The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (93 page)

Third, the pursuit of truth is subsidiary to the creation of value. This applies even, or especially, at the level of generality at which the sense-making characteristic of philosophy occurs. For philosophers are in Nietzsche’s view nothing unless they are creators of value. The creation of value – the provision of value for more particular sense-making – is their contribution to the process of overcoming nihilism (
Beyond Good and Evil
, §§9, 204, and 211; and
Fragmente
, III.19.35 (cited in Han-Pile (
2006
), p. 394)). And philosophy here embraces metaphysics.
⁷⁰

A final point in this section. Asceticism, as we have seen, is a non-affirmative reaction to the meaninglessness of life’s suffering. But it is not the only one. It is not even one of the commonest. There are countless others: countless ways of recoiling, hitting back, brooding, scapegoating, or trying
to contain the suffering other than by doing as asceticists
⁷¹
do, which is to say relegating the suffering to a world of mere appearance where nothing really matters. They include:

•
vengefulness (‘Somebody should pay for my suffering’)

• self-pity (‘I shall dwell on my suffering – may it never be forgotten’)

• blame (‘My suffering is all your fault’)

• guilt (‘Your suffering is all my fault, so I must suffer too’)

• hope (‘Suffering will eventually be a thing of the past’)

• despair (‘Suffering will never be a thing of the past – it is part of the very fabric of the world’)

• acquiescence – which we briefly considered earlier (‘I shall say “yes” to everything, including suffering’)

and even (
Twilight
, III.6–7, and
Will
, §§429–433 and 441–443)

• Socratic dialectic, which combines various elements of the above (‘I shall make you pay for my suffering, by wielding my intellect over yours, but at the same time I shall display my grasp of what really matters; my grasp of those values and resources beyond suffering which enable me to master it’).
⁷²

None of these are ways of overcoming nihilism. They are just what a successful metaphysics must leave behind.

I close this section, much as I began it, with a quotation from
The Will to Power
that serves as a compendium of Nietzsche’s vision:

Man seeks ‘the truth’: a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a
true
world – a world in which one does not suffer …!

… [He believes:] the world as it ought to be exists; this world, in which we live, is an error – this world of ours ought not to exist….

The belief that the world as it ought to be
is
, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do
not desire to create a world
as it ought to be. They posit it as already available, they seek ways and means of reaching it. ‘Will to truth’ –
as the impotence of the will to create
….

This same species of man, grown one stage poorer, no longer possessing the strength to interpret, … produces
nihilists
. A nihilist is a man who
judges of the world as it is that it ought
not
to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning….

It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meanings in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world
because one organizes a small portion of it oneself
. (
Will
, §585(A), emphasis in original)

7. Nietzsche
Pro
Spinoza and
Contra
Hegel

In
Chapter 7
, §6, I tried to highlight some profound differences between Spinoza and Hegel. It is instructive, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s many quarrels with Spinoza and notwithstanding his many convergences with Hegel, to look upon what we have just witnessed as an anti-Hegelian development of certain core Spinozist ideas.

(a) Nietzsche
Pro
Spinoza
⁷³

Both Spinoza and Nietzsche have on overriding concern with the affirmation of life, or with what I called in the previous section the affirmation of the world. In
Chapter 2
, §6, we saw Spinoza refer to ‘an intellectual love of God’, or, in the original Latin, ‘
amor dei intellectualis
’. Nietzsche repeatedly refers to ‘
amor fati
’, literally ‘a love of fate’ (e.g.
Gay Science
, §276, and
Ecce Homo
, II.10). These, despite various important differences between them, are Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s respective ways of referring to just such
affirmation.
⁷⁴
Both thinkers take the affirmation of life to be our greatest ethical achievement. Both see it as a way of welcoming the future with joy, a way of being active rather than passive in the midst of life’s afflictions.
⁷⁵

There is a famous postcard from Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck in which he records his own sudden realization of this kinship with Spinoza. He writes:

I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a
precursor
, and what a precursor! … Not only is [Spinoza’s] over-all tendency like mine – making knowledge the
most powerful
affect – but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous,
⁷⁶
they are due more to the differences in time, culture, and science.
In summa
: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often makes it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is at least a twosomeness. (‘Postcard to Overbeck’, emphasis in original)

But does Nietzsche not fasten on quite different points of contact here from that which I emphasized above? Not at all. When he says that Spinoza makes knowledge ‘the most powerful affect’, he is referring to the way in
which, on Spinoza’s conception, the acquisition of knowledge, or more specifically knowledge of the third kind, gives us power over all our other affects (including what Spinoza would call our affects of sadness and what Nietzsche would call our affects of suffering). And it does this by enabling us to make sense of those affects, which in turn brings us both to our highest level of activity and to
amor dei intellectualis
(
Ch. 2
, §5). So Nietzsche is talking about precisely the same shared concern as I identified above.

