2.1 Life as Suffering

The ancient Greeks, Nietzsche claims, were painfully aware of the awful nature of human existence. His evidence is a piece of ‘folk wisdom’ reported in many ancient sources, in which King Midas encounters the forest-dwelling satyr Silenus and asks him what is most desirable for humans. Silenus replies,

Different aspects of human suffering are compressed in this ‘wisdom of Silenus’. We lack control over the world, so that contingent events can do us harm at any moment, we must continually apply unpleasant effort even to carry on existing, and we are fearfully conscious that our existence is finite. Nietzsche describes the Greeks as ‘susceptible … to the tenderest and deepest suffering’ and as having ‘seen to the core of the terrible destructions of world history and nature’s cruelty’ (BT 7). So in this picture suffering is embedded in our existence, and a level of existential suffering also arises from our awareness that our existence has this character and that we have no power to alter it. Nietzsche regards this realization as the bedrock of the Greek worldview. Yet at the same time Greek culture flourished and, to the modern European world, became emblematic of unrivalled creative power and vitality. So the Greeks must have had a mechanism that enabled them somehow to negotiate this devastating ‘wisdom of Silenus’ so as to experience life as worth living. For Nietzsche, their primary mechanism was art, and in particular the art form of tragic drama.

The influence of Schopenhauer, who also wrote that non-existence would have been preferable for us,Footnote ⁵ made the pessimistic wisdom of Silenus a salient feature of the ancient world for Nietzsche. He had encountered Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation as a student some seven years earlier. Reading it for the first time was an overwhelming experience and for many years he counted himself a ‘Schopenhauerian’. A shared enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s philosophy characterized his close personal association with Richard and Cosima Wagner, which began in 1868. In Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, which had come to be labelled as pessimism, suffering was the most prominent feature. Our in-built nature, according to Schopenhauer, is to will, which means to desire, to strive, and to feel attractions and repulsions both consciously and unconsciously. This opens us perpetually to the possibility of things going against our will, which on his account is suffering.Footnote ⁶ What is more, according to Schopenhauer, desiring itself is already a form of suffering, and having our desires fulfilled is merely a temporary relief from suffering, soon to be filled by more desiring, which is more suffering. Hence Schopenhauer’s famous claims that suffering is ‘grounded in the essence of life’ and that it would have been better not to have been born.Footnote ⁷ By contrast, Schopenhauer thought art could lift us out of the realm of willing and suffering, and that if we could enter a state in which our will abated totally in a kind of saintly conversion, we could attain true selfless tranquillity and find redemption from the suffering that naturally adheres to life.

Nietzsche took from Schopenhauer a complex of ideas concerning suffering, pessimism, art, and redemption and recombined them in a novel way, in the process transforming Schopenhauer’s timeless vision of the human condition into a historical account of the achievement of the Greeks of the fifth century BCE and a diagnosis of where European civilization had since fallen away. The glory of Greek culture was tragedy, the demise of tragedy the beginning of its decline, to which, in Nietzsche’s view, his own nineteenth-century culture is heir.

2.2 Apollo and Dionysus

For any narrative to be tragic, its arc must lead its central characters into intense and irreparable suffering that results unavoidably from their own actions. Oedipus undergoes the shame of having killed his own father and married his own mother and then endures extreme self-inflicted pain in blinding himself. Antigone feels the pain of not being permitted to give religious rites to her dead brother and then faces a long and lonely death to which she is condemned for doing so, while her uncle Creon, as a consequence of condemning her, suffers the loss of his whole family. A tragedy is not a tragedy unless it portrays great suffering. But how did creating and spectating such dramas help the Greeks to deal with Silenus’ verdict on their existence? Nietzsche’s answer to this question is complex, evocative, and diffuse, but its governing idea is that tragic drama is the union of two creative forces, which he identifies symbolically with the deities Apollo and Dionysus.

Nietzsche opens his account of Apollo and Dionysus by associating them with two key terms: dream and intoxication. In practice, Nietzsche allows many other concepts to cluster around the figure of Apollo, the most prominent being illusion, appearance, and beauty of form. Applying these ideas to art, Nietzsche thinks of the sculptures of classical Greece that represent the Olympian gods (‘the delightful bodies of superhuman beings’ (BT 1)) and then of the portrayal of heroic humans and gods in the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey. He likens our experience of these art forms to living in a dream world, where the dream is self-conscious, prolonged, and a source of pleasure. Think of someone, he says, who calls out to themselves ‘It is a dream! I want to dream on!’ (BT 1; 4). By contrast, he associates the god Dionysus with an ecstatic state of mind, Rausch, which we can translate as intoxication, but also as rapture, transport, or frenzy. In Greek culture there was a cult of Dionysus, which involved orgiastic ritual, drunkenness, dancing, and sexual abandon. Nietzsche takes these practices to exemplify a state of mind in which one loses one’s sense of individuality, merging in consciousness with one’s fellow celebrants but also with nature and what he calls ‘the primal Oneness’ (das Ur-Eine). The contrast between individual and Oneness is central to Nietzsche’s imagery here, and before we reach tragedy as such, we need to acknowledge the use he makes of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics.

Following Kant’s transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer held that the world as we experience it is bound by our minds’ structuring forms of space and time. He called space and time the ‘principle of individuation’, meaning that individual things of any kind, including human beings, are distinct from one another, or individuated, by virtue of their occupying different positions in space or time or both. He thought that in the absence of space and time, no individual things or beings could exist, and there would be just the world as such, marked by no individuation. But according to transcendental idealism, this world of our experience is the world as presented to our minds, the world as representation or appearance, not the world as it is ‘in itself ’. It is a mistake, then, to speak of space and time as features of the world ‘in itself ’, and since space and time are the principle of individuation, Schopenhauer reasons that the world in itself is not split into individuals. Applying this metaphysical framework to the Apollo/Dionysus distinction, Nietzsche aligns Apolline art’s ‘dream world’ depictions with individuation: its illusory appearances delight us with the image of superhuman or divine individuals. In contrast, he regards the Dionysiac state of mind as a dissolution of the sense of individuality that puts us in touch with undifferentiated reality at a deeper level, beyond mere appearance.

To see how this Dionysiac state manifests itself in art, we must introduce the all-important topic of music. The full title of Nietzsche’s book is The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Here again it is Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Wagner and Schopenhauer that shapes his project. Schopenhauer had privileged music as distinct from all the other arts: it uniquely works not by way of representing kinds of objects in the world, but by directly manifesting the underlying reality of the world in itself. In Schopenhauer’s view this reality in itself is will. Just as will is the essence of the individual, so it is of the whole world.Footnote ⁸ The same will manifests itself in the multiple individuals that populate the world as it appears to us and also manifests itself in music. Music is the highest art form, for Schopenhauer, because unlike the other arts, ‘it is a copy of the will itself …: this is precisely why the effect of music is so much more powerful and urgent than that of the other arts: the other arts speak only of shadows while music speaks of the essence’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2010: 285). Under the influence of Schopenhauer, Wagner began calling music the ‘redemptive art’, and revised both his theoretical view of the relation between music and drama and his compositional practice.Footnote ⁹

In later years, Nietzsche summarized Schopenhauer’s effect on Wagner thus:

When Nietzsche wrote these words in 1887, he had become severely critical of Wagner and Schopenhauer. But in The Birth of Tragedy, he too is inspired by these ideas about music. Music, as a non-conceptual and non-representational art form, is Dionysiac, and ‘a Dionysiac artist … produces a copy of that primal Oneness as music, if we can rightly call music a repetition and recast of the world’ (BT 5). Nietzsche is so much in thrall to Schopenhauer here that he simply quotes a huge chunk of Schopenhauer’s text, summing up with ‘According to Schopenhauer’s theory, then, we see music as the immediate language of the will’ (BT 16). There is a tension here, however. On the one hand, we know that a few years earlier, Nietzsche had made strong objections to Schopenhauer’s view that the world in itself is will, so it is unlikely that he adopted it as a serious thesis.Footnote ¹⁰ Throughout The Birth of Tragedy, he rather freely uses the term ‘will’ in a manner that sounds Schopenhauerian, but more often he refers to the ‘primal Oneness’ or ‘nature’ without directly calling it ‘the will’ or characterizing it any further. On the other hand, once he has imported Schopenhauer’s theory of music wholesale into his own text, he seems committed to the metaphysics of will by default.Footnote ¹¹ A wider question here, which divides interpreters, is how seriously Nietzsche intended any of his Schopenhauer-speak to constitute a serious assertion concerning the metaphysics of the world. We shall return to that question in what follows.

Nietzsche’s central thesis is that Athenian tragedy, especially in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, unites the Apolline and Dionysiac forces into one art form, and in so doing provides a unifying experience in which a whole culture can simultaneously realize the awfulness of a life of suffering and rejoice in it. Nietzsche’s description of how the two forces unite to achieve this affirmation of suffering is elaborate and often obscure. But it will help to consider the structure of Greek tragic drama. Unlike most modern drama, Greek plays did not consist solely of individual characters up on a stage. There was also the chorus, a group of performers who sang and moved rhythmically together on the circular floor of the theatrical space known as the orchēstra. The Greek word choros originally means dance, and it is the idea of the collective dancing movement of the tragic chorus, whose origin was thought to be in the intoxicated revels of the Dionysiac cult, that particularly seems to have captivated Nietzsche.Footnote ¹² The chorus is the Dionysiac element of tragedy because it is musical and intoxicating, and because it transcends individuality. The suffering character on stage, such as Oedipus, is the Apolline element because it represents the individual and is, in Nietzsche’s terms, an illusion or dream image in which we can delight.

At some length and with many difficult twists and turns, Nietzsche proposes that tragedy owes its power and its very existence to the synthesis of the Apolline and the Dionysiac. In one expressive passage he says:

By ‘redemption through illusion’, Nietzsche means a state that the purely Apolline art of Homer’s epic poems can supply. Purely Apolline art, therefore, can mount a response to the bleak picture of Silenus’ wisdom: ‘The Greeks knew and felt the fears and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all they had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and these horrors’ (BT 3). This response to the stark vision of life as suffering uses art to create the illusion of a different, more magnificent world. But Apolline image-making seems to deal with suffering in a superficial, even mendacious way: ‘beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is, in a certain sense, lied away from amongst the features of nature’ (BT 16, translation modified). By deflecting attention away from the real world, beautiful art helps its audience cope with suffering by blanking it out rather than confronting it. Nietzsche claims that tragedy, by combining the Apolline with the Dionysiac, responds to suffering more profoundly.

