distinguishing higher from lower pleasures, his is a noble soul and I agree with the sentiment expressed in this well-known passage from Utilitarianism, Chapter II:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

I wonder if Mill can validate this noble thought within his paltry hedonist scheme. It is in any case a value judgment and I am not sure I would be able to refute someone who preferred the life of a cat or a dog or a contented cow to that of a man, half-angel, half-beast, tormented, crazed, but participant in highest bliss. But I agree with Nietzsche that man is something to be overcome, though not along the lines he proposes. He needs perfecting. I cannot forbear to quote his marvellous jab at the English hedonists from The Twilight of the Idols:

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. ("Maxims and Arrows," #12, tr. W. Kaufmann.)

Why do We Obsess Over Ultimate Meaning?

Or if not literally obsess, care deeply? Karl White passes on the following from one of his correspondents:

Why are we all so obsessed with infusing things with meaning anyway? Isn't this craving a mere artifact of being brought up under systems of belief that insist on the fact that life has to serve some purpose? Maybe if we hadn't been presented with such presumptions from the beginning, we wouldn't have such a hard time accepting existence?

These are reasonable questions. Perhaps we cannot be satisfied with finite meanings and relative satisfactions and cannot accept the utter finality of death only because we have have been culturally brainwashed for centuries upon centuries into thinking that there is some Grand Purpose at the back of things that we participate in, and some Final Redemption, when there is none. Perhaps we have been laboring under a God Delusion or a Transcendent Meaning Delusion for lo these many centuries. But now these delusions are losing their grip. One sort of person responds to the loss despairingly and pessimistically. Call it the Woody Allen response. Allen laments the absurdity of life and makes movies to distract himself and others from the dismal reality. Another sort of person digs in his heels and frantically tries to shore up the delusions by concocting ever more subtle metaphysical arguments when he knows deep down, as Allen would insist, that it's all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The cure for both is the same: drop the delusions. Stop measuring reality against a nonexistent standard. To paraphrase Nietzsche, when the supposedly Real World falls, then so does the Apparent World. (See The Twilight of the Idols.) The erasure of the Transcendent abrogates the denigration of the Immanent. The Immanent, now no longer immanent, is the sole reality. Live it, love it, affirm it. The finite suffices. Its finitude is no argument against this life if the only alternative is an Infinity that doesn't exist. Death is no argument against life if this is all there is. Drop the delusion and its hinterworlds and you will neither despair nor hope. You will learn to be true to the earth, your natural and only home.

The above considerations don't sway me.

What explains the origin of the systems of belief whose appropriation makes us hanker after Transcendence? Is the longing an artifact of the belief, or the belief an artifact of the longing?

I would say that the longing explains the belief. The belief cannot explain the longing since the belief had to first be there to explain anything, and what explains it is the longing. From time immemorial, people have experienced a deep dissatisfaction with the here and now and with it a longing for a better, truer, higher life. These experiences are real, though not had by everyone, and not equally by those who have them. Outstanding individuals translated these recurrent and widely-distributed experiences of dissatisfaction and longing into systems of belief and practice of various sorts, Buddhism being one example, with its sarvam dukkham. These systems were developed and passed on. They 'resonated' with people, all sorts of people, from every land, at every time. Why? Because they spoke to some real inchoate longing that people everywhere have. They answer to a real need, the metaphysical need. (Cf. Schopenhauer, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" in WWR vol. II) So it is not as if people were brainwashed into accepting these symbolic forms; they express and articulate real dissatisfaction with the mundane and ephemeral and real longing for lasting beatitude.

In sum: the experiences of deep dissatisfaction and deep longing are real; they come first phylogenetically, ontogenetically, temporally, logically, and epistemically. They give rise to systems of belief and practice (and not the other way around). Both the experiences and the beliefs are evidence of a sort for the reality of that which could remove the dissatisfaction and assuage the longing. Of course, it takes some careful arguing to get from longing for X to the reality of X.

This leads us to the topic of Arguments from Desire, a topic to be pursued in subsequent posts.

Since I mentioned Nietzsche above, I will end with Zarathustra's Roundelay, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. It shows that Nietzsche, though possessing the bladed intellect of the skeptic, had the throbbing heart of a homo religiosus. In his own perverse way he testifies to the truth above suggested. "All joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity!"

Zarathustra's Rundgesang

Oh Mensch! Gib acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

»Ich schlief, ich schlief—,

Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—

Die Welt ist tief,

Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Tief ist ihr Weh—,

Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:

Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—,

—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!«

Walter Kaufmann trans.:

O man, take care!

What does the deep midnight declare?

"I was asleep—

From a deep dream I woke and swear:

The world is deep,

Deeper than day had been aware.

Deep is its woe;

Joy—deeper yet than agony:

Woe implores: Go!

But all joy wants eternity—

Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

Adrian del Caro trans.:

Oh mankind, pray!

What does deep midnight have to say?

"From sleep, from sleep—

From deepest dream I made my way:—

The world is deep,

And deeper than the grasp of day.

Deep is its pain—,

Joy—deeper still than misery:

Pain says: Refrain!

Yet all joy wants eternity—

—Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

Lake Sils, Upper Engadin, Switzerland

Mark Anderson, presently on a sort of Nietzsche pilgrimage, sent me this panoramic shot. Left-click to enlarge. Mark explains:

The photo shows lake Sils. The little settlement below is Isola. Further to the right, where the lake ends, is Sils-Maria. The large patch of green that may look like an island right up against Sils is the Chasté peninsula, one of Nietzsche’s favorite places. He even fantasized about building himself a hermit’s hut there.

