Chapter 8

Nietzsche and the Impossibility of Nihilism James I. Porter

Ich verachte das Leben am besten: und ich liebe das Leben am meisten: darin ist kein Widersinn—Widerspruch. Herzensqual I despise life best of all, and I love life most of all: there is no absurdity in this—[no] contradiction. Heart-sore anguish —Nietzsche (1883)

If you love life you cannot be a nihilist about life. That is the premise of this essay, which will suggest that Nietzsche belongs to a long antinihilist tradition that ran from classical antiquity to, say, Eugen Dühring’s The Value of Life (1865), and that Nietzsche’s views in favor of life preclude nihilism. Nietzsche knows about the love of life.1 His writings from all points in his career frequently mention “die Liebe zum Leben” (“the love of life”) or “das Leben lieben” (“loving life”), and he assigns these acts an unqualified value (once the proper qualifications have been made). Thus, for example, a note from 1882: “The love of life (die Liebe zum Leben) is almost the opposite of the love of long life. All love is concerned with the moment and with the eternal—but never with ‘length’” (KSA 10: 88, 3[1], §293). A question that quickly arises in Nietzsche has to do with the organ with which the act of love occurs. Is love in the mind or heart or soul—or in the will? Any of these terms will do, though (again with the appropriate qualifications being made). I want to focus on willing in Nietzsche’s sense of the term, for this is the deepest thread in his later thought about action, and so too, as we shall see, about the acts of love that constitute life. As it happens, there are a few related expressions for “love of life” in Nietzsche which take us into the thick of his peculiar scenarios of willing, and these are seemingly equivalent: the will to life (der Wille zum Leben), the will to power (der Wille zur Macht), affirmation (Ja-Sagen), and affirmation of life (das Jasagen zum Leben). The phrase “will to life,” which is often but not always found in inverted commas, is on loan, in modified form, from Schopenhauer. The very fact of its borrowing makes the

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meaning of the phrase difficult to catch. “Will” (itself borrowed) is notoriously hard to pin down in Nietzsche. It is less a faculty than a state that has to do with dispositional attitudes that can be conscious or unconscious, or even organic and suborganic. It may not even pay to try to locate the source or mechanism of willing, because much of the time Nietzsche appears to be exploring the problem of willing as an inherited concept or intuition, rather than enunciating a dogma about it. Still, within the frames of these frames, willing and affirming have a definite contour, which runs as follows: to will is to affirm, and to will and affirm is to will and affirm life. These acts are unconditional, as unconditional as love—which, incidentally, brings us a bit farther along the way to a definition of love of life, namely it is an unconditional affirmation of life. In a moment we will meet the corollary: unconditional affirmation just is an unconditional affirmation of life. Finally, we shall see how such affirmation is for Nietzsche the most basic activity of life in all its forms: it is what we do all the time, at every moment of our lives. We are lovers of life, and incurably so.

The Affirmation of Life and the Will to Power First, let us look at Nietzsche’s concept of affirmation, an idea that runs through all the layers of his various conceptions of the way the world works (at least in the last decade of his writings). At the top of the evaluative chain, so to speak, are the characterizations of action in the stereotyped forms of affirmation or negation, whereby action is what it is that a human agent does. Some actions are life-affirming, others are life-negating. From this dilemma stem the familiar dichotomies: laudable, noble, and active agents as opposed to loathsome, resentful, and reactive ones. The distinction is one that cannot be maintained with any consistency, however, if it is the case that all actions are life-affirming. And, not infrequently (and arguably, all the time), Nietzsche’s writings betray themselves along these precise lines. At the bottom of the chain are the molecular accounts of will to power, where actions at the higher level are laid out in all their logical bareness. So, for instance, in the Genealogy of Morals we read, “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect,” that is subordinated to a single means, “namely as a means of creating greater units of power” (GM I: 13; II: 11). Here, Nietzsche is postulating centers of agency, willing-forces (much like atoms of will—the expression is in fact his: Atomkräfte— radiating fields of force). One way of understanding this process is to follow Gilles Deleuze and to say that all “a will wants is to affirm its difference.”2 This can’t be right, and it surely can’t be all there is to the problem. A quantum of will, on Nietzsche’s own description, surely wants to magnify its difference even if all it ever succeeds in doing is affirming its difference from all other quanta, whether its difference happens to be imaginary or real. Where this activity of evaluation takes place is indeterminate, and perhaps irrelevant. Nietzsche is