Nietzsche’s reference to the Dionysiac ‘fragmentation of the individual’ blends metaphysics and myth. In a traditional Greek myth, Dionysus was violently dismembered, but then restored to life again. Nietzsche suggests that all tragic mythical narratives, though ostensibly about different protagonists, are really re-enactments of the destruction of Dionysus (see BT 10). He fuses this destruction with the Schopenhauerian idea that the individual disappears when we contemplate the Oneness of ultimate reality. In the world of image the individual protagonists of a tragedy have their life ripped apart, but the Dionysiac vision of the underlying Oneness of everything gives us a deeper perspective from which to contemplate their fate, and by implication our own. Taken pure, without the mediation of art, this Dionysiac vision would arouse only ‘repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence’ (BT 7). We would shudder in the face of the Oneness of the world with its indifference to the suffering individual, who can be swept away at any moment – and who was never fully real in the first place. But if we witness the symbolic destruction of a character like Oedipus in the pleasing ‘dream image’ while also under the ritualistic spell of the chorus, we can experience what Nietzsche calls ‘the metaphysical consolation … that whatever superficial changes may occur, life is at bottom indestructibly powerful and joyful’ (BT 7). Later he describes this consolation thus: ‘Dionysiac art … forces us to look at the terrors of existence, yet we are not to be petrified with fear. … For a brief moment we really become the primal essence itself, and feel its unbounded lust for existence and delight in existence’ (BT 17). So tragedy allows human beings to confront the facts of suffering, rather than throwing a deceitful veil of beauty over them, but to confront them not with horror but with a deep joy and sense of security that stems from a psychological identification with the whole world, the primal essence or Oneness that underlies everything.

Nietzsche uses an emphatic phrase which is frequently cited as epitomizing The Birth of Tragedy’s message: ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (BT 5). He embeds this saying in an elaborate conceit in which we humans are the aesthetic phenomenon contemplated by something greater than us, ‘images and projections for the true creator of the world’ or ‘the primal artist of the world’ (which, as Stephen Halliwell says, ‘shifts us into deeply mysterious territory’ (Halliwell Reference Halliwell2018: 100)). In more mundane terms, Nietzsche appears to mean that only art can reconcile us with life, in the sense of making us feel it is worth living. His term ‘justified’ (gerechtfergtigt) can be misleading. Brian Leiter offers a clarification: ‘what is really at stake for Nietzsche is that life should be experienced as worth living, not that a rational or cognitive warrant exists for continuing to live. The issue is our affective or emotional attachment to life’ (Leiter Reference Leiter2018: 156).Footnote ¹³

Nietzsche has given two ways in which art can attach us positively to life: as pure image-making and as metaphysical consolation through tragedy, the latter being the more profound consolation for the life of suffering. But, according to Nietzsche, the tragic culture did not survive; it was killed by the arrival on the Athenian scene of a new and powerful non-artistic approach to life: that of Socrates. ‘We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history’ (BT 15), Nietzsche says, because we still live with his legacy, which is the prioritization of rationality, science, and ‘optimistic dialectic’ (BT 14) over art. Socrates is the ‘theoretical man’, the ‘optimist who, in his faith in the explicability of the nature of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil’ (BT 15). This creates ‘a profound illusion … – the unshakeable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being’ (BT 15). From this point of view, our lives must make rational sense; we must be able to master suffering by argument: ‘We need only consider the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge, all sins arise from ignorance, the virtuous man is the happy man.” In these three basic optimistic formulae lies the death of tragedy’ (BT 14). Once this outlook predominates, art still exists but gets subsumed under Socratism: dramas must make rational sense, and characters and their actions must be explicable. Apolline image-making continues but is now co-opted by rationality and sheds the Dionysiac element without which tragedy proper cannot exist.Footnote ¹⁴

2.3 Illusion and Truth

Nietzsche portrays rationalistic Socratism negatively because it has killed tragedy. But it nonetheless has its attraction: ‘No one who has experienced the delight of Socratic knowledge, and sensed how … it seeks to encompass the whole phenomenal world, will ever again find a stimulus to existence more compelling than the desire to complete that conquest’ (BT 15). So Socratism too can be an alternative basis for a culture, and a way to make life bearable. In Section 18 Nietzsche sums up the three options for negotiating the wisdom of Silenus:

On this view, all culture consists of means for dealing with the distress that (some) humans feel over the ‘wound’ of their existence. But all three of these means are said to work by way of illusion. That is not surprising in the case of the Socratic approach, whose ‘optimistic dialectic’ puts us under an illusion because it refuses to recognize the wisdom of Silenus at all, rendering suffering harmless through rational justification, or attempting to ‘rectify’ the world ‘through knowledge and science’ (BT 17), as though suffering could be removed from life. Nor is it surprising that the Apolline approach (which Nietzsche here calls simply ‘artistic’) works by illusion, since it consists in inventing an unreal ‘dream world’, a beautiful fictional image to divert us away from the real awfulness of life. But what is perhaps surprising is that the ‘metaphysical consolation’ of tragedy, of which Nietzsche has made so much, is yet a third level of illusion.

If tragedy consoles us with yet more illusions, what does Nietzsche mean when he speaks of ‘Dionysiac knowledge’ (BT 8) and its ‘insight into the terrible truth’ (BT 7)? What is it that he takes to be true here? Given that tragedy’s ‘consolation’ is supposed to be ‘metaphysical’, we might think that Nietzsche is proposing the literal truth of the idea that the world in itself is a primal Oneness creating and destroying individuals, and that through tragic art we grasp this truth in an affirming rather than despairing way. The most extreme version of this interpretation would be that Nietzsche ‘incorporates without modification Schopenhauer’s metaphysics’ (Young Reference Young1992: 26) – that he believes the essence of the world in itself is an undifferentiated will.Footnote ¹⁵ In that case, ‘Dionysiac knowledge’ would amount to knowing that the world is just what Schopenhauer says it is. However, as we have hinted in Section 2.2, Nietzsche is unlikely to have re-hashed Schopenhauer’s position here, since he had already diagnosed serious holes in the metaphysics of the will several years earlier, and he is extremely cagey about it in The Birth of Tragedy, never really committing himself to its literal truth. An alternative reading, suggested by Aaron Ridley, has Nietzsche holding a ‘weak metaphysical thesis … that posits a level of being which is orthogonal to ordinary human experience’, a level at which ‘the “world-building force” itself … must be logically prior to the world of “individual” experience’ (Ridley Reference Ridley2007: 32). This fits better with Nietzsche’s later disparagement of his first book, in the prefatory ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ which he added in 1886. There he says, ‘the entire book knows only one overt and implied artistic meaning behind all events – a “god”, if you will, but certainly only an entirely thoughtless and amoral artist-god’ (ASC, 5), and ‘I regret … having obscured and spoiled Dionysiac intimations with Schopenhauerian formulae’ (ASC, 6).

Other commentators have viewed Nietzsche as in the business of self-conscious myth-making, not metaphysical theorizing. Ken Gemes and Chris Sykes argue that for Nietzsche the problem to be addressed is the felt lack of meaning to life, and that the solace for this lack of meaning comes from myth, ‘a literally fictive narrative encompassing symbolical archetypes that help provide a structural unity to experience’ (Gemes and Sykes Reference 73Gemes, Sykes and Came2014: 83). In that case, Nietzsche’s use of ‘metaphysics’ involves no literal knowledge-claims about the fundamental nature of the world, merely a powerful vision that consoles and perhaps makes the human condition intelligible to us. Sebastian Gardner says that ‘What Nietzsche intends his artist’s metaphysics to amount to is not an extraction of metaphysical truth from tragic myth, but a restatement of tragic myth in its highest … form’ (Gardner Reference Gardner, Gemes and Richardson2013: 606). But ultimately Nietzsche’s writing seems to hover between myth and literal truth without quite settling on either side. He calls the primal Oneness ‘the truly existent’ (BT 4) and says that the ‘Dionysiac man’ has ‘truly seen to the essence of things’ (BT 7). A specifically Dionysiac grasp of the essence of things would presumably be an insight into the reality that everything is One and the individual is nothing, and that the unsatisfactory nature of life ‘lies deep in the essence of things’, as Schopenhauer put it (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2018: 588). Thus, while Nietzsche undeniably uses a Schopenhauerian or quasi-Schopenhauerian metaphysics in order to revive the efficacy of tragic myth in his own time,Footnote ¹⁶ he also seems to trade on the plausibility of its being a true account of reality.Footnote ¹⁷ The Nietzsche of later writings is rightly hailed as a clear-eyed debunker of any transcendent metaphysics. But it is hard not to sense a rather more blurred vision in his first book.

2.4 Pessimism

Where does this leave us with the issue of suffering? One thing that The Birth of Tragedy certainly proclaims as literal truth is ‘the horror and absurdity of existence’ (BT 7). This part of the Silenian ‘folk wisdom’ is never challenged. The view that life is pervaded by suffering and that it would therefore be better not to have existed is what the late nineteenth century termed philosophical pessimism.Footnote ¹⁸ How does Nietzsche stand towards this philosophical position in his first book?

Philosophical pessimism was hotly debated in Germany in the years after Schopenhauer’s death in 1860, and in Nietzsche’s day the pessimistic standpoint was represented by figures who were to become much less well known, among them principally Eduard von Hartmann. Patrick Hassan (Reference Hassan2023) has argued convincingly that Nietzsche’s complex engagement with pessimism owes as much to his reception of his contemporaries as it does to Schopenhauer. This applies even to The Birth of Tragedy, where the overwhelming presence of Schopenhauer masks the influence of the later thinkers, none of whom Nietzsche mentions. One important controversy for the pessimists concerned quietism, resignedly accepting the world as it is with no attempt at change or progress. Schopenhauer had recommended this attitude as the way to deal with the truth of pessimism, thinking that, if we suffer because of our desires, the solution must be to cease desiring anything at all, and merely look upon the terrible world in the mode of detached contemplation.Footnote ¹⁹ Von Hartmann and other pessimists, however, rejected Schopenhauer’s quietism. They wanted the pessimistic view – the view that because of the prevalence of suffering over pleasure, it would be better not to have existed – to be compatible with social and moral progress brought about by concerted action. Nietzsche’s treatment of pessimism in The Birth of Tragedy follows a similar pattern, though without the same interest in social and moral progress. He wanted pessimism to be allied with positive aesthetic creation, not quietistic detachment and abandonment of all desire and effort.Footnote ²⁰

When in 1886 Nietzsche returned to his first book in self-critical mode, he gave it a new subtitle, ‘Hellenism and Pessimism’, but invited the reader to consider more carefully in what sense the book was pessimistic:

Here we are in the world of the later Nietzsche, still diagnosing a malaise in nineteenth-century Europe, but now using a scale of values that polarizes strength against weakness and health against decline, values characterized psychologically in terms of the instincts. In The Gay Science, Book V (1887), Nietzsche makes a distinction between ‘romantic pessimism’ and a Dionysian ‘pessimism of the future’ (Reference WilliamsGS 370), and elaborates on the types to which each pessimism is suited:

In hindsight, Nietzsche sees that his misjudgement was to think his then heroes, Schopenhauer and Wagner, were really on his side. He came to see that Schopenhauer’s pessimism, because it advocates self-denial, ascetic withdrawal from desire and action, and resignation from life, was drastically at odds with the value that he himself wanted to find in tragedy. ‘Ah, how differently Dionysus spoke to me!’ he exclaims, ‘How far I was then from all that resignationism!’ (ASC 6). The ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ proclaims not only his self-distancing from Schopenhauer and Wagner, but his recommendation to ‘consign all metaphysical consolation to the devil’ (ASC 7), and his giving up as ‘hopeless’ any of his early grandiose hopes for German music and the ‘German spirit’ (ASC 6).

