Nihilism, Naturalism, and the Will to Power in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist
Christian J. Emden
1
Nihilism is an integral part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. He begins to use the term “nihilism” for the first time in the summer of 1880, and although his discussion of nihilism culminates in 1886 and 1887, already his much earlier account of “pessimism” is connected to philosophical tropes of nothingness since the late 1860s.1 Nihilism, as Nietzsche conceives of the latter in his late writings, is, however, fundamentally different from modern pessimism. Furthermore, the interesting question is not whether, or not, he views himself as a nihilist (Danto 1965, 22 and 30–33, and Schacht 1995, 35–61). Rather, it is whether Nietzsche’s philosophical project aims at overcoming nihilism, and this question is best answered by relating his discussion of nihilism to the overall naturalistic commitments of his philosophical project, which also includes the will to power.
Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, written in 1888 and published only in 1895, can easily be understood as presenting a strong argument for the overcoming of nihilism. Indeed, already in the first few paragraphs, Nietzsche introduces a far-reaching opposition between “happiness,” on the one hand, and the “nihilistic values” of Christianity, on the other (A 1 and 6). It seems that nihilism stands in a clear opposition to life and nature as they become manifest in the will to power; nihilism emerges on the grounds of a distinctly Christian moral doctrine of pity and selflessness that specifically despises and rejects the natural conditions of what we regard as being human.2 If nihilism, then, entails the rejection of life, and thus leads to despair about what we, as human beings, really are, overcoming nihilism would have to constitute an affirmation of life (Reginster 2006 and Brock 2015, 338–86). Although I am going to argue that Nietzsche, neither in The Antichrist nor elsewhere, fully embraces such a straightforward opposition between nihilism and nature, one of the most famous passages of The Antichrist seems to point into exactly this direction:
I consider life to be an instinct for growth, for endurance, for the accumulation of force, for power: where there is no will to power, there is decline. My claim is that none of humanity’s highest values have had this will—that nihilistic values, values of decline, have taken control under the aegis of the holiest names. (A 6)
The way in which Nietzsche, in this passage and throughout The Antichrist, integrates nihilism into a discourse of decline and décadence that is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition at large obviously suggests that his central interest must be the overcoming of nihilism (Kuhn 1992, 250–55).3 Moreover, overcoming nihilism seems a necessary part of his wider philosophical project, since nihilism is inextricably bound up with metaphysical and moral claims that are central not only to Christianity but also to German idealism as a quasi-secular extension of Protestant Christianity: “Nihilist and Christian: this rhymes, it does more than just rhyme,” he famously notes (A 58). Even though the transcendental philosophy of German idealism—in particular idealism of the Kantian kind—dissolves God into the “thing-in-itself,” it continues to stipulate the existence of an authentic “world of being” beyond the mere appearances of nature that mark human life (A 17).
It is at this moment, however, that a peculiar problem begins to arise as soon as we relate Nietzsche’s seemingly straightforward claims in The Antichrist to some of his earlier work, such as the final essay of GM (1887). In the latter case, Nietzsche clearly presents Christianity as a prime example for the “ascetic ideal,” and even though the ascetic ideal entails a “will to nothingness,” and therefore “nihilism,” willing nothingness “remains a will” (GM III: 14 and 28). But if willing nothingness remains a will, then it also has to be understood as a manifestation of the “will to power”: even the ascetic ideal, albeit in an indirect fashion, is “life-affirming” despite its denial of the value of life (GM III: 18). The denial of life, as it is central to Christian moral thought, ultimately requires a surprising “intellectual rigour” that places considerable emphasis on the critical value of truth, which in turn complicates the seemingly clear-cut opposition between nihilism and the will to power as it appears at the beginning of The Antichrist.