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training his focus on primitive acts of willing, which might obtain anywhere at any time. The isolation is purely analytical. Be that as it may, there is more to be said about the analysis. We need to rethink the continuum of the world posited on Nietzsche’s scenario. For not only is the world of forces scarcely fixed; instead, it is constantly in flux, or rather moving in a flux of ever-changing relations (which is to say, interpretations). The flux consists in the fact that quantities are ever being recast in new form as new qualities by the constituent atoms of will, which are themselves the very quantities and qualities in question. The conversion of quantity into quality is in fact the activity most proper to the will to power, its most basic perceptual judgment. “The desire for an increase in quantum grows from a quale,” by which is meant the perception that answers to the question: What is the quality in front of me, and what is my own? (WP 564). In this way, identities are “fixed,” if only en route to ever larger, more powerful identities, against the background of a postulated “whole”; differences in quantity and quality are established, displayed, and altered in the very process of their establishment. But, again, these features and changes are mere perceptions, and perceptions, being partial by definition, never agree with one another or even internally to themselves within a stable framework of identity-relations. Thus, a quantity of force will be internally incongruent just by possessing the quality of being a quantity, which is to say, just by representing to itself a qualitative difference from all quantities, including its own. As Nietzsche writes, “Quantitative differences . . . are qualities which can no longer be reduced to one another” (WP 565). To be a quantity is to be a difference, a “difference of quantity”; it is to have a valuated “rank,” and to stand in relation to other values (quanta) and to the “whole”; it is to display the “quality” of a differential force (WP 563–5). It cannot be the case that all “a will wants is to affirm its difference,” if that means excluding the power from being “the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition,” characteristics that are proper to a “reactive” (slave) condition. After all, even the reactive will is an expression of the will to power. But how can it be this, that is, essentially reactive and not active, if what all willing wants is simply “to affirm its difference?”3 That is the problem with all monistic hypotheses, which cannot account for deviations (or derogations) from the essential nature of will without running into the incoherent result that essence is asked to do double-duty, first to designate “will” in general, and then to designate a species of will (“active,” noble will). If Nietzsche seems to commend the duplication himself,4 elsewhere he calls this logic into question: it is a “double error,” a fallacy of double counting (GM I: 13; WP 531). Here we have an instance of what is a regular trait of Nietzsche’s writing: an invitation to fallacy. Suffice it to say that all forms of the will are active and reactive by nature (“reality consists precisely in this particular action and reaction of every individual part toward the whole,” WP 567), while the very idea of a nonreactive will, of a will that is purely or even primarily active and

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positively affirmative, is in fact itself a later simplification (by a willing-center itself) of an originally more-complex scenario. Without entering into all the gory details, it is enough to say that force is constructed as a phantasm of the subject—the subject that any center of force in fact represents (see Porter 2006). And so too, the consistency of the world perceived by a center of force (its view of the “whole,” epitomized in the dictum that “everything conditions everything else”) attests to nothing but the consistency of a phantasm. A premise of this picture is the supposition “that the world has a certain quantum of force at its disposal” (WP 638), in other words, a sum of forces. But that premise is false. Whatever else it may be, the will to power is a deeply anthropomorphic hypothesis, and a projection of the constitutive limits of the subject. The primitive mechanics of willing are analogous to the more-refined and complex pictures at the macro level, although the connection is hardly straightforward. It is left open, for instance, to imagine that there is no direct correlation between micro acts of willing and larger-scale actions, but only an overdetermined relation. The actions of an affirmative agent (or is it the affirmative actions of an indeterminate agent?) are not obviously the sum of her molecular acts of will, the infinitesimal acts of willing that comprise her behavior. The doings of the “active,” as opposed to “reactive,” agent conceivably consist of a mixture of active and reactive willing, leaving us with the horrifying but inescapable conclusion that active agents are no strangers to reactive agency: they comprise both kinds of agent within them, possibly surmounting the “weaker” form of the two, but in no way can they disown them. Active agents necessarily contain myriads of reactive agents (or centers of agency, or willing-centers) within themselves. (“Whatever lives, obeys,” Z I: 12.) The results are either forms of subordinated agency or (as is more often the case in Nietzsche) compromise formations, treaties, and negotiated pacts “struck” amongst the various competing agencies within the mind and body, like so many political statesmen: My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on—. (WP 636; emphases added) The statecraft of agency is no cleaner than that of international politics. Appearances are all that matter in the end.

The Value of Reality We are now in a position to go back to the original problem of the love of life, for it is intimately connected with the concept of affirmation. Nietzsche’s view