In 1878 Nietzsche published Human, All too Human, to which he later appended two collections of aphorisms, Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow. In these writings there is a marked change both in style and in intellectual allegiance. Right at the start of Human, All too Human, he rejects ‘metaphysical philosophy’ in favour of ‘[h]istorical philosophy … which can no longer be separated from natural science’ (HH 1). From now on Nietzsche is concerned to investigate human experience and human values in empirical terms. The watchword is that ‘everything has become: there are no eternal facts’ (HH 2). But prominent among the data to be analysed is the human tendency to invent supposedly timeless accounts of the world in metaphysics and in religion. Nietzsche now says ‘Away with those overused words optimism and pessimism! We have had enough of them …. it is quite obvious that the world is neither good nor evil, let alone the best of all or the worst of all worlds’ (HH 28). Once we stop trying to be metaphysicians, we must recognize that our empirical human perspectives are limited and biased and we generally lack any ability to evaluate life or the world as a whole, as philosophical pessimism would have us do.

In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche’s new faith in science eclipses his enthusiasm for art. Religion and art can re-interpret suffering and ‘narcotize it’, but as that approach begins to fail, the contrasting approach of abolishing suffering comes into view (HH 108). ‘Modern science’, he now says, ‘has as its goal: as little pain as possible’ (HH 128) – humans can work for progress (HH 24) and ‘a real improvement in their conditions’ (HH 148). Here Nietzsche sounds reminiscent of the ‘Socratic’ approach to suffering he had earlier lamented in modern society. This progressivist stance was, however, short-lived. In subsequent works, as commentators have emphasized,Footnote ²¹ Nietzsche turned away again from advocating the removal of suffering from life. In his works from Daybreak (1881) onwards he examines our attitudes to phenomena such as cruelty and compassion, reveals different ways in which we inflict suffering on ourselves, and questions the ways in which suffering has been given meaning in morality and the Christian religious tradition from which it has stemmed. Rather than seeking only an affirmative representation of suffering, he now aims to revalue suffering, daring to proclaim it an enhancement rather than an objection to life.

3.1 All-too-Human Cruelty

The reader of Nietzsche’s Genealogy cannot but be struck by the positive language in which Nietzsche sometimes describes human cruelty. In the book’s first essay, he contrasts modern morality with the values of the ‘nobles’ of a previous (rather vaguely located) aristocratic warrior culture, using glorifying descriptions of their ‘boldness’ and their ‘appalling lightheartedness and depth of desire in all destruction, in all the delights of victory and of cruelty’ (GM I: 11).Footnote ²² In the second essay of the same work, he takes cruelty as his explicit theme, and states that ‘Seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so’, adding ‘Without cruelty no festival … and in punishment too there is so much that is festive!’ (GM II: 6). Nietzsche parades before us, seemingly with relish, many historically attested examples of punishments whose goal seems to be the infliction of extreme pain for the sake of making others suffer. Thomas Mann (though he saw much greater depth and significance in Nietzsche) was another who found such passages troubling, an embarrassing picture of ‘infantile sadism’ (Mann Reference Mann1959: 165).

But to understand Nietzsche’s strategy here, we should begin by noting two points: (1) he is, for the moment, making no evaluative judgement concerning cruelty, and is aiming instead to state facts about kinds of human behaviour that were regularly deemed acceptable in the past (by ‘earlier humanity’ (GM II: 6) and ‘as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’ (GM II: 3)); (2) he is demonstrating how alien the idea of enjoying cruelty is to the modern reader. He mixes his celebratory language with negative descriptions such as ‘gruesome sacrifices’, ‘repulsive mutilations’ (GM II: 3), and spells out how repugnant such things now are for us. In full context, his melodramatic acclaim for ‘seeing-suffer’ and ‘making-suffer’ makes a slightly subtler, more ironic impression:

Nietzsche states that many human beings have gained an empowering feeling of pleasure from the perpetration and witnessing of cruel violence. It is hard to dispute the truth of this statement. He further implies that this remains a fact about ‘us’, the only difference being that our moral assumptions now prevent us from facing up to it. So rather than merely ‘liking the contemplation of pain’ or claiming that ‘making others suffer is good in itself’, Nietzsche is using his admittedly lurid rhetoric to confront us with the following truths: human beings have a tendency to cruelty, and we modern (European) humans have become sensitive in a way that makes it hard even to acknowledge this truth, let alone to identify with the state of mind in which cruelty can be enjoyed. So we have reason to conclude with Ivan Soll that ‘[Nietzsche’s] analysis of cruelty is not … tantamount to a simple acceptance and approval of cruelty’ (Soll Reference Soll and Schacht1994: 181).

However, Nietzsche’s position is murkier than that. On the one hand, as a modern human, he presumably includes himself among ‘modern humans, which is to say us’ – the ‘tame’ culture that finds cruelty repugnant. But on the other hand he claims to unmask the alleged hypocrisy that ‘we’ manifest.Footnote ²³ So in what way does he see past this hypocrisy? Is it merely that he does not shy away from acknowledging the ‘hard proposition’ that human beings have a drive to cruelty? Or does he consider himself honest enough not to condemn cruelty and tough-minded enough to value it positively? As we read on, the latter impression emerges more clearly:

We are here in the midst of the Genealogy’s project of ‘calling into question’ the value of our moral values, those belonging particularly to what he calls the ‘morality of compassion’ (Mitleids-Moral ) (GM Preface: 6). He thinks there has been a historical ‘softening’ towards cruelty, and towards suffering in general, that has diminished our capacity to appreciate and attain another kind of value, ‘the highest power and splendor of the human type’ (GM Preface: 6). In seeking safety from suffering, we risk diminishing the potential for kinds of achievement that make human beings admirable. It is fairly clear that Nietzsche evaluates negatively the loss of our ability to feel good about cruelty.

A central strand of this project of calling our values into question is the portrayal of modern European morality as ‘anti-nature’ (Widernatur: TI, ‘Morality’, 1), an acquired set of attitudes and practices that protect against suffering but thereby weaken and sicken us by alienating us from our natural ‘instincts’. If we are being encouraged to lament our alienation from a natural instinct that gives rise to cruelty, then Russell, Mann, and others are reacting to a genuine part of Nietzsche’s enterprise. Nietzsche does not advocate a return to public beheadings and crucifixions, and he may even think – naively if so – that these things belong to a past age that is lost for good by ‘us moderns’. Nor does he state that inflicting suffering on others is good in itself. Nonetheless, he suggests there is something unnatural and unhealthy about the values that nowadays stop us from thinking and feeling that it can be good. Coupled with the fact that ‘with Nietzsche there is not even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty’ (May Reference May1999: 132), he risks, even if inadvertently, opening a door to a world in which atrocities are allowed to occur without disapproval.Footnote ²⁴

Still, we are only a small way into Nietzsche’s analysis and evaluation of cruelty. If inflicting suffering on others can at least feel good, what explains that phenomenon? Here Nietzsche gives an original explanation: ‘to practise cruelty is to enjoy the highest gratification of the feeling of power’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 18). He discusses examples where cruelty is legitimized in the form of punishment and the agent who inflicts suffering on a transgressor is seeking to gain recompense for a wrong committed. Nietzsche’s question is: what is the gain, the reward, for the agent in this procedure? How could another person’s suffering provide the punishing agent with anything positive? His answer is that the inflictor of punishment gains a feeling of power in relation to the one punished.Footnote ²⁵ The pleasure that occurs is not simply a case of being pleased that someone suffers, but is rather a by-product of an instinctive drive towards power expressing itself. In a late unpublished note, Nietzsche writes:

‘That will’ is will to power (Wille zur Macht), a notion which emerges in Nietzsche’s published writings first in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), occurs with some frequency in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and is present in later works. The nature of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power has been the subject of much debate, which we cannot rehearse here.Footnote ²⁶ The present discussion requires only that ‘will to power’ be a psychological notion that is meant to explain (at least some) human motivation and action. Here I shall treat will to power as a human drive.Footnote ²⁷

In claiming that we are driven to increase our power, or to increase our feeling of power,Footnote ²⁸ and in portraying pleasure and pain as mere consequences of the operation of this drive, Nietzsche rejects the ‘famous prejudice’ of psychological hedonism, the view that pleasure and pain are the sole motivations of human desire and action. However, he does not think that power replaces pleasure as the solitary goal of human desire and action. Human beings pursue a huge number of ends; we seek knowledge, love, comfort, creativity, and so on. According to an interpretation proposed by Bernard Reginster, Nietzsche’s psychological notion of will to power is that of ‘a desire whose object includes another (first order) desire. … It is, specifically, a desire for the overcoming of resistance in pursuit of some determinate first-order desire’ (Reginster Reference Reginster2006: 132). On this view, will to power identifies a particular value that we gain as agents by fulfilling our desires in a particular way. If our first-order desire is for X, our will to power is the desire to succeed in attaining X through there being some obstacle or difficulty in attaining X, which we overcome. When we succeed in that way, we gain an increased feeling of power. We want to get what we want by overcoming something that works against our getting it. Hence the resistance to what we want is itself something that we want. Achieving what we desire easily without such resistance is dull by comparison. But if this pattern of willing resistance to our desires can apply to actions in pursuit of any end, what, according to Nietzsche, is the peculiar gain from cruelty as such? Reginster offers this analysis:

To say that we experience no increase in the feeling of power in the absence of resistance is questionable.Footnote ²⁹ For example (see Section 4.1), Nietzsche thinks that compassion also gives a feeling of power over sufferers. It is less clear what the resistance is in that case. It is plausible, however, that overcoming resistance enhances the cruel agent’s feeling of power. Overcoming resistance to one’s will from the will of the victim offers a greater feeling of power than some other instances where a degree of power is felt simply in exercising one’s capacities.

The ‘resistance’ account faces other potential difficulties. Nietzsche talked not only of ‘making-suffer’, but of ‘seeing-suffer’. As Ivan Soll comments, Nietzsche ‘admits only that witnessing the suffering of others is not as satisfying as bringing it about. It remains puzzling, however, how on his account the cruel spectacle would afford any satisfaction at all’ (Soll Reference Soll and Schacht1994: 178). But Soll suggests an answer that plugs the gap: a spectator can identify with the one actually inflicting the suffering. If someone is punished on my behalf, or by an institution or collectivity of which I am part, there is a sense in which I can share in the agency that inflicts the suffering, and thus can share in the feeling of increased power – rather as a football supporter rejoices because ‘we have scored’. It is not clear, however, that all cases of cruel spectatorship require this kind of identification: one might simply enjoy feeling more powerful than the unfortunate helpless victim, in which case no resistance to one’s agency need enter the picture. Other unsettling questions arise if we construe the allegedly desired resistance to our will as suffering. Reginster apparently construes it so, saying that ‘suffering is defined in terms of resistance’ (Reginster Reference Reginster2006: 133). He quotes Schopenhauer’s statement, ‘[w]hen an obstacle is placed between [the will] and its temporary goal, we call this inhibition suffering’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2010: 336). But it is not clear that Nietzsche would accept resistance to the will as a sufficient condition for suffering, or that we should do so. If I am wanting to cross the road and a light changes to red, stopping me from walking, do I suffer? Furthermore, if all resistance to our goals is suffering, then the perpetrators of cruelty suffer inasmuch as they experience resistance from the will of the victim. But to say that this feeling of resistance constitutes the cruel person’s suffering is a counterintuitive (not to say offensive) result on the usual understanding of ‘suffering’. So it is questionable whether all resistances to our will are rightly classified as sufferings. It is also questionable whether all sufferings are resistances to our will that we desire. In the case of illness, for example, Nietzsche is ‘tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all’ (Reference WilliamsGS Preface, 3). But this is not to say that he wanted each of his headaches as a challenge.Footnote ³⁰

3.2 Refined Cruelty

Nietzsche appears to use will to power not only to explain phenomena, but to evaluate them. An oft-cited passage from his late work, The Anti-Christ, runs as follows:

• What is good? – Everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself.

