Simply Nietzsche, page 6
First, it seems straightforward that we are being asked whether we can have either a positive or negative attitude toward the demon’s proposition. Not as straightforward is what kind of attitudes are relevant here. Liking or not liking are too crude to capture the kinds of reaction that the demon’s proposition is supposed to elicit. Elsewhere, Nietzsche gave us a clue to what kind of attitude he had in mind. This is a concept that he was thinking about at the same time as the eternal recurrence, and it is that of “amorfati” or “love of fate.” In the first section of book 4 of The Gay Science (section 247), he wrote:
I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as is what is beautiful in them—thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! … [A]ll in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!
Notice that there is love of fate and a recognition of what is “necessary” in things. So one might put matters this way: it is not merely that I accept that certain things were necessary for the good things to happen, such as, for example, going through the pain of a divorce, which leads to a new love. That would be not affirming one’s life, but affirming only a part of it. For one could consistently recognize that the divorce was necessary, but nevertheless wish that it weren’t so. Nietzsche, I think, didn’t want us to merely affirm certain parts of our lives and begrudgingly recognize that some things were necessary for those parts. Instead, he wanted us to affirm—“say yes”—to life as a whole, rather than dividing it into parts to which one can “say yes” and those to which one does not make the same proclamation. It is to see and affirm everything as equally necessary. To affirm is not to see everything as good—that would be absurd—but to have an equally positive attitude to everything that enters into its composition. It is life as a whole that is affirmed. The thought of the eternal return is a test to see if one has the attitude of amor fati; whether, that is, one affirms life.
The eternal return might not be merely a test to discover those who do affirm life, but instead a device to get the reader to attempt to affirm. It doesn’t simply find out who affirms but tries to encourage affirmation in the reader. But neither of these readings is quite right. For it is also, at the very least, a test to determine who can “affirm” rather than just an injunction to do so. Nietzsche asked whether or not one is capable of affirming, suggesting that some—perhaps very few—are capable of doing so, whereas many others are not. And in his notebooks, he suggested that it is slightly more than a test. It is “a doctrine…. powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world weary” (The Will to Power 862). When Nietzsche asked in GS 341, “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself to long for nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?” he was encouraging readers to become so well-disposed—something, he believed, that only the strong are capable of.
But there is a puzzle here too. For, in various places, Nietzsche seems to suggest that we are nothing but “pieces of fate:” everything that occurs to us is mere happenstance, and not caused by anything we do. Thus, in the section immediately after the introduction of the concept of amor fati, entitled “personal providence” (GS 276), he talked of everything turning out “for the best”—not because of some divine plan, but because of the “beautiful chaos of existence” which produces a “harmony” in the events that constitute a life and, crucially, a “harmony that sounds too good for us to dare take credit for it.” One doesn’t do anything to produce harmony; it just occurs. But affirming one’s life sounds awfully like something one does and also, something that Nietzsche encourages us—or at least the strong among us—to do. So, if we cannot do anything to affirm, what is the point of trying to encourage a few persons to affirm? I propose to leave this issue until later in this chapter. I will also say a little more about the eternal recurrence in the next chapter. Right now, I shall turn to the second of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas that are introduced in The Gay Science, namely the “death of God.”
The death of God
Section 125 of the Gay Science, entitled “The Madman,” is a brilliant example of Nietzsche’s ability to pack into a relatively short piece of writing some profound, prophetic, and subtle ideas. In outline, it contains the following: a madman arrives at a marketplace in the bright morning light, and lights a lantern. He cries “incessantly” that he is “looking for God.” Many of the people in the square don’t believe in God, and so start to mock him, shouting over each other and laughing. Has God emigrated? Has he been lost? The madman stops them by giving his own answer to the question of where God has gone. “We have killed him … We are all his murderers!” he exclaims. He then asks some questions about what this means for us. Now that we have “unchained the Earth,” to where are we spinning, are we breathing empty space? Do we need to light lanterns in the morning rather than rely on the sun to rise? God is dead and what we smell is “divine decomposition.” And is the magnitude of the deed too great for us? “Do we not have to become gods in order merely to appear worthy of it? he asks,” adding that “whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up until now!” His mockers now become silently disconcerted, as the madman throws down his lantern, declaring that he has “come too early … the tremendous event is still on its way” and, in fact, the deed done—the murder of God—is as remote as the stars to the people in the marketplace, even though the killing was done by them. The madman, it is reported, broke into churches, chanting “Grant unto God eternal rest,” and when challenged, he stated that churches are nothing more than tombs of God’s existence.