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of affirmation (Bejahung) is immediately Kantian in origin, but ultimately it is rooted in a tradition of rational scholastic thinking (Schulphilosophie) that goes back to Leibniz and Wolff in the eighteenth century, with antecedents in the logical analysis of ontology that reach as far back as Aristotle. (Here I am relying on the magnificent analysis by Anneliese Maier, Kants Qualitätskategorien from 1930.5) To make a long story short, Kant takes over the concepts of affirmation and negation, most recently deployed to designate judgments of existence (being and not being, namely that a thing is or is not), but he gives these a critical twist: henceforth, the judgments express not the modalities of actual existence (of actual existing things) but the category of existence: they are used to parse out what Maier suggestively calls “Wirklichkeitsgeltung,” or “valuation [or ‘recognition’] of reality”—effectively, the value or degree of reality assigned to an entity; and most of all, they signal the conceptual category of existence itself. For Kant, this comes to mean “the qualitative-categorial synthesis of entities.”6 The roots of this sense of quality lie in the scholastic tradition of realitas: “reality” in this sense is what remains of an entity even when you take away its objective existence (realitas . . . distinguitar [by Duns Scotus] a re; quod res sit id quod per se potest existere . . . et non sit pars rei: realitas autem sit aliquid minus re, in Stephanus Chauvin’s words). For Kant, reality is something like the condition of the possibility of a thing, its essential quality, while the quantity of existence (or reality) is never changing (nec augescendo, nec decrescendo); it is stably given.7 Obviously, reality in this sense is not easily destroyed; in effect, it is what there is about things that cannot ever be taken away from them, because it defines what they always were (one might compare the to ti ên einai of Aristotelian primary substance, the “that which it was [or ‘was shown’] to be”). So stated, the contrary of reality is not negation, but ideality. The, as it were, indestructibility of things (on this conception of them) is the key to the problem of affirmation. To affirm reality says nothing about objective existence but only speaks to possible existence. Likewise, because judgments as to existence and reality (or quality of existence) sit side by side in this tradition, to cast a negating judgment on a thing is nonetheless to affirm its existence. The paradox here is that even negations involve affirmations of possibility: to negate the reality of a thing is to negate the reality of a possible thing, but not the thing itself; it is to negate the possibility of its existence but not to negate its reality or its existence per se.8 The ultimate source of this tradition in modern philosophy is Spinoza. Negation, as a relativization of reality, can no longer be opposed to reality. There being no independence for negation, negation can only coexist with reality in a spectrum that runs along a gamut of quantitative differences. In Kant, the spectrum “causes every reality to be represented as a quantity,” by which are to be understood “unity,” “plurality,” and “totality” (CPR B183; A80), while negation is merely a modification within this range of possibilities, no longer a possibility per se. The upshot of all of this is that for Kant there is effectively only one form of quality, a single category, that pertains all the time,

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and that is the category of reality (Maier 1968, p. 130). It is the category of intensity; and qualities are various intensities of magnitude within the given, within the category of quantity (Maier 1968, p. 131). The proof is in the pudding of sensation itself, which carries out, in its everyday operations, a categorical synthesis (see Maier 1968, p. 132). The product is what Kant calls “the real of appearance,” which can never be reduced to nil.9 Nietzsche would agree, while drawing a further, ethical moral: sensation is for Nietzsche tied ineluctably to the vitality of experience and to the experience of life in all its vivacity. To experience a sensation is, quite simply, to affirm life.

Nietzschean Affirmation Nietzsche’s conception of affirmation (Bejahung) is a direct descendent of the scholastic tradition that Kant’s critique renews and renovates. But Nietzsche has also read Schopenhauer, whose view of the world as a kind of animate soul, a Weltseele, driven by a will to life, made a deep impression on Nietzsche: Above, the characteristic of this subjective entity, or the will, was described: the rapturous, powerful inclination of all animals and men to maintain life and to perpetuate it as long as possible. In order to recognize in this something originary and unconditioned, we have to make clear to ourselves that this same thing is in no way the result of any objective knowledge of the value of life, but rather that it is independent of all knowledge; or, in other words, that those beings represent themselves not as being pulled forward but as driven from behind. (W 2.1, p. 41210) Creatures are driven as from behind because they are blindly groping, struggling, and forever pained by existence, much as they would prefer the quiet stasis of death. Like moles burrowing tunnels in the ground, they toil and suffer, nolens volens, and their efforts are never compensated by their rewards. So viewed, the will to life might appear to be either a “fool” (seen objectively as a kind of subject) or a “delusion” (seen subjectively as a state of mind) that “grips all living things as they exert themselves to the limits of their powers and work towards something that has no value” (W 2.1, p. 418). “Only,” Schopenhauer reflects, drawing back from the blank pessimism of this image, “on closer inspection we will find even here that the will to life is on the contrary a blind force (Drang), a completely groundless, unmotivated drive” (ibid.). The grammar of value is out of place. There can be no question of the value of life, because life hasn’t, as it were, the time to think about such questions: life just is restless, ceaseless activity, forever too late for enjoyment of any kind; it is an ongoing struggle with pain that admits of no inner or outer view. The will to life is invisible per se (whence its metaphysical status as “the limit [Gränzstein] of