In the final essay of GM, Nietzsche also identifies the “nihilists” with the “Antichrists,” the “immoralists,” and the “sceptics,” whom he generally holds in rather high regard as precisely those free spirits that are able to step outside traditional moral philosophy (GM III: 24). To be sure, it is not the case that Nietzsche seeks to attribute to Christianity a positive dimension, or a conscious form of critique that openly reflects on the natural preconditions of Christian moral doctrine. Rather, because Christianity, adhering to an ascetic ideal, is also committed to the value of truth, it is eventually bound to turn against itself, albeit unintentionally. The seemingly nihilistic rejection of life Nietzsche criticizes in The Antichrist always already entails its exact opposite: the life-affirming possibility of new and different values (GM III: 27). Nihilism, in other words, does not simply claim that life is meaningless, or that life has to be rejected, but it entails the possibility of values. Philosophically as much as historically, nihilism is the condition under which new values are able to emerge:
All great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation: that is the law of life, the law of necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—the lawgiver himself is always ultimately exposed to the cry: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.” In this way, Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality, in the same way Christianity as a morality must also be destroyed—we stand on the threshold of this occurrence. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it will finally draw the strongest conclusion, that against itself; this will, however, happen when it asks itself, “What does all will to truth mean?” . . . and here I touch on my problem again, on our problem . . .: what meaning does our being have, if it were not that that will to truth has become conscious of itself as a problem in us? . . . Without a doubt, from now on, morality will be destroyed by the will to truth’s becoming-conscious-of-itself: that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most dubious drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope. (GM III: 27)
What Nietzsche underscores in this passage is the complex philosophical ambiguity of nihilism, as opposed to a merely pejorative use of the term “nihilism.”4 First of all, that all “great things” will eventually bring about their own demise and decay cannot be limited to Christian moral doctrine, but it must also include any appeal to the affirmation of life as a specific value that, for Nietzsche, is supposed to be constitutive of human agency and, as such, is able to guide human agency in an otherwise meaningless world.5 If overcoming nihilism, and thus overcoming the life-denying values of Christian doctrine, should really lead to some sort of normative practical autonomy for human beings qua natural beings, since these beings now have to make their own values, then it must also be the case that these new values, much like the assumption of autonomy’s normative import, will eventually be subject to their “necessary‘self-overcoming’”: whatever the overcoming of nihilism might lead to, this will also need to be overcome and thus necessarily lead back into nihilism. What keeps this process alive, as a manifestation of the will to power, is the “will to truth,” and it is important to recognize that, for Nietzsche, this will to truth remains “a problem in us”: as a problem it cannot be resolved, because it is in us as natural beings. The will to truth—as a will to value truth—is part of what we are as natural beings, and as natural beings we cannot really ever overcome nihilism. On the one hand, as Nietzsche clearly points out, this situation is “terrible” in the sense that any affirmation of life entails tragedy; on the other hand, it is also a situation “most rich in hope” in the sense that it allows for the tragic affirmation of life, and thus the creation of new values, to occur. Nihilism is not the opposite of the affirmation of life, but it is bound up with the latter to such an extent that the one always is the condition of the other.
This ambiguity of nihilism also comes to the fore in the death of God which, in GS (1882/87), is the philosophical center piece of nihilism in European modernity. That “God is dead” is, for Nietzsche, “the greatest recent event” through which the normative order of the Christian tradition has finally destroyed itself, but the resulting experience of nihilism is “not at all sad and gloomy”—after all, the death of God or, rather, the self-destruction of the metaphysical belief in a transcendent but somehow personal God opens up the possibility to properly examine the value of having values, so that “finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright” (GS 343).
The ambiguity that pertains to philosophical nihilism, and that is crucial for the discussion of nihilism in GS and GM, certainly sets Nietzsche apart from a range of philosophers, dating back to the late eighteenth century, who have used the term mainly in its pejorative sense in sweeping attacks on the seemingly formal emptiness of German idealism from Kant to Fichte and Hegel (Obereit 1787, 54–56; Obereit 1792; Jenisch 1796).6 Moreover, since nihilism, for Nietzsche, allows for the creation of values in an otherwise entirely meaningless world characterized only by the interplay of necessity and contingency, Nietzsche’s account of nihilism shares central features of Fichte’s and Hegel’s discussions of the conditions on thinking, which their critics were quick to reject as nihilism (Jacobi 1799 and Weisse 1833). For Fichte, before the self can postulate an empirical world of things and a normative world of values, the self needs to posit itself from nothing as the condition of the world of things and values (Fichte 1982 [1794–95], 100–01). “The self,” he notes, “begins by an absolute positing of its own existence. . . . Everything that exists does so only insofar as it is posited in the self, and apart from the self there is nothing” (Fichte 1982 [1794–95], 99–100). For Hegel, the only way to overcome the dilemma of being and nothingness—that the self was able to posit itself in nothingness—was through the paradoxical argument that being and nothing, in a specific respect, were essentially the same (Hegel 1969–71 [1812–16], 82–83 and 93–96). “Pure Being,” he suggested somewhat apodictically, “makes the beginning: because it is on one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate” (Hegel 1975 [1817], 124, §86). Pure being, in this respect, is not yet determined as the being of something.
While Nietzsche would certainly take offense at the language of transcendental idealism that marks Fichte’s and Hegel’s discussions of nothingness, the indeterminate situation that is the result of the death of God in GS, and that opens up the horizon to the possibility of creating and setting new values, is remarkably close to Fichte’s and Hegel’s accounts of the conditions of thinking. The crucial difference, however, is that Nietzsche integrates this indeterminacy into a philosophical naturalism that also stands in the background of his discussion of nihilism in The Antichrist:
The total character of the world . . . is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called. . . . Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word “accident” have a meaning. (GS 109)
For Nietzsche, this insight in the world’s lack of meaning and purpose also implies that norms and values lack any authority, or standard, beyond the human world in which they emerge. Nihilism, then, does not merely state that life is meaningless, or that there is no meaning to begin with; rather, since nihilism is the consequence of the will to truth, it poses the normative question: how should any norms and values even be possible in a world entirely devoid of such values and norms? Although this might be counterintuitive, I will argue that this question also guides Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism in The Antichrist.
