147. Beyond nihilism: Nietzsche

 

Old absolutes have produced their own demise. Religious transcendence led to a sacrifice of the self, a denial of earthly life and of the body. Nietzsche called it a form of decadence. And the relentless search for truth led to the discovery that we cannot know objective, absolute truth. To tell the truth: we cannot tell the truth. 

According to Nietzsche the despair of nihilism should not produce a flight into triviality, hedonism, or indifference, which would constitute another form of decadence. Despair can be positive, producing a novel perspective, in a ‘revaluation of all values’. Nietzsche preached truth relativism but not value relativism.

Reginster[1] proposed that a revaluation of all values is contradictory, self-defeating, because it negates also the value, the perspective from which the revaluation is done. However, if one rejects absolute values of the true and the good, then, to avoid a search without end, an infinite regress, one must stop somewhere, and take some value for granted. But to be consistent one must allow for the need to arise to change that principle. That is the idea of imperfection on the move.

Now the most fundamental value in Nietzsche’s revaluation is change, a perspective of ‘being’ not as a noun but as a verb, as an ongoing process of transformation, Dionysian creative destruction. And change would include the change of change, perhaps a negation of change, which again would be temporary.

As I have argued at several places in this blog, stability and change alternate, in processes of transformation.     

The central principle producing change that Nietzsche arrives at is the ‘will to power’. Reginster proposed that the crux of it is an appreciation of overcoming resistance, not just the acceptance of it as the price to paid for transformation, but the lust, the delight, the relish of it.

As the will to power is turned to the change of ideas, some of the old values of the Enlightenment re-appear: the virtues of intellectual honesty, integrity, open-mindedness, and autonomy. Inspired by classical Greek thought Nietzsche added values of contest, courage, excellence, creative self-determination, and self-overcoming. The highest manifestation of the will to power is artistic creation.

The ultimate goal to which the will to power is the instrument is the flourishing, the vitality of life, and the ‘elevation and strengthening’, ‘the advancement and prosperity of man’.[2] Here is the transcendent in Nietzsche’s revaluation. However, it is not the transcendent of God or an afterlife, but the transcendent of a future of human flourishing. 

The crucial question for me now is whether and how this can avoid relativism. Why adopt this perspective rather than any other? Did Nietzsche raise the will to power to a new absolute, or is it also subject to change?

Reginster argued that Nietzsche’s stance was ‘fictionalist’. Values are to be taken seriously, not ironically, as if they were absolute, in a suspension of disbelief, demanding commitment, without, however, falling back on any claim of absolute validity.

This seriousness is found in how children play (‘and then you were the princess, and I the slayer of dragons …’), and how rules of games are observed. They are taken seriously, with full commitment, and with indignation when the rules are not observed, even while one is aware that they are not ‘really true’ or even relevant outside the game.

This make-belief and self-delusion would have been quite a step for someone as committed to the courage of ever seeking and facing the truth as Nietzsche was, and therefore I find it difficult to accept.

My view on the matter is as follows. As I indicated, the underlying, more fundamental value of Nietzschean philosophy lies in ongoing change. I think this must imply that the will to power is subject to revision. Indeed, I think that Nietzsche himself would not have wanted it otherwise.

What would he have thought if he could have witnessed the atrocities, in the holocaust, for which Nazism had usurped passages from Nietzsche’s texts (e.g. on the ‘blond beast’)? I suggest that he would have revised his views, not on the fundamental value of Dionysian creative destruction, but on the principle of the will to power. 

So, what might a revised endorsement of creative destruction, with a successor to will to power look like? That is the subject for the next item.

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[1]Bernard Reginster, 2006, The affirmation of life; Nietzsche on overcoming nihilism, Harvard University Press.

[2] Quoted in Nimrod Aloni, 1991, Beyond nihilism: Nietzsche’s healing and edifying philosophy, University Press of America, p. 28.