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every reflection that no reflection can get beyond,” let alone behold and name); or else it is visible only in its works, in what it effectuates. “It attaches the individual firmly to this Schauplatz,” the theater we call existence (ibid., p. 419)—and then blinds the individual to the spectacle. The blind assent to existence is what Schopenhauer calls die Bejahung des Willens zum Leben, “the affirmation of the will to life” (W 2.1, p. 408). Virtually synonymous with willing itself (ibid.), affirmation of life is what willing is. About its opposite, the negation (Verneinung) of the will, Schopenhauer has considerably less to say: attempts to negate the will, to mortify it, to bring it to quiescence, in a word, the wish to die, are but one more instance of the struggle, of willing, of affirmation of the will, of life, and of the world (ibid., p. 493). The contradiction between these two tendencies, both equally rooted in life and in the will, just is what the pain and suffering of life are. Beyond this there are no alternatives, apart from nothingness itself. But that is a prospect no individual can choose to have, never mind tolerate long enough to behold (ibid., p. 508). From Schopenhauer, Nietzsche takes the (plainly, metaphysical) image of action in its most primitive, conceivable form as constituted by basic acts of will: what results is a kind of distributed willing specified over the gamut of individuals in the world, each enacting its own version of willing and affirming, all collectively adding up to the self-affirmation of the one will (cf. W 1.2, p. 417). From Kant, Nietzsche takes the images of willing and affirmation as primitive prepositional acts of judgment (the positing of qualities). His picture of the will to power thus vacillates, unstably, between Schopenhauerian monism, with its brooding psychology of dark urges spread out over the whole world of phenomena, and Kantian subjectivism, with its defiantly critical, ex hypothesi stance and its cool distance toward the projective mechanisms of individual subjects. Despite the evident strains in this inheritance, there is a strong area of overlap: for, from both predecessors he takes over the notion that willing is an irrefragable constituent in human life. And to both positions he adds the view that to will life is to express a love of life. Both Schopenhauer and Kant would differently denounce this last move as the imposture of a delusion. Nietzsche in his vitalism and in his fundamentally affirmative attitude to life would be indifferent to this one form of delusion, exceptionally so, since elsewhere he is keen not only to lay bare but also to savage illusions of all kinds. For it is only in love, only when shaded by the illusion produced by love, that is to say in the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative. Anything that constrains a man to love less than unconditionally has severed the roots of his strength: he will wither away. (UM II: 7; emphasis) Nietzsche affirms, as it were, affirmation in its root sense, in the most basic gesture that says yes to life, that is, the unconditional loving act that embraces life in as unmediated a way as can be imagined. But Nietzsche’s affirmation of

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affirmation is not unlimited, as it might generally be felt to be, and as it cannot be if we wish to make sense of his divided sympathies, which are legion. Thus, he can say, with perfect consistency, “I despise life best of all, and I love life most of all: there is no absurdity in this—[no] contradiction” (KSA 10: 569, 18[13]). There is no contradiction, because Nietzsche by no means affirms all the forms of life, and he possibly affirms no form of life unconditionally; all that he affirms is the most basic affirmation of life. He can get away with this stance because he senses, possibly rightly, that no forms of life are purely life affirming. Affirmation in its purest form is unsustainable; it can never remain a pure act. Nietzsche felt keenly the impossibility of this stance, which is why in the next breath of the note just quoted he qualifies himself: the problem is not one of contradiction, but of heart-sore anguish (Herzensqual). Nietzsche effectively wants to love life unconditionally, but knows he cannot do so because he recognizes that life itself is never loved or lived simply or unconditionally: life is loved and lived out of a complexity of motives, only one ingredient of which will be a purely affirmative gesture, the instantaneous affirmation of things. Love is overshadowed by these complexities; and it is ultimately compromised by them as well. Take the example of love’s immediacy, its intimate relationship to the present-tense pleasures promoted by Epicureanism. Love, for Epicurus, is the spontaneous and pleasurable attachment to life but not to life’s pleasures. For the attachment to pleasure diminishes pleasure; it leads to longing (whether nostalgia or anticipation). The present-tense condition of the love of life is just that: a conditioning factor that can be felt as a limit. The dilemma for an Epicurean is how to take presenttense pleasure in a past pleasure, for example, the memory of a departed friend. A balancing act of affect is required, a management of one’s pleasures. In its enviable simplicity, however, Epicureanism presents this balance as, practically speaking, unproblematic: it is an attainable good. Therein lies the whole promise of the philosophy. Nietzsche knows better. His response to Epicurus would be, “Prove it. Show me.” And he also knows that Epicurus can at best point to an emblematic instance, the immortal gods who live in another world and arguably are living a kind of deathly existence. And that won’t satisfy Nietzsche. Present-tense pleasures are compromised, first of all by their tensed condition, which is to say, by the condition of time itself. To love life in the present tense is to eliminate this love in its past tense. But it is also to eliminate the condition of time in all its tenses, including that of the present. “Do I love the past? I destroyed it so as to live. Do I love present things? I look away from them so as to be able to live” (KSA 10: 209, §201). Whence the blistering critique of historical and temporal consciousness in the second Untimely Meditation, despite the benefits that living surrounded by history can bring.11 But then, to what does one look when one lives life, if it is no longer to the past or even the present?