2
Against the background of what I have noted thus far, it seems questionable that the opposition between a life-denying nihilism that is central to Christianity, on the one hand, and the affirmation of life, on the other, is quite as clear-cut as often assumed. This does not mean, however, that Nietzsche’s position has developed into a different direction in the aftermath of the essays GM, or that, in The Antichrist, he begins to contradict himself, or his earlier arguments. Rather, we have to understand his reflections on nihilism in The Antichrist not merely as part of a broader attack on Christianity, but also as reflecting a continued commitment to philosophical naturalism. In The Antichrist he is, indeed, quite clear about this commitment, when he notes, for instance, that “we have stuck human beings back among the animals” and that “humans are in no way the crown of creation” and therefore not better, or distinct from, the rest of what we regard as living nature (A 14).
Nevertheless, recent discussions of Nietzsche’s account of nihilism, albeit often committed to some form of naturalism, have taken the argument into a different direction by pointing to the fairly straightforward opposition between nihilism and the affirmation of life that also appears in the opening passages of The Antichrist. In a strange and unlikely philosophical alliance between Martin Heidegger’s assessment of nihilism as a manifestation of the crisis of Western culture, on the one hand, and recent analytic commentators, on the other, Nietzsche’s philosophical project is seen as highlighting the need to overcome nihilism (Heidegger 2009 [1933], 112; Heidegger 2002 [1943], 163–64; Heidegger 1979–87 [1961], IV, 1–58). Ofelia Schutte, for instance, claimed that, although Nietzsche himself cannot always avoid nihilism, his philosophical project seeks to reach “beyond nihilism” and that his discussion of nihilism is aimed at “overcoming and transcending nihilism” (Schutte 1984, xi, 4, 7, 87–88, 97, 146, and 190). Although Bernard Reginster accepted the ambiguous nature of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, his reduction of nihilism to an exclusively psychological experience with existential implications likewise forces him to think of the task of Nietzsche’s philosophy along the lines of overcoming nihilism: since nihilism claims that life has no meaning, Nietzsche has to advocate for a conception of “life,” in the psychological sense of the term, that is “inspired” by a “goal” and a “faith” (Reginster 2006, 23–24). The latter might only be relevant as a corrective to nihilism as long as this goal is experienced as valuable and, at the same time, actually achievable in the real world, but behind such claims also stands the vision of an existentially authentic life that bears strong metaphysical overtones which Nietzsche himself, presumably, would have viewed with some skepticism. Nevertheless, Brian Leiter has also attributed to Nietzsche a position that short-circuits nihilism with the psychological experience of “despair,” and such despair comes to the fore especially in cases of meaningless suffering (Leiter 2014, 196 and 206–08). Although there are other kinds of nihilism occasionally to be discovered in Nietzsche’s writings, Leiter suggests, what Nietzsche ultimately seeks to correct is a “suicidal nihilism” that renders any normative commitments and any evaluative stance toward life impossible (Leiter 2014, 211, 214, and 228–30). Most worryingly, however, Julian Young argues from what seems to be an existentially tinged religious perspective that Nietzsche’s philosophy is not only a response to nihilism as such, but that nihilism is simply the loss of an ultimate goal or meaning (Young 2006, 124–30, 167, and 179).
It is not difficult to see that Young’s discussion of nihilism transforms Nietzsche’s philosophy into a metaphysics with Heideggerian overtones. But the language of inspiration, goal, and achievement, and the denigration of meaningless suffering, that are central to Schutte’s, Reginster’s, and Leiter’s account also need to be taken with some caution. I have already suggested that behind such language stands a commitment to an authentically meaningful life as a normative standard that cannot anymore be questioned and that is remarkably close to Heidegger’s conception of authentic being.7 Although Reginster and Leiter, mainly because of their emphasis on moral psychology and meta-ethics, probably would not regard Nietzsche’s philosophical project as an exercise in metaphysics in the narrow sense of the term, the question remains whether overcoming nihilism always has to entertain metaphysical commitments that would prove difficult to justify on the grounds of Nietzsche’s project. Perhaps Theodor W. Adorno was right, after all, when he noted, with an eye on Heidegger: “Acts of overcoming—even of nihilism . . .—are always worse than what they overcome” (Adorno 1973, 380).
Second, Reginster and Leiter in particular view Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism in predominantly psychological terms: nihilism is best understood along the lines of a nihilistic despair that exacerbates the meaninglessness of life by evaluating negatively everything that belongs to life. As a consequence, Leiter tends to bring Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism into close proximity to Arthur Schopenhauer’s account of pessimism, while Reginster views nihilism almost entirely through the lens of pessimism (Leiter 2014, 43–44, and Reginster 2006, 28–33). Overcoming pessimism, however, is not the same as overcoming nihilism. Pessimism consists in the assumption that, throughout human life and history, harm and suffering outweigh both pleasure and the moral good, so that, as far as human agency is concerned, it will always be necessary to expect that our actions have negative consequences. As such, pessimism requires a normative standard that is external to pessimism itself and according to which we can evaluate that harm and suffering actually do outweigh pleasure and life. Nietzsche, as we shall see later, rejects any such external normative standard. Moreover, he views the kinds of pessimism that leads to despair as a specifically modern phenomenon; it is, in short, a romantic attitude of “excessive sensibility” that fails to understand the reality of human suffering in a truly meaningless world (GS 48). The crucial point is not that meaningless suffering has to be overcome, but it is rather that the affirmation of life has to accept the meaninglessness of suffering.