• What is bad? – Everything stemming from weakness.

• What is happiness? – The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome (Reference RidleyA 2).

From this it looks as though ‘Power is the standard of evaluation’ (Katsafanas Reference 75Katsafanas and Katsafanas2020: 87). However, Nietzsche does not endorse as good everything that he explains via the notion of will to power. He is extremely negative about many things that he explains in terms of will to power, including compassion, guilt, and asceticism. And it turns out that Nietzsche does not value all cruelty positively either.

Nietzsche’s accusation of ‘Tartuffery’ in the Genealogy rests on the fact that, while we reject blatant physical cruelty, we tolerate and even promote less obvious forms of cruelty. He finds cruelty where we least expect it: ‘almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 229). Nietzsche grants modern societies little credit for their greater ‘mildness’: ‘I concede only that cruelty now refines itself and that its older forms henceforth offend taste; but wounding and torturing with word and eye reaches its highest cultivation in times of corruption – it is now alone that malice and the delight in malice are born’ (Reference WilliamsGS 23). For instance, Nietzsche identifies what he calls the ‘drive to distinction’, in which we ‘want to make the sight of us painful to another and to awaken in him the feeling of envy and of his own impotence and degradation’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 30). He is inventive in his variations on this theme: someone is humble or kind in order to ‘torture’ or ‘vent his cruelty’ on someone else; an artist strives to become great to defeat rival artists; a nun’s chastity is a vengeful reproach to other women. In all these cases the sense of distinction from others is ‘in its ultimate foundation pleasure in cruelty’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 30). It is refined cruelty, in two ways. First, it is not the infliction of physical pain and injury allegedly enjoyed by earlier humans, but something psychological; second, we do not even think of it as cruelty. But still we are unwittingly perpetuating a pattern of behaviour inherited from those earlier humans: ‘Do you think all this has altered and that mankind must therefore have changed its character? O observers of mankind, learn better to observe yourselves!’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 18). So the message is: by all means condemn the ancient gladiator fights and burnings at the stake, but do not imagine you are free of cruelties yourselves.

In the Genealogy, having contrasted modern people with their ancestors who could enjoy overt cruelty, Nietzsche begins to show his most pressing concerns:

What troubles us is suffering to which we can attach no meaning (Sinn). Towards the end of the Genealogy Nietzsche generalizes this message:

On this view, suffering, however widespread and ineliminable, is not the ‘objection to life’ that Schopenhauer and the pessimists thought it was. It can be accommodated within life if it can be interpreted as serving some higher end, goal, or purpose.

Nietzsche emphasizes the particular way in which suffering has been given meaning by Christianity. Christianity has used ‘torments of the soul … on an unheard-of scale and continues to preach this species of torture’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 77); the ‘ascetic ideal’ is the ‘priests’ best tool of power’ (GM III: 1); with its notions of sin and ascetic self-denial Christianity perpetrates ‘the most horrible form of inhuman cruelty’ that ‘massacres physically and psychologically’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Clever’, 3). Whereas in antiquity there was ‘pure innocent misfortune’, ‘only in Christendom did everything become punishment, well-deserved punishment: it also makes the sufferer’s imagination suffer, so that he feels himself morally reprehensible and cast out. Poor mankind!’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 78). In the Genealogy, Nietzsche elaborates on the way religion supplies meaning: ‘“I am suffering: for this someone must be to blame” – thus every diseased sheep thinks. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him: “That’s right, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it – you alone are to blame for yourself !”’ (GM II: 15). Nietzsche imagines Christian priests ‘in the early Middle Ages’ turning the formerly ‘noble’ type of human being ‘into a “sinner” … stuck in a cage, locked up inside all sorts of horrible ideas … There he lay, sick, miserable, full of malice against himself ’ (TI, ‘Improvers’, 2). Suffering is also seen as redeeming in Christianity. There is a ‘great ladder of religious cruelty’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 55), starting with human sacrifices to the gods, moving to an internal sacrifice of our own instincts and nature, and ending with ‘the final, extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man’ (GM I: 8).Footnote ³¹

These are meanings for suffering that Nietzsche emphatically rejects. Just as we moderns no longer accept the meaning assigned to the tortures of the past and can only be appalled by them as pure cruelty, so for Nietzsche, once ‘God is dead’ (‘the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable’ (Reference WilliamsGS 343)) and the whole panoply of transcendent metaphysics has been rejected, Christian meaning evaporates and what is left is simply a more insidious form of torture. Nietzsche expresses strong indignation at this form of cruelty. ‘Oh, how much superfluous cruelty and vivisection have proceeded from those religions which invented sin!’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 53); ‘Poor Mankind!’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 78).Footnote ³² If Christianity perpetrates objectionable cruelty, and if cruelty is achieved through an increased feeling of power over others or over oneself, then there is no straightforward link between something’s being explained through an increased feeling of power and Nietzsche’s judging it good. One way of reading Nietzsche is to stop short at his irresponsible and sensationalist expressions of nostalgia for a supposed distant time when human beings could happily be cruel. Another is to see him as trying to harness the reader’s alarm at such blatant cruelty and turn it to outrage against the insidious cruelty to which he thinks our religious, and specifically Christian, values have subjected us. This kind of cruelty – even though it may give an increment to the feeling of power in its ‘priestly’ perpetrators – is by no means ‘good in itself ’ for Nietzsche, nor does he ‘like the contemplation’ of it.

3.3 Self-Inflicted Suffering

We have seen how Nietzsche links cruelty to a human instinct and how he thinks the same instinct (or drive)Footnote ³³ that previously led to an ‘innocent’ enjoyment of the sufferings of others has not gone away but has rather shifted to different objects. An important feature of drives is that they combine stability of aim with fluidity of object.Footnote ³⁴ As Mark Alfano puts it, ‘the aim of a drive is what individuates it from other drives, whereas the object (and time of expression) is what individuates different expressions of the same drive’ (Alfano Reference Alfano2019: 52). There has been some debate concerning how to characterize the aim of a Nietzschean drive.Footnote ³⁵ From our present point of view, it is sufficient to note this difference between a drive’s aim and its object. If there is a drive that gives rise to cruelty – we have suggested that drive is will to power – it will be capable of persisting as the same drive with a constant aim, while discharging itself upon different objects.

In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche claims that we ourselves have become the objects of our own cruelty.Footnote ³⁶ He later summed up the essay with the words ‘conscience is not, as is believed, “the voice of God in man”, – it is the instinct of cruelty that is turned inwards after it cannot discharge itself outwards anymore’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Genealogy’). Nietzsche gives us a ‘hypothesis’, a narrative of human development, in which a major change occurred with the advent of civilization. Once humans lived in settled communities, peaceful co-existence required them to curb the excesses of their instincts to inflict suffering on others. The greatest civilizations of course provided them with plenty of spectator-cruelty, but the very existence of such punishments acted as a deterrent to the ordinary inhabitant, who had to keep in line and was thereby deprived of opportunities to gain that specific enhanced feeling of power from making others suffer in person. Thus begins what Nietzsche calls ‘the suffering of man from himself ’ (GM II: 16). One of the Genealogy’s great rhetorical passages conveys the scene:

Nietzsche could scarcely have expressed more graphically his idea that the state resulting from this internalization, which he calls bad conscience, consists of self-inflicted suffering.

The Genealogy’s second essay is designed as an origin-story of the conditions mentioned in its title, ‘“Guilt”, “Bad conscience”, and Related Matters’, but it has proved hard for commentators to settle on the precise form that Nietzsche’s developmental narrative takes.Footnote ³⁷ Let us start at the culmination of the narrative, Nietzsche’s description of an intense feeling of irresolvable guilt that he discerns in Christianity. Having recounted a historical process in which human communities have felt themselves indebtedFootnote ³⁸ first to their ancestors – ‘one has to repay them through sacrifices and achievements: one thereby acknowledges a debt that is continually growing’ (GM II: 19) – then to more powerful gods that they invented to fulfil the same role, Nietzsche arrives at the extreme of this tendency, the ‘maximum’ God of Christianity (GM II: 20), the one all-powerful being to whom everything is owed, but to whom no repayment can ever be sufficient. Nietzsche suggests that the ‘presupposition’ of such a God becomes united with the self-cruelty of bad conscience:

Following this, Nietzsche describes the highest pitch of self-cruelty in an impressive extended passage that ends with the following words:

Nietzsche’s poignant evocation of sadness (over a phenomenon he considers definitive of the modern European psyche) again discredits the allegation that he is simply fond of contemplating pain and suffering. Nor is it consistent with this passage to think that he regards the suffering of these religious self-tormentors as good in itself.

However, Nietzsche does not consider self-inflicted suffering per se a bad thing in all its manifestations and aspects. Bad conscience also represents a momentous leap in human complexity and potential. He can call it both a ‘sickness’ and a ‘pregnancy’ (GM II: 19). Along with the ‘self-torment’, ‘something so new, deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future had come into being that the appearance of the earth was thereby essentially changed’ (GM II: 16). Nietzsche even suggests that this process gives rise to ‘a wealth of disconcerting beauty’ because the very distinction between ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’ arises only when we can reflectively regard parts of our instinctive make-up as ugly (GM II: 18). In being able to recognize and reject part of their natures, humans became capable of self-interpretation and self-transformation. Nietzsche’s language is persistently ambivalent. For example, he evokes

One clear source of ambivalence is that the ‘self’ here is not unitary. The process of self-cruelty has two poles, active and passive, and the one human being is both sufferer and perpetrator. When Nietzsche writes elsewhere that ‘there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 229), it is the ‘making’ side that counts. While it may be possible to take pleasure in the passive side of this process (pleasure in undergoing suffering), Nietzsche instead emphasizes the gain in power that accrues to the positive side (the one who is inflicting the suffering). The active side is creative and ‘artistic’, making something new out of raw material, and Nietzsche equates this side of self-cruelty with the actions of a supposed ‘race of conquerors and lords’ who (though by hypothesis lacking inner complexity) actively coerce a population into an organized state in the first place (GM II 17). It is the same ‘instinct for freedom’ that ‘is at work in those violence-artists and organizers and builds states’ and ‘inwardly, on a smaller, pettier scale … creates for itself a bad conscience’ (GM II: 18). The ‘instinct for freedom’, is, Nietzsche says, ‘speaking in my language: will to power’ (GM II: 18). The allegation is that even when ‘the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing’ punish their instinctive selves, they gain a pleasure that ‘belongs to cruelty’ (GM II: 18). Even the ‘insane sad beast’ suffering the torment of inexpungible guilt before God, who at first sight is just the passive victim of suffering, still has the instinct of will to power and is expressing it by interpreting the cruder manifestations of its own will to power as evil and sinful.