Nietzsche’s Madness Letters

Hier sind die Wahnbriefe Nietzsches. Auf Deutsch. (Das ist ja richtig was ich jetzt geschrieben habe. Vgl. Auf deutsch oder auf Deutsch?)

Nietzsche on Prose and Poetry

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book II, sec. 92, tr. Kaufmann:

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry: all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetry is continually avoided and contradicted.

Nietzsche and the Genetic Fallacy

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Book I, sec. 95:

Historical refutation as the definitive refutation. — In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God — today one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous. — When in former times one had refuted the 'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.

This passage, which is entirely characteristic of Nietzsche's way of thinking, strikes me as a text-book example of the genetic fallacy.

Every (occurrent) belief has an origin: it comes to be held by a person or a group of persons due to certain causes. Thus I came to believe that there are nine planets by reading it in a book as a child. Is Nietzsche suggesting that every belief is false just in virtue of its having an origin? That would be absurd. Is he suggesting instead that only false beliefs have origins? That too would be absurd. My belief that our solar system consists of nine planets, counting Pluto, orbiting one mediocre star is true despite its having an origin.

Given that both true and false beliefs have origins, it follows that one cannot refute a belief, i.e., show it to be false, by tracing its origins. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

People who commit this fallacy fail to appreciate that questions as to the truth or falsity of a belief and as to the reasons for its truth or falsity are logically independent of questions as to the origin (genesis) of the belief in question. Herr Nietzsche is therefore quite mistaken in thinking that accounting for the genesis of a belief renders "superfluous" (ueberfluessig) the question of its truth or falsity.

Far from being the definitive refutation, historical refutation is no refutation at all. A belief's loss of widespread acceptance and existential importance says nothing about its truth.

Nietzsche was subjectively certain of the nonexistence of God. But this was merely a fact about his psyche, a fact consistent both with the existence and the nonexistence of God. Similarly, the "death of God" — in plain English: the waning of widespread belief in God among educated people — is merely a cultural fact, if it is a fact. As such, it is consistent both with the existence and the nonexistence of God.

What Nietzsche and his followers do is presuppose that there is a way things are: There is no God, no moral world-order; truth is a matter of perspective, a "vital lie"; the world at bottom is the will to power; and so on. Armed with these unargued presuppositions, they set out to debunk countervailing positions. What they seem not to appreciate is that debunkers can be debunked and psychologizers psychologized; bullshitters of the decadent French form can themselves be bullshat. Deny truth and you presuppose truth. Turn everything into flux, and you flux yourself up as well. The river into which you can step only once turns out to be a river into which you cannot step at all. Logic, rendered super-fluous, gets its revenge in the end.

To Doctor Empiric

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape
Of old they gave a cock to Aesculape
Let me give two, that doubly am got free
From my disease's danger, and from thee.

Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27.

At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is reported by Plato as saying to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it." (tr. F. J. Church) Asclepius is the Greek god of healing. Presumably, Socrates wanted to thank the god for his recovery from the sickness of life itself.

Nietzsche comments at the the beginning of "The Problem of Socrates" in The Twilight of the Idols:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." (tr. W. Kaufmann)

Nietzsche and the Appeal of the Verifiability Criterion

A long-gone blogger once asked:

Has anyone ever seen an argument – or even a plea – in favor of the verification principle? I mean, beyond anything that just goes, "Hey, now this is cool. We can bash the ethicists, metaphysicians,
and theologians quite thoroughly with this."

As a preliminary stab at an answer, consider the Nietzsche quotation that Richard von Mises uses for the motto of his book Positivism (Harvard University Press, 1951, p. xii):

. . . die kleinen, unscheinbaren vorsichtigen Wahrheiten, welche mit strenger Methode gefunden werden, hoeher zu schaetzen als jene weiten, schwebenden, umschleiernden Allgemeinheiten, nach denen das Beduerfnis religoeser oder kuenstlerischer Zeitalter greift.

. . . to value more highly the little, unpretentious, cautious truths, arrived at by rigorous methods, than those vast, floating, veiling generalities for which the yearnings of a religious or artistic era reach.

A plea for the Verifiability Principle (VP) might just consist of an invocation of the above value judgment: precise, verifiable knowledge about matters of empirical fact is of higher value than broad and uncertain theories about ultimates like God and the soul.

Of course, no (classical) metaphysician shares this value judgment — a judgment which, nota bene, must be merely subjective on good positivist principles — and will hasten to point out that the Principle is self-vitiating in that it implies its own lack of cognitive significance. (Exercise for the reader: 'verify' that for yourself.)

Of course, Hume, whose famous Fork is a conceptual precursor of the VP, faces a similar difficulty: What is the epistemological status of the principle that every significant idea derives from a sensory impression? Does that express a matter of empirical fact? No. A mere relation of ideas? No.

Then consign it to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion!

Giles Fraser Credits Nietzsche with Making a Christian of Him

Two things I like about Fraser's Guardian piece are that he appreciates Nietzsche's deep religiosity and the role that his worship of power played in the development of Nazi ideology. Both of these points should infuriate leftists which of course constitutes an excellent recommendation of them.

See Nietzsche and National Socialism. Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life contains some discussion of Fraser's Nietzsche book.

As for Nietzsche's religiosity, here is the way I put it in one of my aphorisms: "His was the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus wedded to be bladed intellect of the skeptic."