In contrast to pessimism, nihilism implies the more radical claim that moral and epistemic values cannot exist as a normative standard that is external to our life as natural beings. In a world that is inherently meaningless, the values we create out of necessity can always become subject to a revaluation as soon as our will to truth leads to a radical form of skepticism that unearths the meaninglessness of the world. Behind every skepticism, every critique, stands nihilism. But instead of, thus, opting for a philosophy of pessimist despair, Nietzsche comes to accept a “completely de-deified nature” in order to “naturalize humanity,” that is, in order to recognize that what we regard as the normative world we live in simply cannot be separated from our meaningless existence as natural beings (GS 109). Nihilism offers a glimpse into the fundamental paradox of normativity as it comes to the fore in modern philosophy: the death of God clearly shows that there are no external authorities that in any way safeguard the binding force of the normative commitments we make, both epistemically as much as ethically, and yet we cannot escape these normative claims as natural beings.
3
In order to understand more clearly how Nietzsche’s naturalistic commitments undercut the seemingly straightforward opposition between nihilism and the affirmation of life, it is necessary to move away from a primarily psychological conception of nihilism and human flourishing. This will also allow us to recognize that, like the ascetic ideal in GM, the nihilism entailed by Christian moral thought and, by extension, German idealism, remains an expression of the will to power. If this is, indeed, the case, we also have to realize that nihilism does not stand in opposition to the will to power and the affirmation of life, but the will to power is always bound up with nihilism and behind the affirmation of life always stands nihilism as that which allows us to affirm life in the first place.
In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche’s understanding of life is not of a psychological kind, but it is grounded in biology. This already becomes obvious when he defines “life” in terms of an “instinct for growth” and “for power,” that is, as another term for what he describes as the “will to power” (A 6).8 Although his use of the term “instinct” seems to imply a psychological conception of the will to power, his claim about the will to power does not simply refer to “people’s feeling of power,” but it rather refers to power itself as something of which this feeling is a manifestation: “What is good? Everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself” (A 2). Since the will to power cannot be enhanced by something outside itself, what enhances people’s feeling of power is the will to power, or to put it differently: the feeling of power is an irreducible mental state that emerges from the will to power.
Precisely because Nietzsche conceives of the will to power in a biological sense, he is able to argue that we should will a different “type of human being” able to avoid the pitfalls of Christianity’s rejection of life; only such a new type of human being would be able to have a “future” (A 3). The task that he sets out for himself in The Antichrist is not only a sustained attack on the life-denying effects of Christianity, but also the provision of an answer to the question what kind of being might be able to avoid these negative effects. When he asks “What type of human being should be bred?” (A 3), it is first of all necessary to situate this reference to “breeding” in the broader context of his writings. In BGE (1886), for instance, he clearly views the emergence of a normative order in society as the result of such breeding:
For as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command. So, considering the fact that humanity has been the best and most long-standing breeding ground for the cultivation of obedience so far, it is reasonable to suppose that the average person has an innate need to obey as a type of formal conscience that commands: “Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something,” in short: “Thou shalt.” (BGE 199)
Nietzsche’s appeal to “breeding” and “innate needs” to describe the emergence of normative order certainly implies that the latter is the consequence of humanity’s natural history, which must also include Christian moral doctrine and metaphysics. Even Nietzsche’s alternative to the life-denying nihilism of Christian morality—the “new philosophers” and “free spirits”—does not undercut the natural history of this normative order. A new kind of human being that has accepted the implications of the death of God, and that has found a new kind of autonomy that put her into the position of “a new type of . . . commander,” would still be constrained by the natural history of the normative order that allows for this realization of autonomy to happen (BGE 203). Seen from this perspective, “breeding” is a descriptive term that refers to precisely the kind of practices which make us, as human beings, part of the natural world. Not only the “morality of the herd” is a result of such breeding, but so is “an aristocratic community (such as Venice or an ancient Greek polis)” which runs counter to the morality of the herd (BGE 262). For both the Christian and for the free spirit or philosopher of the future, the reality of life is simply that they have been “bred”:
The project of domesticating the human beast as well as the project of breeding a certain species of human have both been called “improvements”: only by using these zoological terms can we begin to express the realities here—realities, of course, that the typical proponents of “improvement,” the priests, do not know anything about, do not want to know anything about. (TI VII: 2)9
It is precisely this natural history of breeding—as Nietzsche points out in TI, written in the same year as The Antichrist—that Christianity specifically denies, despite the fact that it is itself a product of this natural history. This also implies, however, that, for Nietzsche, Christian nihilism is itself part of our natural history, but the very same natural history also opens the door to breeding a different kind of human committed to the affirmation of her own natural preconditions on the grounds of nihilism. As such, the herd morality and the new human being who is supposed to overcome the nihilism of this herd morality are the result of the same natural history, even though the kind of human being Nietzsche envisions as overcoming the denial of life seems “terrible” from the perspective of the Christian herd animal (A 3).