In the Genealogy’s third essay, Nietzsche continues his account of self-cruelty in his description of the generic character of the ‘ascetic priest’ who

This aspiration to achieve contact with a ‘different’ (higher) existence through the negation of life forms the core of what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal. He makes the hyperbolic suggestion that it is really the only ideal humanity has entertained so far, and has been the sole means of finding a meaning in the suffering that life contains (GM III: 28). But the ideal creates more suffering because it is driven, once again, by ‘pleasure in causing pain’ to oneself (GM III: 11). The duality of inflictor and victim continues:

The instinct for power is the active pole in the process. Deprivation of natural instincts is painful, but as the agent of the pain the ascetic is able to take pleasure in inflicting it.

A further factor that gives rise to ambivalence about self-cruelty is variability in the aspect of oneself that is cruelly treated. Nietzsche initially speaks of cruelty and pleasure in persecution ‘turning against the possessors of those instincts’ (GM II: 16). But, as Bernard Reginster observes, ‘[a]lthough he sometimes describes bad conscience as cruelty the individual directs “against himself ”, he means against himself insofar as he harbors cruel impulses’ (Reginster Reference Reginster and May2011: 63–64). The instinct for freedom (will to power) is ‘discharging and venting itself only on itself ’ (GM II: 17, my emphasis). The will to power is trying to suppress its own power; we are here being cruel to our own tendency to be cruel, hostile to our own hostility. In the ascetic it is ‘life itself ’ that is targeted, in an ‘attempt … to use energy to stop up the source of the energy’ (GM III: 11). It is possible, however, for the internal aggression to be directed against other tendencies that we have acquired.Footnote ³⁹ Nietzsche regards the will to power as ‘natural’, belonging to the ‘animal old self ’ (GM II: 18), but also envisages a beneficial internal antagonism in which ‘unnatural inclinations’ are targeted instead:

The notion of ‘ideals hostile to life’ foreshadows the concept of the ascetic ideal, an ideal of self-suppression through which one aspires to attain to something ‘higher’ in value than one’s own nature. Under the spell of such an ideal, self-denial and self-sacrifice have become instincts for us (see GM Preface, 5); they are, if you like, acquired parts of ourselves. Nietzsche suggests that the self-cruelty of bad conscience might help us to combat these parts, if we had the strength to identify with our creative will to power. This manifestation of bad conscience would be positive for Nietzsche, but hard to attain: it would require a redeeming ‘human of the future’ who embodies ‘great health’ (GM II: 24) and whom he associates with his fictional character Zarathustra, ‘a “more future one”, a stronger one than I am’ (GM II:25).

Nietzsche’s most sophisticated and affirmative version of self-cruelty is what he calls the intellectual conscience. This follows the same pattern of one part of the self aggressing against another, but now ‘[the] instinct of cruelty is transmuted to the epistemic domain’ (Alfano Reference Alfano2019: 277). Nietzsche regards intellectual conscience as the prime virtue of the philosophical inquirer, the unusual and solitary figure for whom, unlike the majority, it is ‘contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards’ (Reference WilliamsGS 2). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche explains why this epistemic virtue involves self-cruelty. Here it is the cognitive drives of the mind (Geist) that are in an antagonistic relationship. There is a more primitive ‘fundamental will of the mind’ (Grundwille des Geistes) which, in interpreting the world, strives towards its own feeling of increasing strength rather than the discovery of truth, and ‘constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 229). But in the individual who is a thinker or inquirer there is a distinct tendency, a ‘sublime tendency … that takes things, and wills to take them, deeply, multiply, fundamentally’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 230). This tendency is the intellectual conscience, which Nietzsche portrays as exercising cruelty towards the complacent, surfacing-loving Grundwille of the mind:

Nietzsche views the truth-seeking of honest intellectual inquiry as the infliction of stress and discomfort on the more primitive part of one’s own mind. He speaks frequently of the discipline (Zucht), strictness (Strenge), or hardness (Härte) needed by the inquirer. He sees being on the receiving end of this as a genuine form of suffering: the profound questioner experiences ‘a dizziness, every sort of mistrust, suspicion, fear’ (GM, Preface: 6), and will ‘suffer from … a train of thought as if from sea-sickness’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 23). So ‘[t]his is a type of cruelty on the part of the intellectual conscience and taste, and one that any brave thinker will acknowledge in himself, assuming that he has spent as long as he should in hardening and sharpening his eye for himself and that he is used to strict discipline’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 230). From the active side, of course, the inquirer will be gaining a feeling of power from inflicting this suffering.

Something of a puzzle arises because of the way Nietzsche characterizes the ‘victim’ of this internal cruelty, the mind’s ‘fundamental will … towards semblances and surfaces’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 229). He says its ‘needs and abilities’ are ‘the same ones that physiologists have established for everything that lives, grows, and propagates’; like all living things, the mind tends towards ‘growth, or, more particularly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increasing strength’; its basic ‘will’ is ‘to be master [Herr sein] in itself and around itself and to feel itself as master’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 230). So the basic cognitive tendency of the mind is another manifestation of will to power. But if the active inquiring self, in exercising cruelty upon the sluggish Grundwille, is also manifesting will to power, we have another case of will to power being hostile to itself, parallel to the original case of bad conscience, which was portrayed as a lamentable sickness, albeit also one pregnant with possibility. Why is the intellectual conscience not also a case of sickness? There is not space to pursue the question fully here, but I shall offer two brief thoughts. One is that the intellectual conscience is the positive potential that lay within the turning of the instincts against themselves. The other is that the original bad conscience gave rise to the values of morality, whereas the intellectual conscience gives rise to the epistemic values that Nietzsche proposes to use in undermining the values of morality.

Nietzsche positions the intellectual conscience in an interesting dual relation to the prevalent morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition: it both owes its origin to that morality and is a means for undermining it. What triumphs over Christianity is ‘Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was taken ever more rigorously; the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price’ (Reference WilliamsGS 357). The very Christian virtue of truthfulness now ‘forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God’ (GM III: 27) and will eventually, Nietzsche believes, cause Christian morality to perish. As an illustration of how this process might work among serious inquirers, Nietzsche poses us the following questions:

The first-order conscience under scrutiny here is that habitual part of you that hears the commands of conventional morality and inclines towards slavish obedience to them. Nietzsche urges those rare beings, thinkers, to make themselves suffer by subjecting themselves to a rigorous and disorienting self-scrutiny. Seeing the truth about their own adherence to morality of ‘the herd’ will, he hopes, have the positive effect of enabling them to call its values into question.

4.1 Analysis of Mitleid

For Schopenhauer there are three basic motivations of human behaviour: egoism, malice, and compassion. The first ‘wills one’s own well-being’, the second ‘wills someone else’s woe’, the third ‘wills someone else’s well-being’ and is ‘the sole source of actions of moral worth’ (Schopenhauer Reference 77Schopenhauer2009: 201). Compassion’s concern for the well-being of others is focused on their actual or possible suffering, in Schopenhauer’s view, because ‘someone feeling happiness and pleasure purely as such does not arouse our immediate sympathy [Theilnahme] in the way that someone suffering, deprived, unhappy does purely as such’ (Schopenhauer Reference 77Schopenhauer2009: 202). Schopenhauer takes the connotation of mitleiden literally, saying that it is possible for ‘the well-being and woe of another to move my will immediately’ only if ‘I directly suffer along with him [geradezu mitleide], feel his woe as otherwise I feel only mine’ (Schopenhauer Reference 77Schopenhauer2009: 200). From this he moves to a bold metaphysical claim that the distinction between individuals is an appearance only and does not obtain in ultimate reality: the immediacy of my sharing in others’ suffering is explained by my intuitive recognition that they are ‘I once more’ (Schopenhauer Reference 77Schopenhauer2009: 254–255). Nietzsche calls Schopenhauer’s views on compassion ‘incredible’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 133), ‘frivolous and worthless rubbish’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 142), and chastises the ‘nonsense’ about how compassion ‘enables one to make the break through the principium individuationis’ (Reference WilliamsGS 99), thus ridiculing the notion he seemed to take so seriously in The Birth of Tragedy.

In Daybreak Nietzsche begins a systematic dismantling of the notion of Mitleid, proclaiming that the one word cannot capture ‘so polyphonous a being’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 133). Take the question ‘Why do we leap after someone who has fallen into the water in front of us, even though we feel no kind of affection for him?’ The seemingly obvious answer is: because we are thinking solely of the other person, not of ourselves. But for Nietzsche this answer is superficial and thoughtless: ‘we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourself but are doing so very strongly unconsciously’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 133). We may be feeling our own shared human vulnerability reflected in their suffering,Footnote ⁴⁶ or rescuing the other so that ‘we can present ourselves as the more powerful and as a helper’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 133). None of this shows definitively that pure selfless compassion is impossible, but it casts doubt on whether the monolithic Schopenhauerian picture of compassion is realistic. Nietzsche follows up with a point that dents that picture further: ‘That Mitleid … is the same kind of thing as the suffering at the sight of which it arises, or that it possesses an especially subtle, penetrating understanding of suffering, are propositions contradicted by experience’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 133). If I am moved to act by compassion, I may be suffering in a way, but I am not suffering what the other is suffering, and in acting to alleviate the suffering of the other, I am also trying to be rid of my own suffering.

Further remarks in Daybreak suggest that we gain a positive feeling from being compassionate: ‘there is something degrading in suffering and something elevating and productive of superiority in being compassionate [im Mitleiden] – which separates these two feelings from one another to all eternity’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 138, translation modified). Nietzsche imagines a case where one is compassionate to a friend who is suffering. It is an occasion to ‘give back’ something to the friend, but our being able to do so ‘produces in us great joy and exultation’: ‘if he wants us to suffer at his suffering we give ourselves out to be suffering; in all this, however, we have the enjoyment of active gratitude – which, in short, is benevolent revenge’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 138). Nietzsche literally writes ‘good revenge’ here (gute Rache). It seems a puzzling notion, but the point is that compassion brings a positive gain in the feeling of one’s own agency: it is active (tätig) gratitude, an opportunity to do something for the other. While in revenge proper I feel an increase in my own power or sense of efficacy by harming the other, in active gratitude I feel a growth in stature by doing good to the other. In The Gay Science Nietzsche links compassion directly with the feeling of power (Machtgefühl ) and assimilates it to cruelty: ‘Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exerting one’s power over them’ (Reference WilliamsGS 13). He says that those who have compassion for someone suffering ‘use this opportunity to take possession of him’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 14) and that compassion is ‘a pleasant stirring of the drive to appropriate at the sight of the weaker’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 118), who for some habitual compassionators are ‘easy prey’ (Reference WilliamsGS 13).

