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PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT
Forthcoming in Bart Vandenabeele (ed.),Companion to Schopenhauer: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE
Life-denial versus Life-affirmation:
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Pessimism and Asceticism
Ken Gemes and Christopher Janaway
1. Introduction
It is more or less a commonplace in the history of ideas that Friedrich Nietzsche was deeply enamoured of Schopenhauer’s philosophy when he encountered it in his youth, that his enthusiasm sustained him through the writing of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and his essay Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), but that his rejection of his predecessor grew increasingly profound and hostile through his remaining years of phrenetic intellectual production. More nuanced narratives can and should be constructed on the basis of the one hundred and twenty or so references to Schopenhauer in Nietzsche’s published writings, not to mention the vastly greater number that went unpublished –– Nietzsche never seems to have swallowed Schopenhauer’s doctrines wholesale even in his days of adulation, and in his later mood of outright rejection Schopenhauer remains (and this is honour indeed) his most honoured enemy.[1] But here we shall take our departure simply from two main contentions: (1) that a central strand of Nietzsche’s mature thought, encompassing his critique of post-Christian moral values, pessimism and the ascetic ideal, is a response to some of Schopenhauer’s deepest philosophical claims; (2) that re-constructing a debate between the two thinkers on these central topics can illuminate the significance of both their contributions to philosophy.
2. Saying No
One of Nietzsche’s more prominent mentions of Schopenhauer occurs in the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morality:
The issue for me was the value of morality — and over this I had to struggle almost solely with my great teacher Schopenhauer … In particular the issue was the value of the unegoistic, of the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, precisely the instincts that Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and made otherworldly until finally they alone were left for him as the ‘values in themselves’, on the basis of which he said ‘no’ to life, also to himself.[2]
While Nietzsche would certainly argue that all proponents of the morality he is seeking to revalue, and all participants in the wider Judaeo-Christian tradition, have fundamentally been ‘no-sayers’ of the same stripe, in Schopenhauer this tendency is brought to a head through the explicit theorization of Verneinung –– saying no, denial, negation –– as the preferred attitude to existence and the route to salvation from it. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer spells out mercilessly what much moral and metaphysical theorizing has never quite admitted as its own deep-lying basis: ‘a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life’.[3] Some of the later Nietzsche’s more considered reflections on Schopenhauer picture him as performing a vital transitional role: ridding the philosophy of value of any spurious consolation from remnants of past theism, but at the same time setting up a conservative, negative ideal that can provoke us to find a positive one in future:
As a philosopher, Schopenhauer was the first admitted and uncompromising atheist among us Germans …. This is the locus of his whole integrity; unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of his way of putting the problem, as a victory of the European conscience won finally and with great difficulty; as the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie of faith in God …. As we thus reject Christian interpretation and condemn its ‘meaning’ as counterfeit, Schopenhauer’s question immediately comes at us in a terrifying way: Does existence have any meaning at all?[4]
Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naiveté with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking –– beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –– ; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity.[5]
Why is Schopenhauer both praised for his atheism and condemned for being ‘half-Christian’? One of the chief criticisms Nietzsche makes is that although he honestly posed the question of the ‘meaning of existence’, Schopenhauer’s response used an essentially Christian morality as a buffer against confronting pessimism in a really unbearable form:
What Schopenhauer himself said in answer to this question was — forgive me — something hasty, youthful, a mere compromise, a way of remaining and staying stuck in precisely those Christian and ascetic moral perspectives in which one had renounced faith along with the faith in God.[6]
Nietzsche’s allegation is that Schopenhauer could not face true pessimism, but instead took refuge in affirming a morality of compassion, a moral outlook of seeing all others as ‘I once more’ and taking on their sufferings as one’s own. This position finds positive value at the expense of denying value to the individual human self as such. For morality in this conception, homogenizing all individuals and ultimately denying them full reality — is a step on the road of total self-abnegation, as Schopenhauer himself says: ‘from the same source from which all goodness, affection, virtue, and nobility of character spring, there ultimately arises also what I call denial of the will to life.’[7]