Keeping in mind Nietzsche’s discussion of breeding throughout the 1880s, it now becomes more obvious why he is able to claim that “the human is an endpoint” (A 3), which surely implies that we cannot simply overcome what we already are: the human being that, in The Antichrist seems intent on overcoming Christianity’s nihilism is not different from human beings in general, but it is a variation of what already exists and what always has been possible. The “nobles” Nietzsche discusses in GM might be a counterfactual example of this human being that he seems to pit against the life-denying nihilism of Christianity, but in The Antichrist his reference is specifically of a historical kind. The new human being that should be bred, as it were, subscribes to a set of moral values that more directly reflect this human being’s own natural history: “Virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtù, moraline-free virtue” (A 2).
Nietzsche’s obvious reference to Machiavelli’s conception of virtù is important for three reasons.10 First of all, Machiavelli uses virtù not in the sense of “virtue,” as opposed to “vice,” but in the sense of “skill,” “energy,” and “determination” (Machiavelli 1988 [1513], 30). Virtù is the intellectual capacity that allows Machiavelli’s ideal prince, much like Nietzsche’s free spirit, to counterbalance the possibly detrimental effects of chance, or fortuna: virtù, in other words, allows the individual to exist under the conditions of uncertainty that are part of a meaningless world (Machiavelli 1988 [1513], 84–87). As such, Machiavelli’s virtù is an expression of what Nietzsche views as the will to power. Second, for Machiavelli, as much as for Nietzsche, those human beings who are actually able to realize virtù are marked by a “pathos of distance,” an “aristocraticism of mind” (A 43), which allows them to reflect on the very conditions under which they exist.11 Third, the historically most famous example of such a “moraline-free” individual is, for Nietzsche, but also for Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia (Dombowsky 2004, 137–39; Detwiler 1990, 51–54). Indeed, the figure of Cesare Borgia underscores what really is at stake in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as an example of nihilism—an embrace of nihilism as the condition under which it becomes possible to revaluate the life-denying herd morality of Christianity:
Do people finally understand, do they want to understand what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of all Christian values, an attempt using all means, all instincts, all genius, to allow the opposite values, noble values to triumph. . . . I see a spectacle so ingenious and at the same time so wonderfully paradoxical that it would have given all the Olympic gods cause for immortal laughter—Cesare Borgia as Pope. . . . The old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity, was not sitting on the papal seat anymore! But rather, life! Rather, the triumph of life! (A 61)
Cesare Borgia, in other words, serves as a radical affirmation of life that itself only becomes possible because Christianity has made this triumph possible through its institutions and doctrines. The affirmation of life, then, does not simply overcome nihilism, but Nietzsche fully recognizes that the affirmation of life requires us to accept the meaninglessness of the world as the condition that allows for the creation of values as manifestations of the will to power.
4
If Nietzsche argues, first, that humanity as an endpoint cannot be overcome and, second, that nihilism is part of the natural history of humanity in a meaningless world, we have to ask whether The Antichrist, after all, can really be seen to advocate the overcoming of nihilism. What Nietzsche seems to suggest, rather, is the inevitable self-overcoming of a particular kind of life-denying philosophy that, in its denial of life, actually affirms life. Christianity’s denial of life and nature really constitutes a surface phenomenon. Christianity certainly represents “the corruption of humanity” that is the consequence of a loss of “instincts” and a preference for “harm” guided by its illusory conviction to really have overcome nature in its attempt to “devalue nature and natural values” (A 6 and 38). Morally, this corruption is derived from “pity” as “the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues,” although pity, as Nietzsche claims, ultimately “makes life worthy of negation” (A 7). But the feeling of pity is also a “practice of nihilism,” and as such a practice it is a kind of human agency and remains a manifestation of the will to power that seeks to overcome the resistance offered by the world in which we live. Pity, for Nietzsche, thus takes on a creative dimension “by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable” (A 7). Ostensibly directed against “pleasure,” and presenting the human body as “an object of hatred,” Christianity develops a specific “sense of cruelty” aimed against itself as much as against others (A 11 and 21). It is precisely through such acts and practices of negating what exists that Christianity wants to achieve what, from Nietzsche’s perspective, cannot be possible, namely a normative standard external to human life and nature that is able to transform the meaninglessness of the world into “the ‘meaning’ of life” (A 43). This focus on a meaning of life, which itself is not rooted in life but in something outside the life of human beings as natural beings, is the cardinal mistake of Christian moral philosophy and metaphysics:
When the emphasis of life is put in the “beyond” rather than on life itself—when it is put on nothingness—then the emphasis has been completely removed from life. The enormous lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts—everything beneficial and life-enhancing in the instincts, everything that guarantees the future, now arouses mistrust. To live in this way, so that there is no point to life any more, this now becomes the “meaning” of life. (A 43)12
Christian morality aims at creating meaning in a meaningless world, but what Christianity fails to comprehend is that any such meaning, and any values that guide our agency, cannot be detached from what we already are as human beings. Although it would be all too easy to read the above passage as a critique and rejection of nihilism, the crucial point Nietzsche makes is more complex: the problem is not that Christianity puts the “emphasis of life” on something that does not exist, “on nothingness,” but Christianity’s mistake rests on the fact that it fails to recognize that this really is nothingness, instead conceiving nothingness as something, meaninglessness as meaning, and nothing as being.13 Christian metaphysics, in other words, has to explain away that something, such as value, can come from nothing, and it achieves this by seeing this nothing as something, that is, God.14
Christianity, as Nietzsche presents it in The Antichrist, is thus marked by a decisive paradox: in denying the will to power it affirms the will to power, since its denial of life, and of the natural conditions of our existence, can only take place on the grounds of these very conditions. If Nietzsche’s demand to translate humanity back into nature, as the central task of his philosophical naturalism, also demands of us to become what we already are, then Christian moral thought and metaphysics become what they really are at the very moment that they enter the stage of nihilism. The metaphysical background assumptions that lead to this paradox, Nietzsche argues, become more apparent in the way in which German idealism—or rather: Nietzsche’s polemical version of Kant’s transcendental idealism—continues Christianity’s life-denying impulse, albeit under more secular conditions.
