Abstract
Nietzsche writes a preface to The Gay Science in 1886, four years after its first four books were in print. In this address, he explains that he has been ill and is in recovery. He diagnoses himself as having suffered from “romanticism.” Nietzsche warns that he will henceforth vent his malice on the sort of lyrical romantic sentimentalism from which he suffered. Nietzsche then undertakes to write an additional fifth book to the corpus, which he added in 1887—a year after the above-referenced preface, thereby providing a new end in departure from his previous romantic excursions of the initial four books of GS. I wish to trace how these claims—of illness and convalescence are related to what I argue is a major philosophical turn in Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of reality and how reality matters to us—as value. In this essay, I will locate Nietzsche’s turn. To do so, I explain (1) what Nietzsche describes as “romantic pessimism,” that is, an epistemological dualism (i.e., assertion of an irresolvable appearance versus reality distinction). I will first explain and then show how Nietzsche suffers from this illness in the early books of GS, using textual examples to demonstrate his epistemological presuppositions and romantic-pessimistic preferences (which manifest as a defiant claim that fictions are preferred to reality, thereby still crediting an appearance-reality distinction); (2) how by his later book five of GS Nietzsche plays a different tune by which prior dualisms dissolve in his affirmation of a co-implication of fiction and truth, such that (a) neither are wholly separate from the other, and (b) it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish between them.
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Notes
Nietzsche (1982, p. 317).
Nietzsche (2001, p. 4). He notes that should anyone re-experience such an illness, the invalid “would pardon even more than a bit of foolishness…’gay science’.”
The scope of this essay cannot do justice to exploring Nietzsche’s transformation toward convalescence: along with a long list of secondary literature, Nietzsche’s own Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and GS (book five), allude to an affirmation of the eternal recurrence as key to a philosophical commitment to better health. What I am calling Nietzsche’s turn has not yet been addressed well in secondary literature.
Nietzsche (2001 #346, p. 204). Cf. Also a meditation on this theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Great Contempt.”
Nietzsche may have had many reasons to focus his assault on the “pessimistic epistemological dualism” in the work of Kant, instead of more thoroughly finding it in the thinking of his mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer.
For more on Nietzsche’s characterization of Kant’s epistemological dualism, please see the 2nd chapter, on Nietzsche, in Megan Flocken, Heidegger’s Will to Power and the Problem of Nietzsche’s Nihilism.
“You see that what I misjudged both in philosophical pessimism and in German music [here, referencing specifically Schopenhauer and Wagner] was what constitutes its actual character—its romanticism.” (Nietzsche 2001 #370, p. 234.)
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 236. This language resounds with his earlier critique of Kant’s selfish universalism (“For it is selfish to consider one’s own judgment a universal law…” (Nietzsche 2001 #335, p. 188); this is not the “innocent selfishness” of one who blossoms fearlessly— Nietzsche does cite Wagner in this aphorism (Ibid. #99, p. 98).)
Ibid., p. 235.
Nietzsche uses two Latin adjectives to characterize this Dionysian pessimism, which he dubs the “pessimism of the future”: proprium and ipsissimum (“own” and “ownmost”). Both terms hearken to (Aristotelian) principles of individuation. This is to suggest that Dionysian pessimism bespeaks a relation to what is precisely individuating in one’s knowable experience. In other words, Dionysian pessimism is a contempt for the sort of knowledge of the world which encumbers the individuating aspect of such knowledge. It is here, in Nietzsche’s association of Dionysian pessimism and one’s ownmost individuation where we can see the relation between Dionysian pessimism and the individuating “value of perspective.” This is not to say that Nietzsche’s philosophical endorsement of Dionysian pessimism and assault against romantic pessimism is a purely epistemological discussion. But, for Nietzsche, the way one knows the world—both philosophically and psychologically—affects one’s very being in the world. Nietzsche proposes a philosophy of convalescence, which involves an ontological commitment to change, becoming, and perspectival individuation, and which is founded on an epistemological notion of fitness—with respect to being in the world with others. So let us first approach the epistemological framework of pessimism.