As regards the other five points of contact that he mentions, these signal the two thinkers’ common rejection of attempts to achieve power over all these affects by other means. Both reject the idea that nature has some purpose or
telos
towards which it is striving and in whose terms life’s afflictions can be justified. Both reject the idea that there is refuge from life’s afflictions in the transcendent. (Indeed, both reject the transcendent.) Both, in the contrast between ethics and morality that I drew in
Chapter 2
, §3, likewise reject the idea that there is refuge from life’s afflictions in morality: the good that we pursue is as opposed to the bad, not as opposed to the evil.
⁷⁷
The only one of Nietzsche’s five points of comparison for which we have not already seen clear evidence is the first. This is because we have not hitherto considered Nietzsche’s own denial of freedom of the will. But actually this denial is very much in keeping with what we have considered. For the belief in freedom of the will is an integral part of the belief in morality; and it is fostered, like the belief in an immaterial thinking substance, by the grammar of how we make sense of ourselves (see e.g.
Human
, I.39 and I.106;
Beyond Good and Evil
, §§19–21; and
Will
, §786).
⁷⁸

(b) Nietzsche
Contra
Hegel
⁷⁹

Some of what Spinoza and Nietzsche share Hegel shares too. All three reject the transcendent, albeit in Hegel’s case by rejecting the very distinction between the immanent and the transcendent. And this commits all three, as I see it, to atheism, albeit in each case atheism of a notably unstraightforward sort (
Ch. 2
, §2;
Ch. 7
, §6; and §5 above). All three also in some sense
champion ethics over morality (cf.
Ch. 7
, §6
⁸⁰
).
⁸¹
Nietzsche’s philosophy nevertheless marks a fundamental break with that of Hegel.
⁸²

For Hegel there is ultimately no truth save the absolute truth of the whole. All that we experience – all that is ‘fragmented, fractured, transitory, and unstable,’ to reclaim my own phrase from the previous section – bespeaks falsehood. And it bespeaks falsehood of a kind that needs to be both sublated and reintegrated into that absolute truth by various processes of negation. This means that, although Hegel eschews any immanent/transcendent distinction, his philosophy contains something of the asceticist’s depreciation of all that we experience in favour of what is ultimately true and ultimately real. Hegel takes the friction, opposition, and suffering that beset us to represent stages in a master process, stages which on the one hand we have to endure for the sake of its
telos
, but which on the other hand we can eventually put completely behind us. Nietzsche would see this as a failure of nerve, a failure to confront the suffering squarely and, through creation and affirmation rather than through prescission and negation, to defy it. There is in fact a sense in which Hegel serves as a paradigm of all that most deeply appals Nietzsche.

Another facet of the break between them is interestingly reflected in one of the contrasts between analytic philosophy and philosophy that we shall be exploring later in
Part Three
. Both Hegel and Nietzsche have a particular concern with
difference
and specifically with change. (For Hegel these are the means whereby the finite surpasses its own finitude. For Nietzsche they are the very character of reality.) In this respect they both anticipate what is to come. For in the work that we shall be exploring later there is likewise a particular concern with difference.
⁸³
In analytic philosophy, by contrast, there is typically a greater emphasis on identity.
⁸⁴
But not only that; there is also typically a
prioritization
of identity. It is extremely difficult for analytic philosophers to think of difference in anything other than negative terms; that is, to avoid thinking of what is different as what is
not
the same, or as what does
not
have some feature that some given thing does
have.
⁸⁵
The philosophers whose work we shall be exploring later reverse this prioritization. And in
this
respect Hegel is closer to the former. He too construes difference negatively. Not so Nietzsche.
⁸⁶
Nietzsche fully anticipates what is to come. The
positive
construal of difference, as something that betokens affirmation and something that is itself to be affirmed, is profoundly Nietzschean.
⁸⁷

8. Eternal Return

So far I have said nothing about what is probably the best-known feature of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, namely his idea of eternal return.
⁸⁸
Nietzsche assigns very great significance to this idea. He describes it as the ‘highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable’ (
Ecce Homo
, III.vi.1; cf.
Twilight
, XI.5).

There is nevertheless considerable exegetical controversy surrounding the idea. This controversy has two dimensions. First, there is a dispute about what the idea even consists in. Second, there is a dispute about whether Nietzsche intends it as part of an actual cosmology or whether he intends it merely as a thought experiment with a role to play in our attempts to overcome nihilism.
⁸⁹

As far as the first of these disputes is concerned, the vast majority of commentators take Nietzsche to be reviving the ancient idea of an endlessly recurring cosmic cycle in which everything is repeated in exact detail again and again.
⁹⁰
And in fact to settle the first dispute in
that
way is surely, in
effect, to settle the second dispute as well. For Nietzsche surely does not believe that the universe
actually
undergoes any such recurring cycle. There are passages, to be sure, in which he toys with arguments concerning the play of finite resources in infinite time, arguments whose intended upshot seems to be that all of the finitely many states that the universe can be in it will be in, and will be in again, infinitely many times (e.g.
Will
, §§1062 and 1066). But there are issues about what exactly Nietzsche is doing with these arguments, unconvincing and readily refutable as they are.
⁹¹
And elsewhere he all but explicitly denies that the universe undergoes any such recurring cycle (e.g.
Untimely Meditations
, III.1, opening paragraph, and
Gay Science
, §109).