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Nietzsche, we might say, has been bitten by the bug of skepticism. The naïve illusionism of Epicurus is no longer even an option for him. Out of the crucible of long looks at life, one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks—above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore. The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubts in us. (GS “Preface” 3) Nietzsche’s attitude to the love of life is, I want to suggest, extremely complex, as complex as his view of life itself. How does one love a problem? Life is definitely a problem for Nietzsche, and part of the problem is that one must love life to the precise extent that one is alive (and not insofar as one wants to be alive), however problematical life may turn out to be. And so it can happen that, as he says in another note, “I love life: I despise man. But for the sake of life I want to destroy him” (KSA 10: 462, 13[13]; 1883). The entirety of Nietzsche’s writings are, I believe, best viewed as circling around this fundamental trait of ambivalence. His critiques are acts of profoundest love and of equally profound aversion. They bear reluctant witness to the complexity of life and often to an unwilling admiration of its least wanted features. They are evidence of a fascination. Is the fascination with life possibly an expression of a love of life? Lest this last possibility seem far-fetched, let me give you one example. It is a peculiar moment, one that I am quite sure has escaped notice because of the way it is presented. But it is also absolutely paradigmatic, both of the last quotation from 1882 and of the fundamental ambivalence in Nietzsche that I have been commenting on throughout. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche details a problem about cultural progress, a problem that infects his own countercultural models as well. As culture advances, culture regresses; the higher that man ascends through a process of self-overcoming, the more disastrously does he plunge into his own internal abyss. That is the dilemma that haunts the Genealogy of Morals as a whole, the logic of which is spelled out part way through the First Essay (GM I: 11–12). There, culture is defined as the achievement by which “the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown” by the “instruments of culture,” namely, the reactive forces of ressentiment. But, the instruments of culture, Nietzsche insists, are not its goal, and in fact to confuse these is to confuse the meaning of culture, which issues (or ought to issue) in noble activity, with the meaning of history, according to which man sees himself “as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as ‘higher man’” (GM I: 11). Nothing could be more absurd than this Whiggish historical

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view, which represents the height not of man, but of his delusion. The account of this self-delusion, which in fact echoes sentiments expressed by Nietzsche a decade and a half earlier, is worth attending to closely, and above all the language in which it is expressed.12 What is most despicable about the reactive subject, who stands as the end-product of culture today—that which gives an answer to the question, “What today constitutes our antipathy to ‘man’?”— is the fact that we no longer have anything left to fear in man; that the maggot “man” is swarming in the foreground; that the “tame man,” the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as “higher man”—that he has indeed a certain right to feel thus, insofar as he feels himself elevated above the surfeit of ill-constituted, sickly, weary and exhausted people of which Europe is beginning to stink today, as something at least relatively well-constituted, at least still capable of living, at least affirming life. (GM I: 11; emphasis added) “Affirming life”?—Here we arrive at a genuine impasse, this time not of language or narrative but of meaning. It is one thing to ask why this portrait of false consciousness, drawn so disdainfully by Nietzsche, so clearly resembles the sovereign individual of the Second Essay, that incarnation of selfaffirmation understood as a right.13 The simple fact of their resemblance would be troubling enough even supposing one could account for the difference exhaustively in terms of the justification of the feeling that each of the two subjects has—assuming, that is, that the one subject is properly entitled to the feeling of superiority she has while the other isn’t. Is the reactive subject of the present passage an instantiation of the sovereign individual or just a grotesque approximation? No less troubling, in the present passage, is its indictment of the affirmation of life that the reactive subject claims to have and feel.14 Now, it ought to be a given in Nietzsche and in the readings of Nietzsche that the quality of life-affirmation is an irrefragable good. Life-affirmation is more than a good: it is irrefragably good because it is an essential and ineliminable property of life and of living subjects. Not even the nihilist, that supreme denier of life, is an objection to the principle of life-affirmation: the denial of life is self-refuting. The logic is as brilliant as it is compelling: to inflict suffering on one’s self is to preserve the self, actually to “compel [it] to live”; to take one’s own life is to affirm it in a voluntaristic act, and therefore tantamount to an affirmation of life; in short, “‘Life against life’ is, physiologically considered and not merely psychologically, a simple absurdity” (GM III: 13; cf. III: 18; III: 28). Incidentally, this position, which anticipates Freud’s, is lifted straight from Schopenhauer, who notes the futility of suicide, owing to the logic of the will’s inextinguishable self-affirmation

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(W 1.2, pp. 455, 492).15 After all, ressentiment can be “a denial . . . in the form of an affirmation” (GM II: 22).16 But in the passage before us, the affirmation of life falls under suspicion just because it is a property of reactive subjects.17 This is singularly odd, as well as logically strained—and a far cry from Nietzsche’s customary denial of “rights” to the vitally challenged.18 In the case of a noble spirit, the affirmation of life that she has as a feeling (and not just performatively and spontaneously has) is in principle justification enough for the feeling of power corresponding to it.19 In the case of a weakly spirit, that justification is absent even when the feeling of power (or what amounts to the same thing, the feeling of affirmation) is present. Why is it that the reactive subject cannot have a valid sense of power from the affirmation that she actually feels? Why is it that Nietzsche cannot abide this sense of self when it appears in the paltry worm man? (He confronts it with Widerwillen, “antipathy”.) Nietzsche’s customary answer would be convincing in any other case—an ascetic spirit, for example, systematically misreads health as sickness, and his feelings and beliefs are likewise systematically betrayed by reality. But affirmation, it would seem, has properties of its own irrespective of the subject who has them, and indeed at times even despite that subject (most strikingly, in the case of the ascetic who—repulsively, to Nietzsche—most affirms life when she tries most to deny it). If we accept Nietzsche’s claim, then affirmation ought to be something about which we can never, so to speak, go wrong whenever we feel it. How can this fail to apply in the present case, that of a life-affirming reactive subject who affirms affirmation and in doing so absurdly mistakes herself for a higher man, while at the same time earning “a certain right” to this illusion, one who can at least claim (and be claimed) to have earned a right to—her delusion? The same can be asked of the ascetic priest, of course, which indicates the depth of the problem, as does the following statement from a later section, which is no less relevant here: “This [reactive] type of man needs to believe in a neutral independent ‘subject’, prompted by an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified” (GM I: 13; emphasis added). In a word, Nietzsche can be right to critique the reactive subject only if there is something wrong with the logic of affirmation. I believe there is, at least in its glorified form. The instinct to self-affirmation is, after all, an instinct to subjective delusion, as we saw in our analysis of the will to power above; and this is doubtless part of the point of the passage from the Genealogy of Morals (GM I: 11), which is beginning to look quite perversely constructed. For what is surely odd about the passage is the way in which the reactive subject here is fundamentally serving as a mouthpiece for Nietzsche’s own apparent views, while in the same breath Nietzsche reviles her as “illconstituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned.” Rhetorically, the passage is a disaster; its voicings are thoroughly confused, which makes it so hard to