A characteristic that unifies Schopenhauer’s axiology is that there really is nothing of true value in his scheme of things that is not characterized in some way by a flight away from natural embodied consciousness of oneself as individual subject and agent, and towards will-lessness and abandonment of individuality. One can be morally good, for Schopenhauer, if and only if one adopts a standpoint of self-negation in which one refrains from imposing one’s individual will on events and occupies the viewpoint of the whole. Attaining the — in Schopenhauer’s eyes — correct view that individuation is illusory shifts the individual away from attachment to his her own will and its successes and failures and towards compassion for all others. Such a person is moral in the sense of being anti-egoistic or self-negating. The subject of aesthetic experience is a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’, the eye that passively mirrors the world rather than interacting with it via the embodied and willing individual.[8] And the ultimate denial of the will to life is glossed as a prolongation of this very state of will-less objectivity.[9]
In short, the common feature of the value found in aesthetic experience, in a moral disposition, and in the redemptive denial of the will to life is that they involve attitudes of disengagement from willing, detachment from bodily individuality, and loss of self — at least where self is construed as anything other than a pure contemplative subject, or an eye with no direction or place in the world.[10] So in this way Nietzsche is right that the key to the attainment of any genuine value for Schopenhauer is saying No to life and himself. Willing, living, existing as an individual human being, are the occasion for lamentation, if correctly understood. The person who knows that suffering is endemic to all existence is incapable of identifying with the weal or woe of one part of the world as against all others. He or she can no longer proceed as if this individual’s gaining such and such willed end, or suffering such and such setback in its willing, were worth anything at all. Schopenhauer’s redemption occurs at a high price: I must come to see myself, the individual human being with all its potential weals and woes, as worthy of absolute rejection. So anyone who sees things aright will reject even a single repetition of his or her human life, and ‘will much prefer to choose complete non-existence.’[11]
Unless we appreciate the extent to which Schopenhauer thus locates value in the negation of individual selfhood, or in the extinction of our natural attachment to life, we shall not fully comprehend the nature of Nietzsche’s opposition to his predecessor, or his pressing need to delineate a new ideal. Nietzsche seems shocked and scandalized by Schopenhauer’s conception of value — surely an ascetic ideal par excellence — and this reaction informs his drive to find a manner in which to say Yes to life and to the world. For example, he describes a crucial opposition between ‘the degenerate instinct that turns against life with subterranean vindictiveness (—Christianity, Schopenhauer’s philosophy … )’ and ‘a formula of the highestaffirmation … an unreserved yea-saying even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything questionable and strange about existence’[12] He even characterizes Christianity itself in Schopenhauerian terms as a ‘this denial of the will to life made into a religion’, which sets itself against ‘a higher order of values, the noble, life-affirming values’.[13] Schopenhauerian No-saying appears here as the generic phenomenon of which Christianity is but one instance.
The latter point reflects Schopenhauer’s own attitude towards Christianity. Although, like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer expends no energy arguing against the existence of God, he is as firm as Nietzsche in his rejection of the whole Christian metaphysics of the perfect divine being, immaterial souls, personal immortality, the highest good, and absolute values and imperatives. He parallels Nietzsche also in assimilating Christianity to Eastern religions on the grounds of its sharing with them a more fundamental orientation of affect and will towards life and existence. We might say that for both philosophers the metaphysical dogmas of a religion are a mere superficial feature in comparison with its profound orientation of affirmation or negation. Thus Schopenhauer says:
Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better … [T]hat great fundamental truth contained in Christianity as well as in Brahmanism and Buddhism, the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will, hence by a decided opposition to nature, is beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be.[14]
It is here that we shall find one of Nietzsche’s deepest points of controversy with his ‘great teacher’.
3. Will to life: affirmation and denial
The passage quoted above about wanting ‘what was and is just as it was and is’ alludes to what Nietzsche calls his ‘highest formula of affirmation’, the much discussed doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same.[15] Could one bear the thought of one’s life repeating itself unchanged over and over again without end? It is less well known that Schopenhauer already addresses this Nietzschean question, albeit somewhat buried in the intricate discussion of the Fourth Book of The World as Will and Representation:[16]
A man who . . . found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence [immer neuer Wiederkehr]; and whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for life’s pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject; such a man would stand [now follows a quote from Goethe] ‘with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth,’ and would have nothing to fear. . . . [M]any men would occupy the standpoint here set forth, if their knowledge kept pace with their willing, in other words if they were in a position . . . to become clearly and distinctly themselves. This is for knowledge the viewpoint of the complete affirmation of the will to life [Bejahung des Willens zum Leben].
