Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche understands the problem of nihilism most basically as a problem of life-denial. On my view, Nietzsche calls life-denying any phenomenon that involves either (1) an explicitly or implicitly negative evaluation of life or (2) results in the weakening or degradation of the will. And indeed, as we will see, in each of nihilism’s incarnations—in its socio-cultural, cognitive, and affective manifestations—life (especially human life) is disparaged, degraded, or preserved only in its weakest forms. By understanding nihilism as life-denial, we can come to see what the wide variety of cognitive, affective, and socio-cultural phenomena Nietzsche calls nihilistic share in common.
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- 1.
Thank you to Matthew Meyer for posing this question to me at the 2019 meeting of Nietzsche in the Northeast.
- 2.
For Nietzsche, the disparagement of life also includes negative evaluations of this-worldly existence and humanity itself.
- 3.
This is similar to what John Richardson calls “no-to-life nihilism,” or “a ‘bodily’ stance occurring beneath the level of consciousness and language [in which] one’s ‘physiological’ condition rejects or disvalues life” (forthcoming).
- 4.
Note that here the “negative assessment” is of life as it actually is.
- 5.
Again, I take the phrase “epistemic practices” from Riccardi’s work on psychological nihilism (2018).
- 6.
Thank you to Matthew Meyer for encouraging clarity on this point.
- 7.
See also the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy: “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life. Hatred of ‘the world,’ condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for ‘the sabbath of sabbaths’—all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a ‘will to decline’—at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless…”
- 8.
Babette Babich’s work productively investigates continued contemporary investments in a notion of a beyond. For example, Babich suggests that humanity’s increasing “absorption in… virtual worlds” exemplifies a contemporary version of nihilism as life-denial insofar as those who absorb themselves in virtual worlds devote themselves to an idealized world beyond this one (Babich 2007, p. 233n99). Additionally, in a 2017 article, Babich pinpoints transhumanist thought as a contemporary ideology that implicitly devalues life and this-worldly existence insofar as it celebrates a time beyond our own, in which human beings will master and control themselves and their world. In that piece, she argues convincingly that Nietzsche would reject such an ideology on grounds that it is overly humanistic and life-denying (2007, pp. 115–116).
- 9.
Such human pursuits can be knowingly or unknowingly directed toward such a purpose.
- 10.
See also Hatab (2006).
- 11.
In his notes, Nietzsche remarks that “[w]e have, from an early age, placed the value of an action, of a character, of a being, into the purpose [den Werth einer Handlung, eines Charakters, eines Daseins in die Absicht gelegt, in den Zweck] for the sake of which it was done, for the sake of which we acted, lived: this ancient idiosyncrasy of taste finally takes a dangerous turn” (KSA 12:7[1]). Here we can imagine one example of such a higher purpose: an understanding of “social progress” such as that subscribed to by nineteenth-century ethnologists. On a nineteenth-century picture of social progress, “primitive” societies advanced through a number of stages to eventually become “civilized” societies, and this progression or advancement involved increases in social complexity and cultural sophistication. On such a picture of social progress, the purpose of society is ever greater civilization, and societies are understood as more or less valuable with reference to this higher purpose: “more civilized” societies are “better,” more valuable societies than “more primitive” ones. Furthermore, civilization is the purpose at which these “more primitive” societies knowingly or unknowingly aim.
- 12.
In KSA 12:9[130], Nietzsche enacts a “critique of modern man” which involves a critique of “reason as authority; history as overcoming of errors; the future as progress.” In KSA 12:2[127], Nietzsche remarks upon the “nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science (together with its attempts to escape into some beyond).” See also progress as nihilistic in KSA 13:11[99]; “progress” as decadence in KSA 13:17[6]; and a general critique of progress in KSA 13:15[8]. Nietzsche’s critique of this-worldly permutations of a “higher purpose” is also in the background of Nietzsche’s critiques of “scientific optimism” in his early notes—where he calls that “the laisser aller of our science” a “national-economic dogma” involving “faith in an absolutely beneficial success” (KSA 7:19[28])—and in later reflections (BT, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” 4).
- 13.