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read. So closely is Nietzsche identified with the reactive subject’s spleen and exhilaration, her language and her ideas, that a neat separation of the two views is effectively blocked. Surely it is this proximity that is the source of Nietzsche’s repulsion.20 Consider her diagnosis of contemporary culture: unlike the distorted misreadings of the ascetic, her readings of sickness in her culture are a reading of sickness in that culture—or rather, they coincide to a tee with Nietzsche’s own. But the contagion hardly ends here. Next, consider her response to that diagnosis, her sense of elevation, her pathos of distance, which aligns her with the nobles of the misty past; it is, in each case, “the protracted and domineering fundamental total feeling on the part of a higher ruling order in relation to a lower order, to a ‘below,’” that gives a subject, active or reactive, its sense of self, power, and distance (GM I: 2). But how valid an index of anything is a feeling (see Porter 1999)? The question suggests its own answer, and in its light Nietzsche’s defense of the occasional errancy of noble pathos is a transparent case of special pleading: On the other hand, one should remember that, even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent—in effigie of course—by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent. (GM I: 10) We are entitled to wonder whether the feeling of affirmation in a subject is ever anything more than a falsification, the inevitable effect of a perspectival distortion. In despising the deluded reactive subject, how can Nietzsche fail to despise the very form the delusion takes—a form that reappears identically in the case of active subjects? The more immediate problem, in any case, is one not of adjudicating between two ideals, one noble and one debased, but of distinguishing between them.21 The image of a reactive subject mistaking itself for an active subject is, on Nietzsche’s scenario, truly grotesque. But what is perhaps even more grotesque is our own incapacity to distinguish clearly between the two kinds of subjects. But that is not a topic I want to press here.

Facing Nothingness A similar problem confronts Nietzsche when he comes face to face with the problem of nihilism. Let us go to the start of the Third Essay, to its inaugural equivocation: “That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man . . . is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal— and it will rather have nothingness than not will” (GM III: 1). Evidently, to posit a goal is to avoid a lack, a lack of a goal and of meaning; it is to affirm oneself, to assign oneself a meaning; and it is to attain to sovereignty. But above all, it is to

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perpetuate this lack, the fearful void that lies at the heart of meaning, identity, and willing: This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void—he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning . . . —and the ascetic ideal offered man a meaning! In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seem to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism. (GM III: 28) Even so, “this interpretation . . . brought fresh suffering with it,” which is to say a further lease of life, and consequently of will, for “[man] could now will something; . . . the will itself was saved” (GM III: 28). In other words, life would go on, even if absurdly so, for henceforth even nonmeaning could be recuperated into meaningfulness: it would be “overcome” in the sense of being preserved in a transmuted form; it would be sublimated (aufgehoben). Willing is the highest but also the sole expression of a horror vacui; but what it is most of all the expression of is the (averted) horror of its own senselessness, of the intrinsic meaninglessness of all meaning and all willing. I say averted because there seems to be, in fact, no way of staring meaninglessness in the face: the very conception of a void in meaning and the fear this evokes are themselves the product of a fantastic imagining, and thus already on the road to idealization. So it is not even the case that willing is an expression of a void in meaning; it expresses only the fear (and secret fascination) that the prospect of this void evokes.22 Genealogy traces both these contrary drives simultaneously, the flight from nothingness and the attraction to it, but without being able to narrate fully what it traces. And so, as genealogy moves forward as if approaching a goal, what it describes in its own motion, in the arc of its “plot,” is not a receding goal but only the senselessness of the goal itself. Here, the plotline of genealogy reenacts the problem it fundamentally revolves around, namely, the problem of self-affirmation. Even meaninglessness is converted into sense for a subject; and the ascetic ideal may be one way of naming the subjective impossibility of looking meaninglessness in the face, one way of voicing the irreducible human need for meaning and the equally compelling need for its aversion—hence, the will to truth is simultaneously a concealed will to contradiction (GM III: 12) and a will to death (GS 344). If the ascetic ideal gives voice to a contradiction, then the subject is the inability to name that contradiction as such, the impossibility of affirming the contradictions of the sort that the ascetic ideal, or rather its underlying fascination, brings to light. Unable to affirm such contradictions, the subject is unable to affirm itself. And this latter impossibility is what defines the subject as its own antagonism. Something like this is what Nietzsche has in mind when he speaks of the condition of nihilism, “radical nihilism,” in which his contemporary culture found