Nietzsche uses the German Jenseits (Beyond) in his title (Beyond Good and Evil). Interestingly, Hegel uses the term Jenseits in both Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic to signify the work of the negative (from in-itself—finitude—to what consciousness makes of it—infinite). Here we find linguistic evidence to substantiate conceptual content that places Nietzsche’s project in line with Hegel’s, especially insofar as the “Beyond” relates to Aufhebung. A quick check on Nietzsche Source brings up 23 uses of Hegel’s most ownmost term in Nietzsche’s Nachlass. For example, in references to “the family” and “morality,“ to get beyond the order of good/evil, it is the dogmatic order of morality/ family which must be superseded (i.e., without entirely obliterating the concept of, here, flourishing or kinship), so that a new form can persist. Invoking this Hegelian negativity as “futurity” (Nietzsche’s attempt to get beyond bears the subtitle: “to a philosophy of the future”) might serve as a much better explication of “nihilism”--if Nietzsche is to be ever correctly interpolated by this -ism.
Nietzsche (2001 #370, p. 236). The term “great event” can be cross-referenced to Zarathustra’s “On Great Events,” where Zarathustra admits that he has “outgrown the belief in “great events” wherever there is much bellowing and smoke,” in favor of the “great events” of our “stillest hours,” by which “the inventors of new values (Werthen)” replace the traditional noisy barometer of greatness and become an “inaudible” fulcrum of the world. (Nietzsche 1982, pp. 241–245.) It is here, when Zarathustra’s shadow cries, “It is high time to descend!” that we find an admission and parallel to Nietzsche’s own recovery from romantic pessimism toward a “descent” into Dionysian pessimism—which becomes Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, taken up when I am calling post-Turn, as perspectivism.
Nietzsche (2001 #335, p. 188). There is a litany of references to Kant in Beyond Good and Evil, which clarify Nietzsche’s position with respect to the romantic pessimism that he once (perhaps unwittingly) endorsed. (Ibid. #34.) Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s most well-known English translator, notes that both Kant and Nietzsche have “necessary fictions.” (Nietzsche 1966, footnote 6, p.12.) Their difference, as I’ve argued, is whether these fictions promote or desert life. The Kantian dogmatic appeal to appearance, which belies an ambition for objective certainty, instead, for Nietzsche, transforms into “perspective”: An eagerness for life that “in good humor, let[s] their securest possession [i.e., the certainty of knowing] go.” (Nietzsche, Ibid. #10, pp. 16–17.) Altogether and generally, each reference fleshes out the barometer with which Nietzsche can castigate Kant for his fictions while endorsing Nietzsche’s own: “The question is to what extent it [falsehood] is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.” (Ibid. #4.) Of course, this statement begs the question of what “life,” “species,” and then, “preservation” entail.
Nietzsche (2001 #57, p. 69).
This is how I interpret Nietzsche’s definition of the romantic pessimist as one who “takes revenge on all things by forcing, imprinting, branding his image on them, the image of his torture.” (Ibid. #370, p. 236.)
As I established in other work, a will reducible to purpose and intention—a conscious will—is more how Heidegger describes Nietzsche’s will to power in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures (Flocken 2020). Further, in these lectures, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s preference for fiction/appearance to reality preserves the metaphysical distinction, thereby compromising its radicality. I have argued that Heidegger was unfair in his interpretation of Nietzsche because Nietzsche turns away from this stance in his later writing. But, in this case and in his earlier writings, Heidegger’s critique lands a bull’s eye.
Ibid. #58, p. 69.
Ibid., p. 69–70. In this way, Nietzsche’s position here differs from the Sartrean notion that one must always authentically be “acting” as oneself (against a “nihilating” understanding of what one is not), because, for Sartre, this nihilation—or “nothingness” is part of being itself. (Sartre 1956, p. 127–133.)
Nietzsche (2001 #58, p. 70).
We might see additional evidence of Nietzsche’s early romantic-pessimist commitments in GS #109, where Nietzsche describes nature as chaos and any judgments about it (e.g., orderliness or lack thereof, beauty, wisdom, purposes, accidents) as anthropomorphisms. “In no way does [the universe] strive to imitate man!” (Nietzsche 2001 #109, p. 109 − 10). Thanks to my reviewer’s insight on how my arguments intersect with Nietzsche’s so-called redeemed naturalism. On this naturalism, see for example Cox: “In short, Nietzsche maintains that, contrary to metaphysics, being and becoming are not opposed to one another. Rather, being is a mode of becoming—becoming conceived under a particular description, which, however, will always conflict with others and can claim no ultimate priority… In this new guise, truth is concerned not with the determination of absolute and ultimate being, but with a specification of the perspectives and interpretations relative to which the world appears as being such and such.” (Cox 1999, p. 32).