Nietzsche’s own presentation of the overman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra should give us pause here. After all, he insists that “the overman shall be the meaning of the earth” (TSZ, Prologue, 3) and remarks that “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” Nietzsche goes on to praise “[he] who justifies future and redeems past generations” (TSZ, Prologue, 4). Nietzsche’s call for the overman in Zarathustra certainly sounds like his proposal of a better, more advanced world which justifies our current aims and existence! Indeed, Zarathustra even remarks that “I will teach man the meaning of their existence—the overman, the lightning out of the dark cloud of man” (TSZ, Prologue, 7). What might make his account of the overman different than the accounts of higher purpose which he critiques as false and life-denying? One thought is that what separates accounts of higher purpose from Nietzsche’s account of the overman is the ambiguity of the overman’s values and purposes. If the overman is to justify existence, Nietzsche is famously vague about how he will do so. Unlike nihilistic conceptions of progress which measure positive, forward-moving development with reference to one standard or ideal (for example, social progress involves the becoming-civilized of societies, scientific progress involves the acquisition of ever more knowledge, etc.), Nietzsche’s vagueness about the content of the values the overman will create allows for a multiplicity of realizations and standards, such that we cannot justify our current actions with reference to any one or unify our pursuits in any one standard. Striving toward the overman will never involve striving towards one pre-established standard, as it does in the cases of higher purpose I discuss above. We see this also when Nietzsche remarks in this same section of Zarathustra that “my happiness should justify existence itself!” (TSZ, Prologue, 3). Here, one understands existence as justified by standards and values which emerge from out of one’s own engagement in the world, one’s own “happiness.” If we read this idea together with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the overman as the justification of existence, we see the importance of actively justifying existence through the creation of new values situated in one’s own interests and engagements. Yet on Nietzsche’s picture, this can only happen through this-worldly engagements. On this picture, any life-affirming future-oriented goal or purpose must emerge from out of the immanently grounded process of value creation; no one purpose can be firmly fixed as “the purpose” which justifies all of existence. In short, Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman as the “meaning of existence” need not involve the fixation of a pre-established and unchanging standard through which existed is justified.
- 14.
We see Nietzsche’s rejection of a higher purpose in his 1886 critique of his own early work, The Birth of Tragedy . In this retrospective critique, Nietzsche recognizes The Birth of Tragedy as a youthful attempt to present an idealized, amoral picture of the world that would serve to justify humanity generally, or bestow humanity with a meaning, through a higher purpose. Nietzsche’s early notion that the “existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” presents the world as “at every moment the attained manifestation of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the person who suffers most, who is the most rent with contradictions” (BT, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” 5). In The Birth of Tragedy, the world is an artistic creation of this “amoral artist-God” who creates the world in order to “[rid] himself of the strain of fullness and superfluity, from the suffering of pressing internal contradictions.” As an expression of the contradictions and chaos of this artist-God, the suffering of humanity and the chaos of the world of earthly existence are given some sense, and man can be consoled by this fact. Nietzsche’s late interpretation of his attempt at metaphysical consolation in The Birth of Tragedy, which understands the artist’s metaphysics as an attempt to resist Christian interpretations of the purposefulness of the universe, acknowledges that this attempt still results in a nihilistic conception of the world (albeit an amoral one, distinguished from Judeo-Christian conceptions of higher purpose). Nietzsche himself interprets his artist’s metaphysics as a system which “would sooner believe in nothingness or the devil than in the here and now.” This nihilistic conception of the world is what Nietzsche ultimately rebukes in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” His early “artist’s metaphysics” both posited a higher purpose to the universe that was not there, and judged human existence as justified through this purpose alone. This worldview, like those Judeo-Christian worldviews which the young Nietzsche had hoped to supplant with The Birth of Tragedy, denigrates this-worldly existence and leaves man without immanent sources of meaning through which he might affirm his life.
- 15.
For a different but related interpretation, see Thomson (2011, p. 151).
- 16.
In a note from 1887, he remarks that “the nihilistic question ‘for what?’ is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside” (KSA 12:9[43]). This otherworldly hope ignores the fact that, for Nietzsche, we have a perfectly good explanation for why things are the way they are in the will to power. As Matthew Meyer notes in Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients, “the idea is that there is a kind of naturalized or immanent teleology divorced from theology, and this kind of teleology explains the organization, behavior, and movement of organic and even inorganic entities in terms of goal-directed forces at work within nature” (Meyer 2012, p. 247).
- 17.
For this reason, disinterested, objective truth can be understood as “extra-perspectival” truth.
- 18.
It is worth noting here that Nietzsche’s account of the theoretical man is actually an account of Socrates’ influence in the ancient Greek world (BT 15). But insofar as Nietzsche himself seems to be reading this influence anachronistically through the lens of the scientific tendencies of his day, this need not complicate the picture I present. Nietzsche’s point in this section of The Birth of Tragedy seems to trace the history of truth as objective truth in the West back to its origins in “Plato’s Socrates” (“Socrates’ influence has spread out across all posterity to this very day”), and indeed, this is something which is firmly in the spirit of what I do in this chapter. His characterizations of knowledge and hyper-rational culture is clearly shaped by his understanding of the “science” of his day as “hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up (ibid.).”