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itself. Nihilism is not merely the will to nothingness. It is the conflicted position of a subject that knows too much and too little; it is the condition of radical self-contradiction incarnated in praxis, a state in which knowledge and action all but cancel each other out. Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be “divine” or morality incarnate. (WP 3) Enlightened self-consciousness is frozen by its own dark knowledge. But, Nietzsche adds, “this realization is a consequence of the cultivation of ‘truthfulness’—thus itself a consequence of the faith in morality.” Hence Nietzsche’s own contradictory views toward morality, its life-affirming qualities (“it prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life,” WP 4, §4) offset only by the paradox that morality fosters precisely this self-ravaging. Morality is an incentive to life . . . and to nihilism. But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective— and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. To nihilism. (KSA 12: 211, 5[71], §2 = WP 5)23 Nietzsche continues: Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation—needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs. This, he writes (KSA 12: p. 212), is our “antagonism,” our deepest and most unwilling knowledge about ourselves and our existence, as well as that to which we most unwillingly (and unwittingly) are returned, as it were eternally. The thought that corresponds most frighteningly to our condition is a thought in which thinking itself occurs “in its most terrible form”: it is the thought of “existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: ‘the eternal recurrence’” (WP 55 = KSA 12: 213, 5[71], §6). And yet, this idea is not something that can in any way be affirmed or thought as such. The prospect of the sheer absence of meaning is not too horrific to bear owing to any lack of meaning, but rather owing to its excess of meaning. Such an idea will always have too much meaning for a subject. We can never, in fact, be nihilistic enough to realize the insignificance that nihilism requires of us.

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There is a certain bleak comfort in this last realization.24 This optimism, itself tinged with despair, to be sure (and possibly just a delusory image of optimism), is at any rate not an artifice of desperation, not some last minute decision to salvage a future for mankind from Nietzsche’s scorching vision of it. It is actually written into that vision itself: strangers to ourselves, we cannot even have the intimacy of knowledge that would be needed to correct our own errors; we cannot even know that. It is a strangely inarticulate hope, a hope that will not even become legible so long as the hope he superficially commends, the approach of some messiah-like savior, continues to inspire belief in a Nietzsche who is all too familiar in the way he is known to us. Only then will Nietzsche truly have become a stranger to us all. And only so will life become worthy of affirming without delusion.

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Nietzsche’s late thought, illuminates many important points in Nietzsche’s mature psychology. Nietzsche’s language in this passage also announces the full sense in which nature has set itself the task of breeding an animal permitted to promise (GM II: 1): the ultimate goal of humanity is not only for individual human beings to be able to promise as individuals, but for humanity to be able to promise as a species, to be able to promise something greater than and beyond the mere human; the goal of humanity, as of all great things, is to overcome itself and so to destroy itself by reaching its goal or endpoint, to reach a point where humanity is no longer the goal. Again, the bad conscience or the moral repression of instinct is not an impediment to reaching this goal but rather the condition of being able to pursue it at all.

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This essay marks a continuation of Porter (2003) and Porter (2005), which form part of an ongoing project to be titled Love of Life, From Antiquity to the Present. Deleuze (1983, p. 9) echoing Heidegger (Heidegger 1961, 1: 161). This might be a fair way of putting Nietzsche’s outlandish “theory.” Unfortunately, Deleuze is not entirely consistent, and he cannot coherently account for the generation of affirmation’s opposite, negation: it is variously “the aggression of an affirmation,” “subsequently-invented” (Deleuze 1983, p. 9) and an “immediate qualit[y] of becoming itself” (p. 54); what it wants is “to deny what differs” (p. 78). Deleuze’s theory thus rigorously reflects the incoherence of Nietzsche’s will to power. A different assessment is needed. For instance, in his claim that “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; . . . and at least, at its mildest, exploitation [. . . , which] belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function” (BGE 259). This “active, aggressive” account of the will to power simultaneously encompasses and, by rhetorical implication, excludes weakly and passive reactive forces. Reprinted in Maier (1968, pp. 71–147). On Aristotle, see ibid. (p. 117, n. 95). Maier 1968, pp. 74–5. This innovation is not in fact original with Kant but contemporary; it is found in G. S. A. Mellin’s Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der kritischen Philosophie (1797–1804; cited by Maier 1968, p. 75). Dilucidatio, Prop. X; cit. Maier (1968, p. 94). Maier 1968, p. 88. Cf. ibid., p. 90. Maier 1968, p. 137: “Negation in appearance is thus merely realitas evanescens, or reality in diminishing degree.” Citations after Schopenhauer 1977 (abbreviated as W). Life dominated by historical remembrance “is far less living and guarantees far less life for the future than did a former life dominated not by [historical] knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusions” (UM II). In the earlier account (UM II: 9), Nietzsche regards this delusion as a sign of “incapacity for action” and of a historical cynicism whose incantation to itself is, “We have reached the goal, we are the goal, we are nature perfected.” Nietzsche