Ibid. #299, p. 169. My emphasis.
Ibid.
Ibid. #301, p. 171.
Ibid.
Indeed, in book five, Nietzsche fine-tunes this assessment of the creative power of beings and, thereby, alights on the tragedy of his convalescence, when beings discover that: “the world is not worth what we thought” (Nietzsche 2001 #346, p. 205.). Though this question could be framed as, is the world worth anything without our thought?, my point is that by Nietzsche’s later, convalescing writing, Nietzsche would frame just such a question to suppose that the world is worth much more than once thought—i.e., that the world was worth nothing.
Nietzsche (1966 #34, p. 47).
Ibid.
Nietzsche (2001 #346, p.204).
Ibid.
To be fair, Nietzsche rather states that abolishing “yourselves” would be nihilism and asks (the question of the aphorism’s title, “Our question mark”) whether the abolition of our venerations—as though they were aberrant or mistaken versions of “yourselves”–would not also be nihilism. I find there is little argument to be made over answering his question with anything but an affirmative, as questions are themselves a certain response which calls for affirmation. Cf. Nietzsche notes: “Es bleibt übrig, entweder unsere Verehrungen abzuschaffen oder uns selbst. Letzteres ist der Nihilismus“ (KGW VIII-1.127). Cited in Wrathall (2003).
And the explication that it is for “coming generations” to face this problem of nihilism helps to explain why romantic pessimism is a “modern” pessimism.
The scope of this essay does not grant me space to further explore Nietzsche’s characteristic polysemy of GS #346. For example, Nietzsche, here, can also be read to encourage the criticism (or suspicion) of the opposition between appearance and reality, and indeed Nietzsche’s own suspicion of opposition (criticism of epistemological dualism) leads to his own convalescence. Read in another light, I am focusing on Nietzsche’s point that a commitment to a reality-appearance distinction compels a (harmful) suspicion that can lead to a nihilistic attempt to choose between one or the other (appearance or reality), as though they were separate and distinct, i.e., that one was eradicable from the other.
In his 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche laments his earlier lack of courage for developing his own language, caught instead in the snares of his predecessors, Schopenhauer and Kant. Specifically, Nietzsche cites Schopenhauer on the tragic leading to resignation and exclaims, “How differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far removed I was from all this resignationsim!” (Nietzsche 1967, p. 24.)
For “thoughts are the shadows of our sensations,” cf. Nietzsche 2001 #179, p. 137). Nietzsche makes a similar point in the early “Truth and Lie in An Extra-Moral Sense.” For “Even one’s thoughts one cannot entirely reproduce in words,” cf. Ibid. #244, p. 148.
This is significant to countermand critiques of Nietzsche (like Heidegger’s) by which value-positing is interpreted as similar to conscious knowledge.
Cf. Nietzsche (1966 #19): thought comes when it wishes.
Nietzsche (2001 #299, p.170).
Ibid. #354, p. 212–213.
Ibid., p. 213.
Ibid., p. 214. This declaration of having no organ for knowing, for truth, motivates Nietzsche’s silence on the question of Being.
And Nietzsche’s concern about the sickness of consciousness accounts for the “pessimism” of his Dionysian pessimism.
This last phrase echoes Nietzsche’s praise of appearance from his preface to The Gay Science. (Nietzsche 2001, p. 8–9).
Nietzsche (2001 #354, p. 213).
Ibid. #357, p.217.
Ibid. #360, p. 225. Further, “Is the ‘goal’, the ‘purpose’, not often enough a beautifying pretext, a self-deception of vanity after the fact that does not want to acknowledge that the ship is following the current into which it has entered accidentally? That it ‘wills’ to go that way because –it must?…We still need a critique of the concept of ‘purpose’.”
On the “new infinity” cf. Nietzsche #374, p. 239–240.
Cf. Nietzsche 1966 # 10. Thanks to Lee Braver for this note.
This allows Nietzsche’s philosophy to be read against his detractors, who note he is an exclusionist, a determinist, and in favor of social conservatism as stasis. (Karademir 2013).
Nietzsche (2001 #373, p. 238).
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Flocken, M. Nietzsche’s turn: from nature as value-less to value-laden. Cont Philos Rev 56, 243–258 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09600-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09600-8