- 19.
Nietzsche refers to modern Western culture both as “Socratic culture” and “Alexandrian culture” here. For a more extended interpretation of this section of the Birth and an argument that locates the culmination of such “Alexandrine” culture in contemporary “techno-scientific culture,” see Babich (2007, p. 209).
- 20.
If one feels inclined to dismiss this as an “immature” and “early” version of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the matter, one need only to read Nietzsche’s 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism ,” in which he explicitly remains supportive of his critique of “science” from The Birth of Tragedy while skewering other features of this early text.
- 21.
As Gemes also points out, “In the context of Christianity and the modern scholarly spirit [Nietzsche] sees the will to truth as slandering life” (2006, p. 197).
- 22.
In his article titled “Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth,” Scott Jenkins (2012) gives a detailed account of science’s otherworldly asceticism.
- 23.
An apparent tension arises when we attempt to square Nietzsche’s claim that (1) absolute knowledge, or totally disinterested, objective knowledge, is impossible with his claim that (2) life and reality are purposeless becoming (that is, a world of ceaseless flux devoid of any global, higher purpose/s ). In what sense can Nietzsche say it is true that the world as it actually is is ceaseless becoming? This tension, I argue, is one Nietzsche does not explicitly resolve, but Anderson’s account of claims to truth (in Nietzsche) as a “matter of satisfying norms and standards drawn from within the circle of our cognitive practices” (Anderson 1998, p. 14) can help; “life is becoming” and “the world is will to power” count as truths in a Nietzschean sense because they “demand acceptance across a broader class of perspectives by satisfying shared epistemic standards” (Anderson 1998, p. 21).
- 24.
Translation from Gemes (1992, p. 53).
- 25.
Importantly, Gemes advances a stronger claim: in asserting that “Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity is based on the fact that it enfeebles strong wills, not that it is false” (58), he argues that the truth value of a given belief is largely irrelevant to Nietzsche’s assessment of that belief. This claim, in my estimation, is too strong. Indeed, Nietzsche does at times take issue with the falseness of Christianity, especially insofar as the false and confused beliefs it promotes preclude an honest reckoning with life as becoming, as devoid of transcendent or global teloi. After all, such a reckoning is required for a thoroughgoing affirmation of life.
- 26.
It is worth noting that, in a number of places, Nietzsche’s analysis of the scientific outlook and its origin (as well as its function) parallels this analysis of the Christian’s experience. For example, in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche asks rhetorically: “Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism?” (1). He goes on in “Attempt” to argue that “it was precisely during the period of their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more hypocritical, and with a greater lust for logic and rational understanding of the world, as well as ‘more cheerful’ and ‘more scientific’? What’s this? In spite of all ‘modern ideas’ and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness… which occurs in the same period, perhaps be a symptom of failing power, of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion?” (4). See also GM II:12, GM III:23.
- 27.
Throughout this section, I understand “norm” to mean a standard or guideline that fixes what counts as normal, proper, or acceptable behavior, and by which the normalcy or propriety of behavior is measured. I also say that Nietzsche frames certain values or norms as “typically” life-denying because there are always exceptions. For example, pity might be life-affirming and life-enhancing for certain individuals to adopt, depending on their constitution. Furthermore, all norms and values mentioned here must be understood as socio-cultural byproducts; thus, doxastic life-denial is fundamentally connected to life-denial as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
- 28.
Note here that life as will to power is degraded—and that this is all life is, for Nietzsche.
- 29.
Nietzsche frames this as a rhetorical question: “Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? To nothingness?” (GM, P, 5).
- 30.
Of course, there are ideals Nietzsche understands as exceptions to this general “rule”: namely, those ideals the endorsement of which leads one to value one’s drives and become stronger (such as valuing one’s unique form of will to power, for example).
- 31.
This has to do, of course, with Nietzsche’s claim that virtues, or moral goods, typically develop as means of increasing the flourishing of a community or society, not of one’s own life (GS 21).
- 32.
Riccardi would say that this is critical for understanding the cognitive aspect of “psychological nihilism” (2018), as his term “psychological nihilism” is meant to capture both the cognitive and affective dimensions of life-denial in Nietzsche (ibid., p. 266).
- 33.