This comparison between compassion and cruelty casts some doubt on the analysis of will to power discussed in Section 3.1, according to which resistance to our will is a necessary factor in every feeling of power. Assuming that people generally welcome the offered alleviation of their suffering, there is no resisting will for the compassionate agent to overcome. Bestowing compassion should then give less of a feeling of power than cruelty, or perhaps none. Yet Nietzsche says – and with this we must surely agree – that hurting others is seldom as agreeable as benefiting them (Reference WilliamsGS 13). A closer look reveals that, as often with Nietzsche, whether compassion or cruelty is more gratifying depends upon what type of person you are, because ‘one always seeks this or that spice according to one’s temperament’ (Reference WilliamsGS 13). Compassion is ‘the most agreeable feeling for those who have little pride and no prospect of great conquests’ (Reference WilliamsGS 13), also for pessimists, for whom ‘Mitleid becomes the antidote to self-destruction, as a sensation which includes pleasure and proffers the taste of superiority in small doses’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 136). By contrast, ‘proud natures’ do not find compassion fulfilling in the same way, and ‘are often hard to someone who is suffering’ (Reference WilliamsGS 13). While some agents feel heightened power when the will of the other offers resistance, others are not able to do so, and prefer the feeling of power that (allegedly) arises from being compassionate. So the feeling of power does not essentially arise through the presence of a will that resists the agent’s will. However, Nietzsche valorizes the cases in which it does, treating the way the ‘proud’, ‘strong’, or ‘healthy’ type of agent gains feelings of power as superior.

These analyses of compassion aim to debunk the claim that there is a purely selfless compassion for others that contains no trace of self-interest. We might reject this and think that Schopenhauer – most likely minus his metaphysics of non-individuation – is somewhere on the right lines with his notion that compassion involves the absence of all concern for self. Or we may agree that genuine compassion is compatible with benefit to its agent – as is the case in Buddhism, for instance.Footnote ⁴⁷ However we analyse it, though, we are prone to think that compassion is a good thing. When effective, compassionate action can remove or reduce suffering, and because of this we tend to regard compassionate acts as good and compassionate dispositions as good character traits. We now turn to Nietzsche’s rejection of these common assumptions.

4.2 The Morality of Compassion

‘The morality of compassion’ may refer either to something akin to Schopenhauer’s view, namely that an action is morally good only if it proceeds from the agent’s compassionate motivation to alleviate the suffering of others, or to a weaker view that actions are, other things being equal, morally good if they spring from such a motivation. Nietzsche’s stance towards either of these views is negative: the attribution of any positive value to compassion is an important part of the morality he wishes to call into question (see GM, Preface, 5–6). Nietzsche speaks also of the ‘religion of compassion’, sometimes meaning Christianity specifically (Reference RidleyA 7), but more often a broader outlook shared by Schopenhauer, Socialists, a supposed ‘new Buddhism’ in Europe, ‘hysterical little men and women’ of his day, and ‘our whole literary and artistic decadence from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This ‘religion of compassion’ has made compassion into ‘the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues’ (Reference RidleyA 7) and adopted the moral principle that suffering is ‘evil, hateful, deserving of annihilation’ (Reference WilliamsGS 338) so that we are commanded to remove or lessen any suffering purely because it is suffering. Nietzsche calls this outlook a ‘religion’ because it is widely ‘preached’ by his contemporaries (‘no other religion is preached any more’, Reference HorstmannBGE 222).

Nietzsche treats the morality of compassion as a phenomenon of modernity – ‘these days … one can hardly endure the presence of pain as a thought and makes it … a reproach against the whole of existence’ (Reference WilliamsGS 48) – and he draws a contrast with earlier humans’ values. For example, he says the Stoics fought against ‘feeling with … the sufferings and moral frailties of others’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 131), and that ‘during the best days of Rome … a compassionate action was not called either good or evil, moral or immoral, and if it were praised on its own, the praise would be perfectly compatible with a type of reluctant disdain’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 201). Michael Brady cites a nice example from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations – ‘it becomes the brave and magnanimous … not to give way to pain’ (Brady Reference Brady2018: 91) and similar ideas in the ancient Cynics. Not content with specific philosophical examples, Nietzsche sometimes fantasizes about broad eras in ‘world history’ in which ‘suffering counted as virtue, cruelty counted as virtue, … Mitleid was accounted a danger’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 18), and ‘[f]or the longest time meek, benevolent, yielding, compassionate feelings … had precisely self-contempt against them’ (GM III: 9). He associates such attitudes with what he calls ‘noble morality’ (vornehme Moral ), to which compassion and selflessness are alien (Reference HorstmannBGE 260).

Nietzsche deploys the concept of noble morality, or ‘master morality’ (Herren-Moral ), most famously in On the Genealogy of Morality, where he contrasts it with ‘slave morality’. This account has been extensively summarized and dissected by commentators. Here we shall consider it from the point of view of the ‘morality of compassion’ and its relation to suffering. Nietzsche claims that in the more ancient ‘master morality’, the concept good was applied (initially by themselves) to an aristocratic class, ‘the noble, powerful, higher-ranking and high-minded’ who were aware of ‘the pathos of nobility and distance, this … basic feeling of a higher and ruling nature in relation to a lower nature, to a “below”’ (GM I: 2). But he is especially interested in the psychology of those in the ‘below’ position, ‘the common man’, ‘the people … or “the slaves”, or “the mob” or “the herd”, or whatever you like to call them’ (GM I: 9). He imagines them experiencing a hatred that was ‘suppressed’ and ‘unsatiated’ (GM I: 10, 11). They experienced what he calls ressentiment, a condition for which, as a working hypothesis, we may take the relatively simple formulation by Guy Elgat: ‘an affectively charged desire for revenge that involves the belief that someone or other is responsible for the suffering that causes it’ (Elgat Reference Elgat2017: 46).Footnote ⁴⁹ An individual’s ressentiment is a response to suffering they have undergone: ‘every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, … a guilty perpetrator who is receptive to suffering – in short, some living thing on which … he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy’ (GM III: 15). But weak and strong types fare differently in response to their experiencing ressentiment, and responses typical of the weak – their inability to discharge their affects – play a crucial role in Nietzsche’s account of the ‘revaluation of all values’ (GM I: 8) that produced the ‘morality of compassion’.

It is plausible that the instinct that drives sufferers to react to their sufferings with ressentiment is, once again, will to power. Nietzsche’s ‘nobles’ have the power to act upon their instincts: if they respond to their sufferings with ressentiment, they are able to discharge their pain and hatred ‘in an immediate reaction – therefore it does not poison’ (GM I: 10). But the weak, Nietzsche’s ‘slaves’, while having the same will to power and the same instinct to discharge their feelings upon some external object, lack the power to do so. When they suffer, vengefulness remains undischarged, leaving them ‘festering with poisonous and hostile feelings’ (GM I: 10). The weak human being becomes a Mensch des Ressentiment (GM I: 13) or ‘man of ressentiment’ (although Mensch is not a gendered term). The poisonous vengeful feelings become a standing disposition of the person’s character. Eventually, Nietzsche hypothesizes, they find an outlet in an ‘imaginary revenge’ upon the stronger nobles by producing new values: the opposition of good and evil. There develops the idea that everyone is free to exercise their power or not, to harm or not to harm, and that all are under a moral obligation not to harm and are blameable if they do. Failure to comply with this moral obligation classifies an agent under a new evaluative concept, evil, and renders them apt for punishment, even if only one imagined in an afterlife.Footnote ⁵⁰

Nietzsche paints an ironic picture of the thought processes of the oppressed who ‘invent’ morality:

The idea that causing suffering in others or failing to prevent it in others is morally bad and blameworthy, that the instinct towards growth and power is morally evil, that there are over-riding goals and duties to be harmless and protect everyone from suffering – all this, on Nietzsche’s account, arose from the perspective of those who endured suffering but lacked the power to discharge their resulting ressentiment by inflicting suffering openly on others. Instead, they perpetrated revenge by re-description. What they could not do became what everyone ought not to do. Nietzsche calls this change in values the ‘slave revolt in morality’ (GM I: 10).

4.3 Against Compassion

Nietzsche regards the morality of compassion, as he finds it to exist in modern times, as a misguided and even dangerous moral outlook. One of his objections is that Mitleid increases suffering by multiplying sufferers. ‘Compassion (Mitleiden), insofar as it causes suffering (Leiden) … increases the amount of suffering in the world’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 134), hence ‘Mitleid as a principle of action’ would mean ‘we would have to suffer from our own I and at the same time from the I of the other (Reference Clark and LeiterD 137, translation modified).Footnote ⁵¹ The point is best read as an internal objection to the Schopenhauerian view: if you think the compassionate person is ‘suffering-with’ the pain of the sufferer, how can that be good, since now there is more suffering than before? The objection also assumes that life would be better for containing less suffering or none at all. Schopenhauer does of course assume that suffering is an objection to life – its presence is for him the reason it would have been better not to have existed – so that the full challenge to Schopenhauer combines two of his assumptions: if you think suffering is bad in itself, and if you think compassion causes additional suffering in the compassionate agent, you should not consider compassion a good.

The obvious answer from a Schopenhauerian point of view is that, yes, I take on the suffering of others, adding a bit more suffering, but my doing so is beneficial because it tends to produce actions through which I reduce or prevent further suffering, and that is a value that overrides the negativity of my suffering. To this Nietzsche responds that compassion is detrimental precisely to the extent that it succeeds in diminishing suffering. His provocative view is that suffering can enhance life. He addresses adherents of the ‘religion of compassion’ thus:

Nietzsche lists the qualities that are the ‘gifts’ of suffering such as strength, courage, depth, and greatness. Here again, depending how we read him, he can seem to stray into potentially barbarous territory. Is his point merely that suffering has (at least can have) value in developing positive character traits and making possible other achievements? Or does he really judge suffering as good for its own sake and wish that more of it would happen? It can look that way when he praises ‘harshness, violence, slavery, danger in the streets and in the heart’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 44). He uses explosive language in his polemic against moralists who conceive ‘well-being’ as the absence of suffering, and he certainly holds that a life cleansed of all suffering would be impoverished. But for Nietzsche there is no single value that attaches to suffering ‘in itself ’ simply in virtue of its being suffering. As we shall see, its value depends on whose the suffering is, how it is interpreted, and what relations it stands in to other events.

In The Gay Science Nietzsche charges that the ‘religion of compassion’ ‘strips … suffering of what is truly personal’ to the person who suffers. This is no bloodthirsty proclamation of ‘let there be more suffering’. In a more thoughtful and intimate tone Nietzsche is suggesting that a generic policy of preventing suffering merely because it is suffering can be detrimental to individuals who suffer. The dogmatic compassionator

If we think of suffering only as something to be eliminated, we miss the way in which it may become an essential part of a flourishing life. Suffering can bring change, insight, gains in psychological strength, and a new sense of self. Nietzsche arguably identifies a phenomenon akin to what some contemporary psychologists have called post-traumatic growth.Footnote ⁵³ If the particular sufferings one undergoes are necessary to such psychological growth as one achieves, then it is intelligible to hold that one’s life would be impoverished without the suffering it in fact contains.