What are we to make of this story? The first thing to emphasize is that Nietzsche himself did not claim to have refuted God’s existence. For the most part, he simply took atheism as the only viable intellectual position on this issue and did not attempt to argue for it. “What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons,” he wrote (GS 132). Remember, after all, that the madman’s announcement of God’s death is directed at people who already do not believe in God. The passage is about the aftermath of the abandonment of that belief, but the crowd in the marketplace seems utterly unconcerned about how it will affect them. The madman is fervently exclaiming that this event will have a monumental impact, of which those in the marketplace have little or no inkling. The madman has come “too early” for the effect to have occurred.
Before we come to what that effect is, it is clear, I think, that the “madman” is Nietzsche himself. The madman has been trying to think through the consequences of God’s death, recognizing that, metaphorically, the earth has now been unchained. The declaration that he has “come too early” reflects something Nietzsche says about his own work, namely that it is “untimely” and what is needed are philosophers and philosophies “of the future” (Beyond Good and Evil is subtitled “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”). In the preface to the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche wrote: “[m]y day won’t come until the day after tomorrow. Some people are born posthumously.” The reaction of those in the marketplace is reminiscent of a situation that Nietzsche described in GS 2. He counted himself as one of the few with a genuine intellectual conscience, finding contemptible those people who do not react to questions about existence, like himself, without hatred or at least faint amusement. There is faint amusement in the marketplace, not at the question so much, but at the person asking it, and that is because they have no real grasp of the question’s enormity.
What of the lantern? Nietzsche had recently started to stay in Sils Maria, which he would revisit for three months almost every summer for the rest of his sane life. Despite his continuing poor health—his poor eyesight meant he could no longer read, and so he concentrated on writing, or, rather, dictating his own insights—the village in the Swiss Alps became a sanctuary for him. He stayed in a small room, lit by a single lantern. Nietzsche—the solitary man with a solitary lantern—confronted those not ready for his thought. There is, I think, further significance to the image of lighting the lantern in broad daylight. If God is light, and he is dead, then another source of light is required. This is obviously not the literal sense of darkness, just as it is not literally the case that the earth has become unchained. Rather, it suggests that God was supposed to be the source of meaning and value in our world. Nietzsche realized, and those in the marketplace did not, that the death of God means the decay—the “decomposition”—of that which has supported the meaning and values shaping the existence in the Judeo-Christian world. The lantern is a human-made source of light: it is humanity that will have to become the source of metaphorical light in the future.
This brings us to the significance of God’s death for Nietzsche: its impact on the ideals, meanings, and values possible for human lives. Its content is far more subtle and complex than the simple thesis positing that without God, life becomes devoid of value. The first point is this: Nietzsche didn’t think such values—and we will come to what these might be a little later—would simply disappear overnight. He had several reasons. First, he didn’t seem to think Christianity would disappear altogether. He believed, quite plausibly, that people aren’t Christians because they have some evidence for the existence of God, but rather because they are of certain psychological dispositions and live in certain cultures where that way of understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos suits the needs of the human creature. No amount of rational criticism is going to shift the complex combination of culture and psychology that determines someone’s Christianity. Instead, Nietzsche became increasingly concerned with its significance of the death of God for the small number capable of adequately appreciating it.
Second, Nietzsche believed that sincere atheism is only part of the story. I said above that the death of God is the death of that which underpins meaning and the values of the Judeo-Christian world. What that does not mean is that the values disappear overnight, or that it is inevitable that they disappear at all, even if we all became atheists overnight. What Nietzsche had in mind was the broader notion that Christianity provides an overarching account, or interpretation, of human existence and all that we experience within it. Our sufferings and misfortunes are not meaningless events, but instances of punishment, the taint of original sin, or part of an earthly testing ground, only to be redeemed in the afterlife. One’s fortunes, advantages, and talents are not the mere caprice of nature, but gifts from God. Injustices on Earth will be corrected in heaven, and the meek shall inherit everything. The concatenation of events—which really is nothing other than the “beautiful chaos of existence”—is imbued with meaning and order, with reasons for why just such and such happens, and why what happens is the best. This interpretation of human nature, and the place of human beings in nature generally, also gives intelligibility to certain ideals of human life. We are all created equally in God’s image, and the exemplar of a good life is Christ’s selflessness in giving his life to redeem the world. Charity, compassion, selflessness, and concern for others represent the ideal human traits. The truly good people give themselves in the service of others and are not driven by the acquisition of worldly goods or pleasures.