Schopenhauer is here considering ways in which human beings may be unconcerned by the fact of their future death. This may happen either reflectively or unreflectively. Unreflective affirmation of the will to life is intrinsic to the living being as such, and can also be called affirmation of the body, for ‘the fundamental theme of all the many different acts of will is the satisfaction of the needs inseparable from the body’s existence in health’, which ‘can be reduced to the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the species’.[17] In simply throwing ourselves into living, as any animal does, we tend to feel naturally secured against death, or indeed oblivious of it:
In man, as in the animal that does not think, there prevails as a lasting state of mind the certainty, springing from innermost consciousness, that he is nature, the world itself. By virtue of this, no one is noticeably disturbed by the thought of certain and never-distant death, but everyone lives on as though he is bound to live for ever.[18]
Schopenhauer’s explanation invokes his central metaphysical doctrine that the common nature or essence of us all is will to life. The world appears as populated by distinct individuals with a finite temporal duration; but, to the ‘metaphysical glance’ that sees through space and time (the principle of individuation) and penetrates to the thing in itself, the same world is a nunc stans — ‘The present alone is that which always exists and stands firm and immovable’.[19] This, allegedly, explains why each living thing, in simply being, is a perpetual inhabitant of the present, existing in blind harmony with its own metaphysical essence. If a human being rationally grasps the alleged metaphysical truth about the will to life as the essence shared by the whole world, he or she may, Schopenhauer thinks, develop a reflective unconcern for death. The person from our initial passage who becomes ‘clearly and distinctly’ himself (or herself) reflects that his or her nature is will to life, that while individuals come and go, the time in which they do so is an illusion, and that the will to life itself, which we all share as our essence, exists only timelessly and can never be destroyed.
Setting aside the grave and familiar worries about the metaphysics of the will[20] (about which the later Nietzsche is contemptuous, the early Nietzsche at best dubious, at worst duplicitous[21]), let us note that there are two kinds of affirmation for Schopenhauer, reflective and unreflective, and that what is affirmed is the same in both cases: ‘this life . . . is now willed as such by the will with knowledge, consciously and deliberately, just as hitherto the will willed it without knowledge and as a blind impulse.’[22] Schopenhauer’s message concerning the ‘strong-boned’ affirmative individual embodies a form of consolation: someone whose attachment to life is boundless, who loves life, whatever it may bring, who desires to live and even to repeat his life endlessly, can nevertheless re-gain, through reflection, that total indifference to his future non-existence as an individual that is found naturally in all other living creatures.
Things are well and good for the ‘strong-boned’ man, up to a point. But Schopenhauer comments that this reflectively affirmative individual still lacks knowledge. He has not come to know that ‘constant suffering is essential to all life’.[23] Schopenhauer goes on to argue — to Nietzsche’s eventual consternation — that an antithetical outlook, called Verneinung des Willens zum Leben, denial of the will to life, holds the only true hope of salvation: ‘true salvation [Heil], deliverance [Erlösung] from suffering and life, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will’.[24] The saving state of denial results when the will to life is quietened or sedated: the realization that willing is as such a painful condition combines with the insight that individual manifestations of will are not metaphysically basic but a kind of temporary illusion thrown up by a world that itself insatiably strives but can never be resolved. If one attains knowledge of these two truths combined, one is at a cognitive advantage over both the unreflective and the reflective affirmer of life. One sees that the world devours itself to no avail, and that it is genuinely of no consequence whether at any moment the particular portion of the world one is identical to is devouring or being devoured. Nothing that one desires, hopes for, or succeeds in doing as an individual constitutes a good sufficient to compensate for the burden of existing.
Schopenhauer is sure that he has located a state superior to affirmation. But he says it would be senseless to recommend affirmation or denial as if they were attitudes that could be adopted at will, one in preference to the other.[25] Denial of the will occurs when knowledge acts as ‘the quieter of the will’, instead of motivating it as usual.[26] His word here is Quietiv, which would be better rendered as ‘sedative’ or ‘tranquillizer’. So it is not really that knowledge gives one reason to take one or other attitude. Rather, it seems to act causally, knocking out the impulse to do, strive, or desire on one’s own behalf as an individual agent: ‘the will . . . turns away from life’[27] — though the detail of how this happens is obscure.[28]