But is suffering essential for growth? Graham Priest implicitly challenges this view: ‘it is true that one who survives a tragic experience, such as a Nazi concentration camp, may well have had to develop an admirable strength of character, but it would have been better had it not had to be done in this way’ (Priest Reference Priest and Davis2017: 104). There may be other ways in which psychological growth or strength of character can develop.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, some reports collected by psychologists suggest that those in whom post-traumatic growth is said to have occurred may see no other way of gaining whatever it is they have gained. For example, a musician who suffered permanent paralysis said in retrospect, ‘This was the one thing that happened in my life that I needed to have happen …. If I had to do it all over again I would want it to happen the same way. I would not want it not to happen’ (Tedeschi and Calhoun Reference Tedeschi and Calhoun2004: 10). This statement is paradoxical, given the ready assumption that suffering is intrinsically something unwanted. But this kind of judgement seems to be characteristic of some reported post-traumatic growth, which can involve ‘construction of higher order schemas that allow for appreciation of paradox’ (Tedeschi and Calhoun Reference Tedeschi and Calhoun2004: 15). People can regard the particular suffering they undergo as an essential contributor to an ongoing process of growth.

Nietzsche’s point is that the aspiration to abolish all suffering – a crazy idea anyway, he thinks – risks creating such a safe environment that people’s lives become impoverished. Our compassion towards others might be a kind of overweening meddling that ultimately won’t benefit them and might even ‘interfere destructively in a great destiny’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Wise’, 4). A difficulty here is that, while the musician may later say the experience of paralysis was the one thing necessary in his life, we cannot know in advance that we would enhance his life by not preventing his suffering (assuming it were preventable). Some sufferings do not enhance life. So the point cannot be that every compassionate act is bad because it removes a suffering that would be good for the agent; rather, it is that to lament suffering as something that solely subtracts value from life, as Schopenhauer’s pessimism and the ‘religion of compassion’ would have it, is short-sighted.

Nietzsche calls on us to re-assess our attitude to our own sufferings in particular:

Contemporary psychologists echo Nietzsche’s words:

For some people suffering leads not to growth or any such thing, but to disorder, disintegration, or tedious misery, and others may leave it behind them with no real change in the long run. But this is in a way grist to Nietzsche’s mill: the generalizing compassionator is unaware of the particular significance of the particular person’s suffering to them. The paralysed musician is not going to recommend paralysis as a great thing everyone should go in for, but on Nietzsche’s view he would be right to resist the generalization that this kind of event must only be ruinous to anyone’s life.

Nietzsche raises another objection: that a preoccupation with the suffering of others may be harmful to oneself. He is concerned here with what he calls losing ‘one’s own path’ in life, not attending to one’s ‘own thing’ (eigene Sache), which we may interpret as one’s own tasks, achievements and personal development. ‘[T]he preacher of the morality of compassion even goes so far as to hold that precisely this and only this is moral – to lose one’s own way like this in order to help a neighbour’ (Reference WilliamsGS 338, translation modified). Nietzsche detects a ‘secret seduction’ in this moral imperative:

The seduction rests on its being easier to adopt a ‘selfless’ outlook. Nietzsche confesses ‘I know with certainty that I need only expose myself to the sight of real distress and I, too, am lost! (Reference WilliamsGS 338). He imagines cases in which he would answer the call of a suffering friend who is dying, or of a ‘small mountain tribe’ fighting for survival, by offering ‘my hand and my life’. Helping others in such circumstances would be bad for him because it would distract him from his own course. His character Zarathustra says something similar: ‘My suffering and my Mitleiden – what does that matter! Am I striving then for happiness? I am striving for my work!’ (Z IV, ‘The Sign’). What Nietzsche should be working for is presumably what his ownmost conscience is telling him: ‘You should become who you are’ (Reference WilliamsGS 270; see also Reference WilliamsGS 335).

Compassion might be detrimental to the sufferer in another way, if it is seen as shaming to her. This is a line of thought also developed by Zarathustra.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the section entitled Von den Mitleidigen (sometimes translated as ‘On Those Who Pity’), Zarathustra says

We might incline towards ‘pity’ as the translation for Mitleiden in this context, since there is a clear sense in which pitying someone can place them in a demeaning light and make them ashamed of their weakness and vulnerability. (To offer Mitleid, Nietzsche says elsewhere, ‘is as good as to offer contempt’ and to cry out for it is to ‘cry out … for the most shameful and profoundest humiliation’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 135).) But when (also in Z II, 3) Zarathustra instructs that ‘great love’ overcomes Mitleiden and lies above it, Mitleiden now sounds like compassion. For who would confuse love with pity, and need telling that the one is far above the other? Zarathustra’s point is that you love someone in a higher way by allowing them their suffering rather than removing it. Schopenhauer equated ‘pure, unselfish love’ with loving kindness (Menschenliebe), the actively helping form of Mitleid, and it is from this that Zarathustra needs to dissociate the love that allows others their suffering and its significance for them.

Nietzsche claims that compassion is a symptom of weakness and decline on both a psychological level and a cultural level. Mitleid is ‘unworthy of a strong, dreadful soul’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 18), a symptom of ‘a morbid over-sensitivity and susceptibility to pain’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 293) and of ‘declining life’ (GM III: 25), a ‘virtue for decadents’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Wise’, 4). He alleges that those who are prone to feel compassion, and especially those who preach it, are constitutionally weak and represent a falling away from an ideal of healthy and robust life, characterized by self-confidence and the ability to impose one’s will actively upon the world. Nietzsche thinks the morality that over-values compassion came into existence because it advantaged those who lacked the power to cause suffering and to retaliate. From this he infers that the widespread and (in his view) increasing proclamation of this same morality as the morality is evidence that Europe’s population at large, to whom it seems to appeal, share the same kind of weakness as the ‘slaves’ of his origin-story. We can of course view things the other way round: finding the population of his day ‘weak’ and ‘decadent’, he invents the ‘slaves’ to mirror them.Footnote ⁵⁶

Nietzsche diagnoses the Mitleids-Moral as simultaneously a symptom and a danger (GM Preface, 5, 6): it not only betrays existing weakness and decline, but it also brews dangerous consequences for the immediate future. ‘Nihilism’ is the term he uses for the most serious consequences. In the instincts that underlie the morality of compassion as propounded by Schopenhauer Nietzsche finds

Here the issue with the morality of compassion is not that those who espouse it fail to have any guiding values, see life as meaningless, or find it not worth living (all ways in which ‘nihilism’ is sometimes understood).Footnote ⁵⁸ Nor do they regard their values as lacking objective standing – they have no doubt about the status of these valuations and regard compassion as ‘value in itself ’ and suffering as ‘disvalue in itself ’. The ‘nothingness’ here is the aspiration to a moral and metaphysical negation of self, seen as a positive value, an orientation that Nietzsche later calls a ‘will to nothingness’ (GM II: 24; III: 14, 28). The nihilism here is partially affective and partially evaluative. Overwhelmed by the ubiquity and supposed negativity of suffering, one becomes disaffected from life and seeks positive value in self-negation. As Schopenhauer said, the ‘moral virtues’ – those stemming from compassion – ‘encourage self-denial and thus the negation of the will to life.’Footnote ⁵⁹ One might object that it is unnecessary to place compassion within the particular idiosyncratic network that Schopenhauer constructs. But Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Schopenhauer – with whom he says he had to ‘struggle almost solely’ (GM Preface, 5) – is a gateway to his finding among his contemporaries a more general tendency to self-negation and weariness with life.

Compassion, Nietzsche says, ‘is contagious’, has ‘a depressive effect’, makes one ‘lose strength’, ‘negates life, … makes life worthy of negation’ (Reference RidleyA 7). In Nietzsche’s view the dangerous effect of compassion is that it promotes the interests of those who are ‘weak’ or ‘sick’ rather than ‘the happy, the well-formed, the powerful in body and soul’ (GM III: 14). ‘The weakest are the ones … who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves’ (GM III: 14), which Nietzsche fears will end up with the ‘strong’ and ‘healthy’ being ashamed of their condition, doubting their right to be happy (or fortunate, glücklich). In his final years Nietzsche combines a defence of the ‘well-formed’ types with a shocking attack on the ‘weak’ as a supposed threat to human development:

The strong can welcome their suffering as a challenge and opportunity for growth. The ‘failures’ – the so-called ‘botched’ ones (missrathenen) – are unhealthy: their suffering will kill them, unless it is alleviated. But a blanket policy of helping them not to suffer will just perpetuate weakness and unhealthiness in the population. Now the promotion of ‘life’ – growth, power, and splendour – in modern culture, and in the human species generally, has become so important for Nietzsche that he contemplates ‘ruthless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘BT’, 4) and ‘humanity as mass sacrificed for the flourishing of a single stronger species of human being – that would be progress …’ (GM II: 12). Nietzsche became concerned with ‘breeding’ healthier humans (see, e.g., Reference RidleyA 3; TI, ‘Improvers’, 3). In this he was not alone at his time of writing. For example, Darwin wrote that preservation of ‘the weak members of civilised societies … must be highly injurious to the race of man’, and that we must ‘bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind’ because we cannot overcome the instinct of sympathy we have developed (Darwin Reference Darwin1874: 134).Footnote ⁶⁰ Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s remarks on the extermination of degenerate human beings as parasites are especially chilling in the light of later atrocities whose ideologues had appropriated his name.

4.4 Nietzsche’s Compassion

With these harsh words in mind, it is perhaps surprising to find commentators arguing that Nietzsche is in favour of compassion in some form or other. Bernard Reginster has claimed that ‘Nietzsche clearly advocates some forms of compassion and benevolence’ (Reginster Reference Reginster2006: 185). Antoine Panaïoti rejects ‘the simplistic view that Nietzsche is opposed to compassion and benevolence in all its forms’, saying that ‘there is room in Nietzsche’s philosophy for a healthy form of compassion’ (Panaïoti Reference Panaïoti2013: 187). Ruth Abbey suggests ‘he does not see all manifestations of fellow‐feeling as base or spurious’ (Abbey Reference Abbey2000: 56). But benevolence or fellow-feeling are not the same as compassion, if we recall Zarathustra’s lesson that loving someone can involve not having compassion for their suffering, and that the compulsive helpers of GS 338 fail to benefit those they rush to help. I agree with Jessica Berry that ‘the prediction that Nietzsche will not concern himself overly much with the suffering of others would be hasty and inaccurate’ (Berry Reference Berry2024: 1227), but that such concern need not be compassion.Footnote ⁶¹

Nietzsche considered himself susceptible to compassion, and it seems true that ‘one personal feature which … contributed to his outlook was a hypersensitivity to suffering’ (Williams Reference Williams and Williams2001: xiv). We have seen him writing in confessional mode about the ‘seduction’ and ‘temptation’ offered by the morality of compassion and the consequent need to resist devoting oneself to others’ suffering at the expense of one’s own task. He writes of compassion as a threat to oneself personally, saying for example ‘Where lie your greatest dangers? – In compassion’ (Reference WilliamsGS 271). He comes close to straightforward autobiography here. In 1884 he wrote in his notebooks of ‘Mitleiden my weakness, which I am overcoming’ (Reference Colli and MontinariKSA 11: 25[498], p. 144, my translation) and in a letter to Franz Overbeck the same year, ‘From childhood on the proposition “my greatest dangers lie in Mitleiden” has confirmed itself again and again’, adding that his ‘bad experiences’ have provoked him to ‘a theoretically very interesting change in the evaluation of Mitleiden’ (Reference Colli and MontinariKSB 6: 530, my translation).Footnote ⁶² Mitleid has an attraction for Nietzsche, but must be resisted. He projects the same tension onto Zarathustra, who announces, ‘In caring and Mitleiden my greatest danger has always lain’ (Z III, “Return Home”) and who faces, as his ‘last temptation’, Mitleid for the ‘higher human’ who cries out for help (Z IV, ‘The Cry of Need’). Zarathustra overcomes Mitleid at the end of the book (Z IV, ‘The Sign’), but did Nietzsche?