Despite the neo-Kantian stance that shapes Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism, and despite the proximity of his discussion of nihilism to Fichte and Hegel, Nietzsche’s attack on German idealism in The Antichrist is mainly an attack on what he regards as illusory metaphysical background commitments that shape Kant’s moral philosophy as much as the former members of the “Tübingen seminary,” such as Hegel (A 10).15 The central philosophical problem Nietzsche detects in this context is the assumption of an authentic meaning in a meaningless world, whose authenticity depends on “the concept of a ‘true world,’ the concept of morality as the essence of the world (the two most vicious errors in existence!)” (A 10). The truthfulness of the true world Nietzsche alludes to in this passage is, however, not simply a world characterized by the will to truth that he views as a manifestation of the will to power, but it is a world that already entails the assumption of moral authority: the true world is a moral standard, while the will to truth, in its most radical form, is a “moraline-free” skepticism ready to turn against itself. Nevertheless, precisely because “the lie of ‘the moral world order’ runs through the entire development of philosophy, even modern philosophy” (A 26), this lie, and with it the assumption of a true world that Nietzsche so neatly deconstructs in TI, is part of our very own natural history as human beings. It is no accident that Nietzsche, in this passage, uses the word “development,” Entwicklung, rather than “history,” since he regards the history of philosophy here in evolutionary terms. The “high point of humanity” is reached when the true world is gone and “we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one” (TI IV), that is, when we, as natural beings, have been able to recognize the potential that comes along with the death of God: the dangerously critical potential of nihilism.
What Christianity and German idealism lack, on the other hand, is an insight into the critical potential of understanding that the world really is, in the sense of GS, utterly meaningless. Instead, the metaphysical turn of German idealism, from Nietzsche’s somewhat idiosyncratic point of view, does not merely divide reality into reality and appearance, but it rather presents the phenomenal world as something that is inauthentic, while the noumenal world, the world of being, gains in authenticity precisely because it is withdrawn from reality and thus from knowledge. “Reality was made into ‘mere appearance’” and “a complete lie called ‘the world of being’ was made into reality” (A 10), but the assumed primacy of the world of being depends on those Kantian things-in-themselves about which nothing can be known at all. Not only the world we claim to be reality has been turned into inauthentic appearances, but even the world of being cannot be accessed by human beings.
Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), does not, and in fact cannot, make the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves quite as clearly and dramatically as many of his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers assumed it to be.16 His “transcendental idealism” allows for a realist account of the world that is closer to Nietzsche’s naturalism than Nietzsche himself would be willing to admit: that our knowledge is limited to “appearances” which are “mere representations,” and therefore “not . . . things in themselves,” does not prevent Kant to “concede the existence of matter without . . . assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me”—after all, these representations and appearances need to come from somewhere, so that transcendental idealism also entails the perspective of the “empirical realist” (Kant 1998 [1781/1787], 426 [A 369–70]).17 For Nietzsche, however, dividing the world into inauthentic appearances and an authentic being that escapes human knowledge implied something more radical, as it were: whatever Protestant theology before Kant saw as God, German idealism has now dissolved into the “thing-in-itself” (A 17), but both God and the thing-in-itself really refer to nothing at all. The metaphysical claims of German idealism, on this account, continued the problem that shaped the metaphysical background commitments of Christian theology, without ever fully realizing what was at stake: “God as the deification of nothingness” and “the canonization of the will to nothingness,” which neither were recognized as such (A 18).