Nietzsche offers his reader two accounts of this development: first, the development of a will to truth from the conflict of drives and conceptions of utility in “Origins of Knowledge” from The Gay Science, and second, the will to truth’s origin in morality. According to the former account, at an earlier time in Western culture, something was considered true only insofar as it was useful for life. The critical moment for the will to truth’s development arrives when two different drives or complexes of drives present contradictory notions of what is truly useful for life. Since both notions appeared equally useful for life, it became “possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life,” and these drives or complexes of drives came into conflict (GS 110). Although disagreements about notions of utility begin as “intellectual play,” the separate drives or complexes of drives eventually recognize that only their conception of utility has the value of potentially helping them to achieve their aims. Each baptizes its own conception of utility as the only absolutely “good” and “true” conception. In essence, the will to truth results from this becoming-absolute of conflicting conceptions of utility. In short, the free intellectual play mentioned above turns into the struggle for extra-perspectival, objective truth when each drive or complex of drives wills the domination of its own conception, its own “truth,” above all others. As the needs of various drives (or complexes of drives) conflict with the needs of other drives (or complexes of drives), each attempts to employ its own “truth” to subjugate and dominate the other. Eventually, Nietzsche describes how “the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for powers developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about ‘truths.’ The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified—and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs” (GS 110). Although the will to truth begins as the mere instrument of other drives, it eventually establishes itself as an independent drive: Nietzsche’s “knowledge drive” (BGE 6). Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the will to truth in morality from On the Genealogy of Morality fits with this picture from The Gay Science: after all, it is when the human mind develops certain convictions or value judgments that the power struggle among the drives intensifies. In the Genealogy, as mankind begins to develop a need for morality and moral understanding (from out of his need to give meaning to his suffering), he also develops a drive to attain knowledge of objective truths qua extra-perspectival facts about the world around him. The will to truth first awakens as a desire to know extra-perspectival moral facts; after all, traditional morality and its enforcement requires knowledge of what counts as truly good or bad. In this way, as Katrina Mitcheson notes, “our search for truth has been driven by something other than a pure desire for the goal of truth” (Mitcheson 2013, p. 60). Nietzsche is famously ambivalent about the will to truth. In its relentless pursuit of “the true,” the will to truth uncovers a number of hard truths with which human beings must reckon in order to truly affirm life. Indeed, after the “steady and laborious process of science will in the end decisively have done” with otherworldly notions and conceptions of truth (HH I:16), it is the job of free spirits to learn to embrace life nonetheless. Many, Nietzsche thinks, will uncover these hard truths as a result of their wills to truth; few are able to incorporate and affirm such truths. Still others, of course, cling to old truths; this is the case with “old believers” in Europe: “an article of faith could be refuted to [them] a thousand times; as long as [they] needed it, [they] would consider it ‘true’ again and again, in accordance with that famous ‘proof of strength’ of which the Bible speaks” (GS 347).
- 34.
Riccardi isolates fanatacism as an epistemic orientation associated with “psychological nihilism” (2018).
- 35.
- 36.
It is worth noting that Nietzsche gives this example of “blindly raging industriousness” in an aphorism on the harmfulness of virtues that encourage the erasure of oneself and one’s goals (GS 21).
- 37.
Nietzsche’s critical perspective on general scholarly praxis and his critique of historical scholarship are very closely related, though distinct. Below I illuminate the qualities they share of which Nietzsche is critical—both are life-denying—but this is not to identify them with one another entirely.
- 38.
The way Nietzsche frames the comportment of the worker and scholar (in The Gay Science and “On the Use…”, respectively) also mirrors his characterization of the “last man” from Zarathustra (Z: P, 5) and the “objective man ” from Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 207).
- 39.
Remember the life-denying genius of slave morality from the Genealogy: that it exerts a covert weakening influence on strong life, raising the status of the weak in comparison.
- 40.
In the Genealogy, Nietzsche calls the nihilistic instincts which cause man to deny life and himself “great danger[s] to mankind” and notes that nihilism marks “the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life” (GM, Preface, 5).
- 41.
As seen below, Nietzsche also calls this nihilistic instinct a “degenerate instinct” or “instinct of decadence [den entartenden Instinkt]” in Ecce Homo (“Books: BT,” 2).
- 42.
Note here that such a “degenerate instinct” is explicitly placed in opposition to a formula for the “highest affirmation born out of fullness, out of overfullness, an unreserved yea-saying even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything questionable and strange about existence… This final, most joyful, effusive, high-spirited yes to life” (EH, “Books: BT,” 2).
- 43.
Importantly, Nietzsche does not believe that all nihilists are affective nihilists. More on this in Chapter 7.
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Creasy, K. (2020). Nihilism as Life-Denial. In: The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37133-3_3
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