The death of God is the death of this all-encompassing interpretation of human nature. But as I noted, its implications are complex. It does not, as I mentioned above, mean the values that disappear. And not only did Nietzsche think Christianity would remain alive for many people, but he also believed that the values of selflessness, which are structured by the ideals that the Christian account of human nature ascribes, remain even for atheists who explicitly reject Christianity. The most conspicuous example of this is Schopenhauer. He was a self-declared atheist, and yet at the same time professed an ethics of selflessness and compassion, along with an ascetic conception of virtue. The good person is one who chooses a life of voluntary poverty and chastity. Nietzsche, however, thought Schopenhauer had not properly reflected on the implications of his atheism. He had rejected the Christian interpretation of human existence but had not questioned the values that were shaped by it. This point is behind the first mention of the death of God in The Gay Science, which is entitled “New Battles” (GS 108): “God is dead; but … there may be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must defeat his shadow as well!” Schopenhauer’s ethics—and, as Nietzsche foresaw, the morality of the liberal West—stood and still stands in the shadow of God.
Does this mean that we should simply reject the values that the Christian interpretation underwrites? Should Schopenhauer have dropped compassion as well as God? Again, matters are not that simple. Nietzsche’s intention was not a total rejection of Christian values, but what he termed in later works the “re-valuation of all values.” Rather than taking, say, compassion as unquestionably of positive, and ever overriding moral worth, we should consider its worth as we do other values, in light of the correct conception of human nature. That is when, as he put it in GS 109, “the shadows of god no longer darken us,” and we “begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature.” This requires a cold look at just what kind of creatures we are and the invention of new ideals for them. Nietzsche saw himself right at the beginning of this task: as such, he had come to the marketplace too early.
“Beautiful chaos of existence”
Nietzsche returned to the death of God once more in The Gay Science, right at the beginning of the fifth book. We shall return to it, but not in this chapter. As I mentioned above, the fifth book was written when Nietzsche was composing what are perhaps his two greatest works, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. That is why I shall revisit his thoughts about God’s death in the context of discussing his later works. But as well as the possibility of revaluing all values that come with it, there is a further thing that Nietzsche claimed in The Gay Science—namely, that values themselves are human creations. As I mentioned, we can think the madman lighting a lantern is an indication of “illumination”—of meaning and value—which is not from God but from human beings. In this connection, Nietzsche wrote in GS 301 of the “delusion of the contemplative ones.” The delusion is that we are merely spectators, and that value is something that is there independently of us. Beauty is just “there, anyway.” Instead, the world independent of human beings is completely devoid of value: “whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less—but rather has been given, granted value, and we are the givers and granters.”
Now, the claim that value in the world—beauty, both aesthetic and moral—is (somehow) projected onto the world by human beings who feel and judge, was not new to Nietzsche. The great 18th-century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, said that we “gild and stain” natural objects with “colours borrowed from internal sentiment.” Like Nietzsche, Hume thought that values (somehow) depend on our feelings for their existence. Nietzsche, however, didn’t merely see this as a fact about values, but also as something that we need to be conscious of and exploit. We “misjudge our best power, and underestimate ourselves just a bit. We … are neither as proud or as happy as we could be.” Not only did Nietzsche suggest that values should be revalued, but also that we should further view ourselves as “creators” of value. More precisely, in later works, he called for “philosophers of the future” to be creators of value.
We will pursue that thought—and its relation to the project of “revaluation”—later in this book. But it is connected to another idea I mentioned earlier in this chapter: that one can read The Gay Science as promoting honest artistry as a form of life. There is the terrible question about the meaning of existence, to be met with a superficiality born from profundity. The “superficiality” is not supposed to license what we would normally construe as superficiality, but instead a concern with forms, of imposing, of creating something aesthetically pleasing out of the “beautiful chaos of existence.” In some moods, Nietzsche seemed inclined to think that imposing artistic interpretations meant wilfully embracing an illusion. Thus, in GS 299, “What one should learn from artists,” he wrote of viewing aspects of life in such contexts, so that “each partially distorts the new [view] one has of the others and allows for only perspectival glimpse.” In GS 107, “Our ultimate gratitude to art,” there is a mention of a “good will” to appearance, to art as the “cult of the untrue.” This echoes The Birth of Tragedy, namely that “an aesthetic phenomenon is existence still bearable to us.” In a much-discussed passage, entitled “One thing is needful!” (GS 290), Nietzsche suggested that we should treat ourselves as artworks. The one “needful thing” is
[t]o “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all their strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weakness delight the eye…. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity…. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear that how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small.