5
The metaphysical commitments of German idealism, as Nietzsche describes them in The Antichrist, have far-reaching consequences for the moral claims made by Christian doctrine and Kantian philosophy. In both cases, our reasons for acting in one way or another are of an external nature, that is, they are external to both our actions and to what we are as natural beings. The morality of pity that Nietzsche attributes to the Christian tradition is ultimately rooted by Christian metaphysics in something that is beyond life, preferably God. Likewise, “Kant as a moralist” derives the reasons for acting morally not from these actions, or from our existence as natural beings, but rather from an external normative standard, “‘goodness in itself’,” which is supposed to be “impersonal and universally valid” and which is thus detached from life (A 11). Nietzsche, in contrast, emphasizes that any normative standard that allows us to create values, and that also allows us to evaluate what is useful for us in one way or another, needs to be internal to us as natural beings who are always engaged in some kind of agency:
A virtue needs to be our own invention, our own most personal need and self-defence: on any other sense, a virtue is just dangerous. Whatever is not a condition for life harms it: a virtue that comes exclusively from a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue” [i.e., virtue as such; CJE], as Kant would have it, is harmful. . . . The most basic laws of preservation and growth require the opposite: that everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives. (A 11)
The crucial point in this passage is not the rejection of Kantian moral philosophy, but rather the way in which Nietzsche does not deny the value of virtue, while emphasizing that the value of virtue as a normative standard for human action has to be derived from what we already are as natural beings. Nietzsche, in other words, opts for a kind of reason internalism.18 At the same time, it would be a fatal misunderstanding to argue that, for Nietzsche, internal reasons are simply the subjective creations of an individual, and that moral values are thus entirely relative. Rather, if our actions depend on internal reasons that are constitutive of what we are as human beings, these internal reasons will always have emerged within the context of our natural history as a species. They are always more than merely individual reasons.
The reason internalism that comes along with Nietzsche’s naturalism, and that also includes what can be described as a form of constitutivism, has two important consequences for his discussion of nihilism in The Antichrist. First of all, what separates the free spirits who are able to overcome Christian morality and metaphysics from those who adhere to Christianity is not their radical difference, but it is rather that they are able to have an insight into what they really are: “Let us not underestimate the fact that we ourselves, we free spirits, already constitute a ‘revaluation of all values,’ a living declaration of war on and victory over all old concepts of ‘true’ and ‘untrue’” (A 13).19 The revaluation of all values is lived in the practices and actions of those free spirits, who recognize that their agency is a manifestation of the will to power and thus of life. Second, Christian theology and German idealism might deny the will to power in their rejection of life and nature, but they still cannot escape the will to power, even though their will always destroys the illusions that they live by, since it is “the will to an end, the nihilistic will willing power” (A 9).
For Nietzsche, this nihilistic will willing power does indeed have a function within the natural history of human beings, and the ascetic ideal of Christianity remains a manifestation of the will to power. Even though it is certainly misguided, for instance, to derive “humanity from ‘spirit,’ from ‘divinity,’” the very fact that we can do so if it can bring us advantages makes human beings “the strongest animals because they are the most cunning” (A 14). Likewise, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche describes the slave revolt that was central to his critique of Christianity in GM (I:10) as an “ingenious” manifestation of power which was able to employ “the ressentiment of the masses” as a “weapon” and which was able to use appeals to an otherworldly morality of pity as a “technique for seduction” (A 24, 43, and 44). Moreover, even though Christianity’s cultural success very much depends on an “instinct of hatred for reality,” the latter is above all an instinct and, as such, represents “physiological realities” that make Christianity, as much as German idealism, part of the natural history of humanity (A 30).20 Indeed, Christianity, despite its complex theological constructs of inwardness, is a kind of “practice,” a “way of acting,” that itself has to be understood as “the result of a single instinct.” Seen from this perspective, the actual “reality of ‘redemption’” is precisely “not” a life-denying faith but the attempt at a “new way of life” (A 33).
Although, throughout The Antichrist, Nietzsche often distinguishes between an institutionalized form of Christianity, on the one hand, and the figure of Christ, on the other, the former is still possible only on the grounds of the latter: even behind the church doctrines in the aftermath of St. Paul’s institutional founding stands the reality of Christianity as an attempt “to demonstrate how people need to live” (A 35), which the institution of the church eventually implements as an organization of “power” through “ideas, doctrines, symbols that would tyrannize the masses and form the herd” (A 42). As such, Christian moral laws, much like Nietzsche’s reading of the Kantian categorical imperative, certainly seeks to make the “natural order” disappear behind metaphysical doctrines, but it can only be successful in doing so because the exercise of power that comes to the fore in these laws follows this very natural order and its development (A 57). Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that any morality, realistically speaking, is “the expression of the conditions of a people’s life and growth” and thus reflects “its most basic instinct of life” (A 25). This must surely also mean that a morality built on a “God who demands” still expresses these conditions of life (A 25). If nihilism, then, is the inevitable consequence of Christianity’s natural will to truth turning against itself, nihilism itself cannot be detached from life or from the will to power.