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replies, “Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are raving!”, and so on (p. 108; trans. Hollingdale). See Porter (1998) for an analysis of the Sovereign Individual. This follows despite the odd irregularity of the last “that”-clause, which is perhaps most naturally construed as representing a fact not about the reactive subject but (elliptically) about her own belief. (Similarly, the final “as”-clause.) Cf. also Hartmann (1869, pp. 635–6; cited in UM II: 9). See also Herman (1997, p. 85): “The stance of suicide is active; it preserves an inner sense of control” and is “a sign of resistance and pride.” Ressentiment’s more customary face is that of an affirmation in the form of a denial (GM III: 28). And not because it is a property of a belief or feeling. See next note. Similarly, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z II: 6), a reflection about the “maggots in the bread of life” who inspire “not my hatred but my nausea”: “Alas, I often grew weary of the spirit when I found that even the rabble had esprit,” namely, will to power and life. Hence, “the great disgust with man.” And yet, one must acknowledge that “the man of whom you are weary, the small man,” “eternally recurs” (ibid., III: 13; trans. Kaufmann). As, for example, in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 204), where philosophers of a certain persuasion (it does not much matter which) are rebutted for “having desired more of themselves at some time without having had the right to this ‘more’ and its responsibilities.” This, too, is remarkably stingy for someone as interested as Nietzsche is in promoting the health of the philosophers of the future. In the present passage, Nietzsche doesn’t pronounce on the question, but my point is that were he to indict the feeling of self-affirmation for being subjectively false he would not also indict it for being a feeling: the feeling as such remains objectively “true.” Cf. “has already learned.” The question has to be asked: Has Nietzsche been seduced by a reactive fantasy into an identification with it? Only, the question, once posed, has to be directed not only to the present passage, but to the Genealogy of Morals as a whole. Cf. The Gay Science (GS 370), where Nietzsche’s ideal, the “Dionysian,” includes by definition “the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged” (emphasis added). One way to justify a difference is to say that the Nietzschean affirmation is an activity one spontaneously performs without the attendant feeling (or consciousness) of affirmation. But this possibility is falsified by Nietzsche’s text, as was just seen (and compare: “the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian,” GM I: 2); and such a possibility ought, I wish to argue, to be discounted as nothing but an idealization of affirmation itself. The power a subject has is reducible to the feeling of power a subject has. Affirmation is the affirmation of this power, and therefore of this feeling. See especially what leads up to the quotation just given: “ . . . behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!’ This is precisely

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what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking . . .” There is a certain circularity here. The void exists only insofar as it is feared, but the fear is prompted by the prospect of the void. We have before us, in other words, a retrospective and self-confirming lack. These last two words are missing from The Will to Power (WP 5), which I have slightly modified in the translation. Dühring’s ideal, which is that of a human life on the brink of despair but constitutionally denied the way to a nihilistic conclusion (1865, p. 173), likewise fights off pessimism toward life. His view is a subtle counter to that of a superhumanity (Übermenschlichkeit), which he contemplates (e.g., Dühring 1865, p. 6), and a good deal closer to what is arguably Nietzsche’s implied and internal critique of his own mythical (or just hazy) image of an Übermensch. Nietzsche simply makes arriving at “belief in the value of life” (Dühring) considerably harder and more desperate an affair than Dühring allows.

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There are of course exceptions to this: commentators who have called attention to Nietzsche’s antipolitical stance. See, for example, Kaufmann (1950/1968), Hunt (1985), Bergmann (1987), and Pippin (1991). See, for example, Detwiler (1990), Brinton (1941), and Appel (1998). See, for example, Warren (1991) and Hatab (1995). See, for example, Honig (1993), Owen (1995), and Connolly (2002). One should of course be somewhat wary of my neat compartmentalization: most of the above cited works are more complex than I can represent here, and some of the most interesting work takes on clearly hybrid strategies, such as those of Strong (1972), Ansell-Pearson (1994), and Conway (1997). Since writing this paper, I have come across Shaw (2007), which among its many other merits, provides a nuanced account of Nietzsche’s attitude toward politics. Her account is much more subtle than the procedure of tabulating the merits and demerits, from Nietzsche’s perspective, of the elements of politics. Nevertheless I cannot discuss her approach in the present context. One way of illuminating this point is by a contrast with Aristotle, for whom pure actuality is possible (albeit not for human beings). Whereas for Nietzsche all powers are contingent upon determination, for Aristotle having a power is to realize, and thus exclude, such a determination. I have discussed these issues in Guay (2002 and 2006a). I use this as a term of art: there are of course other meanings given to “contingency,” with reference to Nietzsche and in general. Since my present enterprise is to examine the political implications of contingency, I am not concerned to present a very fine-grained account of contingency itself here; indeed, a suitably generalized account should be better at bringing out the implications. Nevertheless, one can find different accounts of contingency in Nietzsche in Havas (1995) and Small (2004). Havas of course cites Rorty (1989), which offers a different account of contingency from the one presented here. As far as I can tell, what

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