Category: Nietzsche

Silenian and Epicurean Sources of “Death is Not an Evil”

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the specifically Epicurean reason for thinking death not an evil from another reason which is actually anti-Epicurean. I'll start with the second reason.

A. Death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is — to die soon."

Silenus B.  Death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead.  Since there is no such STOA, there is no bearer of the property of being evil.  If this property has a bearer it cannot be an individual or a property but must be a STOA.

And so the Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil because axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The first reason is axiological, the second ontological.  The Silenian pessimist  renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good, better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

This reinforces my earlier conclusion that there is nothing nihilistic about the Epicurean position. 

Nietzsche’s Definition of ‘Nihilist’

Der Wille zur Macht #585 (Kroener Ausgabe): 

Ein Nihilist ist der Mensch, welcher von der Welt, wie sie ist, urteilt, sie sollte nicht sein, und von der Welt, wie sie sein sollte, urteilt, sie existiert nicht.

A nihilist is one who judges of the world as it is, that it ought not be, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist.

My translation is as beautiful as the German original.  Don't you agree?

Best Evidence of the Greatness of This Country

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

The best evidence of the greatness of this country is that people are clamoring to get into it. Almost nobody—including self-loathing progressives—wants to leave it.

It is also the best evidence of the failure of Communism and those socio-political schemes that are ever on the slouch toward Communism.   They needed walls to keep people in, we need walls to keep them out.  Hence the rank absurdity of the comparsion of a wall on our southern border to the Berlin Wall.  Now the leftists who make this comparison cannot be so obtuse as not to see its rank absurdity.  But they make it anyway because they will say or do anything to win.  They are out for power any way they can get it.

By the way, this lust for power by any means explains the fascination of leftists with Nietzsche, a fascination which would otherwise be difficult to explain given the German's social and political views.  Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis is that the world is the will to power.  Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!  And because reality at its base and core is blind will to power without rhyme or reason, whose only goal is its own expansion, there is no place for truth.  Truth gets reduced, and in consequence of the reduction eliminated, in favor of ever-shifting perspectives of ever-changing power centers.  Perspectivism, accordingly, is Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine.  It is of course incoherent and easily refuted.  But why should that matter to someone who does not care about truth in the first place?  Truth is a conservative notion since it points us to the way things ARE.  But progressives take their marching orders from Karl Marx: "The philosophers have variously interpreted the wotrld; but the point is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach.)  Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden  interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.

What in these two central Nietzschean doctrines is there for a leftist not to love?  He finds sanction in them  both for his pursuit of power unchecked by any moral standard ("The end justifies the means") and for his propaganda and deceitfulness.   If there is no truth there is no limit to what he can say and do in pursuit of his ends.

This also explains the leftist's  belief in the indefinite malleability of man and society. If there is no way things are, no rerum natura, then there is no limit on what is possible.  And if there is no moral world order, then there is no check on what it is morally permissible to do. And so the leftist, foolish idealist that he is, embarks upon schemes the upshot of which  are of the sort documented in the Black Book of Communism.  But if you break 100 million eggs and still have no omelet, then you need to go back and check your premises.  Or, to paraphrase Aristotle, a little error in the beginning leads to a big bloody one in the end.

 

The Eternal Return of the Same Old Same Old

A redemption from transitoriness that consists of an endless repetition is no redemption at all.  An eternity of the same old crap is still crap.  It is actually worse than transient crap.  It is Crap Eternalized, nihilism on stilts.

Pious Nietzscheans will be shocked at my irreverence.  But wasn't it his irreverence that attracted their adolescent selves to him in the first place?

Nietzsche would restore the 'weight' to the world that the now absent God had supplied.  But his Eternal Recurrence is a makeshift not up to the task. 

Fulminate as he does against old Plato, he himself is a Platonist: he takes the world's impermanence to argue its unreality and unimportance. Which is why he posits Eternal Recurrence.  From within Becoming he would redeem Becoming.  But he should have seen that among the consequences of the death of God is not only the death of truth, but also the death of redemption.

On Writing for Money

From an NYT interview with Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Hitch-22:

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

The fool in excelsis, I suppose, would be he who not only writes what cannot sell, but uses his own blood for ink.  I am thinking of Nietzsche whose posthumous birth was due in no small measure to the  auto-vivisection which supplied the fluid which powered his pen.

Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life

Nietzsche1 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.

Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

For the New Year

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so shall I.

Nietzsche, Guilt, and Incoherence

I love reading Nietzsche, just as I love reading his opposite number, Kierkegaard. There is  much to admire in them: their stylistic brilliance, the penetration of their psychological insight, the singlemindedness of their quest for truth. They are about as far away as one can get from the mere professor of philosophy. Nevertheless, both were hell-bent on tangling themselves up in absurdities. Herewith, yet another example.

Execution. — How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being is being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not the guilt that is being punished, even when it exists; this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that caused him to become one. (Human, All Too Human (1878), vol. I, sec. 70, tr. Hollingdale.)

So it is not the criminal who is guilty, but the circumstances in which he arose. But if the criminal is not guilty, then no one and nothing is. Either there is guilt on both sides, or on neither side. It is incoherent to displace guilt from the criminal onto his environment. (And what is a hard-assed political reactionary like Nietzsche doing making a soft-headed liberal move like this?) What Nietzsche really wants to say is that that there is no guilt on either side, since “no one is accountable for his deeds…” (Sec. 39) But if so, then we are not accountable for our judging the criminal and punishing him. If he is a deterministic system, then so are we. It follows that it is absurd to say that we ought not punish him, or that “to judge is the same thing as to be unjust….” (Sec. 39) If there is no such thing as moral responsibility, then neither ‘just’ nor ‘unjust’ are words that apply to anything.

Why can’t Nietzsche appreciate this simple point? And in section 107, where he writes, “Everything is necessity…. Everything is innocence…,” why can’t he see that if all is necessity and there is no free will (cf. Sec. 102), then both ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ fail to apply to anything? Merely paradoxical formulations, or deep underlying confusion? I incline toward the latter view.

Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.

"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." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.)

The art of the aphorism at its best.

In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was an Englishman who provided what is perhaps the best refutation of hedonism we have, namely, F. H. Bradley in his "Pleasure For Pleasure's Sake"  in Ethical Studies.

Nietzsche on Causa Sui and Free Will

Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 21 (tr. W. Kaufmann):

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Muenchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

It is easy to be seduced by the beauty and energy of Nietzsche's prose into thinking that he is talking sense when he is not. The above excerpt is a case in point. Let's take a long hard logical squint at it.

Continue reading “Nietzsche on Causa Sui and Free Will”

Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Marriage a Long Conversation?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (tr. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 59):

Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.

Fairly good advice, but how would old bachelor Fritz know about this, he who in another place recommends taking a whip along on a date?  (To be accurate, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Portable Nietzsche, p. 179, puts in the mouth of an old woman the saying, "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip! Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!")

In my experience, marriage is not a long conversation so much as it is a long and deep and wordless understanding.

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.'

Continue reading “Nietzsche, Truth, and Power”