Nihilism proper is not unique to Christianity, although we can witness its emergence in particular as soon as Christianity turns against itself. Rather, nihilism is built into any normative order. Since we can neither live in a world without values, nor escape the will to truth as a manifestation of the will to power, nihilism can never fully be overcome. Nietzsche clearly points this out in his late notebooks: “Nihilism as a normal condition.” But while an “active nihilism,” as the conscious willingness and practice to engage in revaluation, is an expression of strength and autonomy, a “passive nihilism” is merely a manifestation of weakness (LN, 146–47, 9 [35]). Such passive nihilism, as it comes to the fore in Christianity, remains, however, always a surface phenomenon. Behind it stands an active nihilism that is as destructive as it is creative, thus reflecting the tragedy of what it means to be human in a meaningless world: it is precisely because nihilism is part of life, and precisely because it cannot fully be overcome, that we are able to engage in a continuous revaluation of values. The affirmation of life, then, does not lead to an overcoming of nihilism, as many recent commentators have claimed, but it entails the affirmation of life as tragedy; this, to be sure, requires the affirmation of nihilism.
Notes
1 On the early formation of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, see Kuhn 1992: 10–18. There has been much speculation about the sources of Nietzsche’s somewhat sudden reference to “nihilism” in the summer of 1880. Although he will have encountered the term in a number of contemporary publications, at least in passing, his actual sources seem to be French discussions of Russian literature, such as Prosper Merimée’s “Lettre à l’éditeur” in the French edition of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). It would be absurd to assume, however, that Nietzsche was entirely unfamiliar with the debate between Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, especially the latter’s Brief an Fichte (1799). See Ottmann 1999: 329–45, and Kuhn 1992: 18–37.
2 Nietzsche’s primary point of reference for Christianity’s rejection of physical life, in particular the human body, is Pope Innocent III’s treatise De contemptu mundi (1195). The latter was available in a nineteenth-century edition (Innocent III 1855), but Nietzsche seems to have relied on the quotations in Plümacher 1884, 66–72.
3 That Christianity should be a particularly poignant example of such décadence and degeneration is not surprising. See, for instance, Moore 2002: 139–64.
4 As far as the history of nihilism is concerned, it is important to make a clear distinction between a philosophical nihilism proper and the merely pejorative use of the term. See Emden 2019 (forthcoming).
5 In the background of this claim stands the argument that, for Nietzsche, the normative import of the “will to power” is constitutive of what it means to be a human being as a natural being: if the agency of living things, such as human beings, consists in overcoming resistance, then overcoming resistance is a normative standard constitutive of the agency of living things. For the meta-ethical implications of this argument, see Katsafanas 2013: 145–82.
6 For a preliminary discussion of the emergence of philosophical nihilism around 1800, see Gillespie 1995; Gawoll 1989; Müller-Lauter 1975; Pöggeler 1974.
7 To put it more sharply, the language of inspiration and achievement that has become fashionable in recent American analytic philosophy has little in common with the perfectionism that is the implication of Nietzsche’s will to power as the overcoming of resistance, but it rather seems to reflect a sort of positive psychology that describes even tragic failure as a subcategory of achievement, thus transforming meaninglessness into meaning. See, for instance, Bradford 2015: 171–73. There is, in short, no room for nihilism and tragedy in such accounts.
8 For a fuller version of this argument, see Emden 2016.
9 It is difficult to overlook that Nietzsche’s overall perspective shares some central characteristics with Michel Foucault notions of biopower and biopolitics. See the insightful discussion in Lemm 2008.
10 For a balanced and contextual account of Nietzsche’s reception of Machiavelli, see Ottmann 1999: 281–92. See also Dombowsky 2004.
11 See also BGE 257 and GM I: 2.
12 On this issue, see also Acampora 2013: 112–22.
13 Although Nietzsche was not aware of this, the logical problem of how being can come from nothing stands at the center of a theological debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, for the very first time, employs the term “nihilism.” See Goetze 1733: 77–81.
14 Baumgarten 1779, 3 (§ 7), highlights that this problem is not limited to theology but also is central to the logical underpinnings of metaphysics: there cannot be a nihil negativum, since to speak of nothing is already to speak of something.
15 On Nietzsche’s Kantian and neo-Kantian commitments, see Doyle 2018: 35–42, 101–41, and 189–206; Emden 2014: 20–33 and 101–24; Hill 2003; Crowell 1999; Anderson 1999.
16 See Prauss 1974. Nevertheless, the dramatic opposition between a phenomenal world of appearances and a noumenal world of things-in-themselves quickly became the standard framework through which to assess the critical project as a whole. See, for instance, the early reviews of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 by Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder in the highly influential Göttingische Anzeigen von den gelehrten Sachen, in 1782, and the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, in 1783, translated in Sassen 2000: 53–58 and 59–79.
17 See also Kant 1998 [1781/1787], 115 (B xxvi), 171 (A 48), 185 (B 59), and 426 (A 369–70). For a concise reconstruction of the problem that Kant seeks to address with his reference to things-in-themselves, see Allison 2004, 51–57 and 64–73.
18 Nietzsche’s claim here goes into a similar direction as Williams 1981, and it is not surprising that Williams, given the naturalistic stance of his account of moral psychology, should have found Nietzsche’s position attractive, albeit incomplete. See Williams 2006 and Williams 2002, 12–40.
19 It has to be emphasized that, for the free spirits, this insight depends on the positive function of “science,” and the latter’s “concepts of cause and effect” are the most serious threat to the power of Christianity, or any other kind of priesthood (A 47 and 49).
20 See also A 39.
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