It may be thought that there is evidence of Nietzsche’s positive compassion in passages where he expresses negative affective reactions. Recall the reactions to the suffering he sees as caused by Christianity – ‘Poor mankind!’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 78), that ‘insane sad beast’ (GM II: 22), ‘stuck in a cage, locked up in all sorts of horrible ideas’ (TI, ‘Improvers’, 2). Far from rejoicing at this suffering, Nietzsche cares deeply that so much of humanity has been, as he sees it, sickened and degraded in this way. So is he expressing compassion for the ‘victims’ of the church and of their own ascetic self-torture? Not necessarily. Berry argues that Nietzsche exemplifies ‘a kind of fellow feeling, but without Mitleid ’ (Berry Reference Berry2024: 1227). Her argument begins from an allusion Nietzsche makes in Daybreak, saying ‘The Greeks have a word for indignation at another’s unhappiness: this affect was inadmissible among Christian peoples and failed to develop, so that they also lack a name for this more manly brother of Mitleid ’ (Reference Clark and LeiterD 78).Footnote ⁶³ Indignation or outrage is disapproving of suffering, but need not manifest the compassion Nietzsche repeatedly rejects.

A passage that seems to approve a kind of compassion is: ‘a man who is naturally master, – if a man like this has Mitleid, well then! This Mitleid is worth something!’ (Reference HorstmannBGE, 293). Nietzsche is crudely masculinist here, for he has just described such a man as being able to ‘hold on to a woman’ (among other things, such as ‘having his anger and his sword’) and remarks on the ‘unmanliness’ of the Mitleid preached by the ‘weak’ and ‘over-sensitive’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But what about this ‘manly’ Mitleid: does not Nietzsche approve of it? Yes, but the prime trait Nietzsche celebrates here is not compassion, but rather strength and power. Compassion has little importance for the character Nietzsche valorizes here. A little earlier he has said that ‘the noble person helps the unfortunate … not (or hardly ever) out of Mitleid, but rather more out of an impulse generated by the over-abundance of power … [and] is even proud of not being made for Mitleid ’ (Reference HorstmannBGE, 260, my emphases). ‘I consider the overcoming of Mitleid a noble virtue’, he says elsewhere (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Wise’, 4). This ‘masterly’ Mitleid then is ‘worth something’ not because it eliminates suffering, but because it comes from someone who is not over-sensitive to suffering, does not consider it an evil to be cleansed from the world, someone with power and self-mastery who can resist the temptation to lose himself in the suffering of others, and who is pointedly contrasted with the ‘morbid over-sensitivity and susceptibility to pain’ of those who preach compassion. For Nietzsche, a better and more characteristic way for the ‘manly’ to express self-mastery is tolerating and administering suffering to others, rather than removing or preventing it. This cannot really serve as an example of Nietzsche reneging on his critique of compassion as a prime moral virtue.Footnote ⁶⁵

When Nietzsche lauds ‘the discipline of great suffering’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 225), we find him allying himself closely with a ‘kind of’ Mitleid, a ‘higher, more far-sighted’ kind than that espoused by those who would like to abolish suffering:

Nietzsche here portrays a conception of well-being that treats the human being as essentially passive, vulnerable and needing protection, and for whom all would be well as long as there is no suffering. He offers a replacement conception of human flourishing which stresses activity and the power to create, characterized by strength, inventiveness, and ‘courage in enduring, surviving, interpreting, and exploiting unhappiness’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 225). Unleashing his own linguistic inventiveness, he writes:

We might think this is Nietzsche advocating compassion. But it can be so only in a paradoxical sense. What Nietzsche here calls ‘our Mitleid’ or ‘inverted Mitleid’ has a valence opposite to that of compassion. It is a concern not about suffering, but about not suffering. The claim is that not suffering leads to a diminishment of the creative, power-willing side of humanity that requires its suffering in order to flourish. It is a concern about detriment to flourishing, but not about suffering. This, I suggest, is where compassion and benevolence come apart for Nietzsche (rather as compassion and love do for Zarathustra). If benevolence is seeking to promote someone’s flourishing and removing what diminishes it, then ‘inverted Mitleid’ is benevolent towards humans qua creators. But its benevolence is in allowing and fostering their suffering, and that is not compassion. Mitleid and ‘inverted Mitleid’ may ironically share a name, but the latter is not a species of the former. Nietzsche’s attitude to suffering here is not any kind of concern to remove it.

5.1 Saying Yes and No

Nietzsche uses the term ‘life’ (Leben) in more than one way.Footnote ⁷¹ In one sense, ‘life’ means a set of characteristics that pertain naturally to living beings. We have already seen the notion of will to power used in this connection: ‘Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 13). Nietzsche takes this to mean that ‘life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least … exploiting’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 259). On this view, humans, as living things, will naturally tend to inflict suffering on one another. If we condemn these natural tendencies as ‘evil’, or strive to suppress these tendencies in the individual or in society, or wish for a situation in which no suffering occurs, these are in Nietzsche’s eyes ways of ‘saying No’ to life, in the sense of faulting life for its essential nature. It is important to note that ‘saying No to life’ is not saying No to living. Nietzsche recognizes that striving to suppress our harsh and injurious natures has been a way for some to make life worth living. Succumbing to what Nietzsche calls ‘the ascetic ideal’, human beings invent a suffering-free state beyond this life and in the hope of attaining it suppress their natural drives. The ascetic ideal makes it possible to go on living, but only in a way that ‘says No’ to life by devaluing it. It is in this sense that Nietzsche describes the paradoxical condition of the ‘ascetic priest’ as ‘life against life’ (GM III: 13): lamenting life as a ‘wrong path’ and ‘error’ (GM III: 11) allows the priest’s own ‘degenerating life’ to be preserved (GM III: 13).

‘Life’ in another sense refers to a lived sequence of events. In the famous passage where Nietzsche imagines someone confronted with the announcement that everything will return eternally, the prospect is that

The question of affirmation posed here is whether you could be sufficiently ‘well-disposed … to yourself and to life’ that you would respond ecstatically to the prospect. Elsewhere Nietzsche’s anti-pessimistic ideal is ‘the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming [weltbejahendsten] 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’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 56). If one is to ‘say Yes’ to everything in one’s own life without exception, then one must welcome the prospect of reliving one’s sufferings (‘every pain’, and perhaps also some of those ‘thoughts’ and ‘sighs’). If the Yes is said to the whole course of the world, then presumably its scope will include all sufferings ever. It would be easy to find the idea of judging all sufferings good either horrendous or incomprehensible. But Nietzsche is not imagining someone making a sober judgement of this kind, rather someone who in one heightened moment feels well-disposed to their life and the world as a whole.

Commentators differ as to what constitutes Yes-saying for Nietzsche. Ken Gemes writes: ‘For Reginster [2006] affirmation involves various cognitive stances. Thus he says: “To affirm life in general is to recognize that those necessary aspects of it ‘hitherto denied’ are ‘desirable for their own sake’” … and “you affirm life if you react with joy to the prospect of its eternal recurrence”’; Gemes counters this by pointing out that Nietzsche’s ‘nobles’ in the Genealogy are unreflective life-affirmers who ‘affirm life by living it in a direct expressive way’ (Gemes Reference Gemes2008: 459). Gemes coins the expression ‘naïve affirmation’ for the latter case and observes that Nietzsche values both naïve and reflective affirmation. Nietzsche in fact treats the one as a symptom of the other:

The philosophical pessimists are reflective No-sayers to life, judging it worse than non-existence, but Nietzsche regards that as merely a symptom of a deeper-seated negative attitude to life, which he here calls physiological (see also Reference WilliamsGS, Preface, 2). ‘Nihilism in its deepest manifestation is for Nietzsche an affective rather than a cognitive disorder. It is a matter of the constitution of one’s deepest drives rather than a matter of one’s overt beliefs’ (Gemes Reference Gemes2008: 461). Nietzsche’s view, as we have seen, is that to find suffering an objection to life reflects an underlying weakness or decline, an inability to face suffering as a challenge.

The morality of compassion, philosophical pessimism, and the ascetic ideal all ‘say No’ to ‘life’. They take suffering to be a salient constituent of life – a point on which Nietzsche still agrees – but rate it as something negative that vitiates life. The morality of compassion aspires to cleanse life of all suffering, but if suffering is truly inseparable from life, Nietzsche sees that aspiration not only as ‘crazy’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 225) but as a negation of life’s very nature. Philosophical pessimism goes further and rejects life wholesale, judging that because of its ineliminable suffering life as a human being is worse than non-existence. The ascetic ideal, of which Nietzsche develops a complex account in the Third Essay of the Genealogy, seeks redemptive value outside of human life, in something ‘higher’, eternal or transcendent, supposedly to be attained through rigorous self-suppression of the instincts and desires that characterize us as living beings. This ideal ‘affirms [bejaht] another world than that of life, nature, and history’ (GM III: 24), and thereby offers a meaning for suffering:

Suffering can now be accepted, even craved – ‘“more pain! more pain!” thus cried the longing of [the ascetic priest’s] disciples and initiates for centuries’ (GM III: 20). But the meaning it gains through the yearning for redemption stems from antipathy to life: ‘hatred of the human, … abhorrence of the senses, … longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself … an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life’ (GM III: 28). In a related note from 1887 Nietzsche writes that the metaphysicians’ inference that there is a ‘higher’ world – true, unchanging, unconditioned, and free of contradiction – is ‘inspired by suffering’: ‘These are fundamentally wishes that there should be such a world; likewise, hatred towards a world that makes suffer [leiden macht] expresses itself in another world’s being imagined, a valuable one: the metaphysicians’ ressentiment against what is real is creative here’ (Reference Colli and MontinariKSA 12: 325, my translation). Instead of this flight towards an imagined world, Nietzsche seeks a positive affirmation of this world in which we live, its suffering included.

5.2 The Value of Suffering

We have seen Nietzsche warning against treating suffering as ‘evil, hateful, … a defect of existence’ and saying to the opponent who would remove all suffering, ‘how little you know of human happiness …. For happiness and unhappiness are two siblings who either grow up together or – as with you – remain small together’ (Reference WilliamsGS 338, translation modified). He says he wishes to heighten suffering rather than abolish it, rejecting a passive conception of well-being (freedom from suffering) and replacing it with a conception of flourishing centred on creativity and greatness, for which suffering is required (see Reference HorstmannBGE 225). In his late writings he speaks of ‘Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems’ (TI, ‘Ancients’, 5) and approves the sentiment that ‘Pain is not considered an objection to life’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Zarathustra’, 1). His strategy in these passages contrasts with that of The Birth of Tragedy: rather than calling for a way of representing suffering that allows for an affirmation of life, Nietzsche now argues that suffering itself is part of human flourishing and should be welcomed by those who are strong enough to ‘say Yes’ to life.

Nietzsche clearly aims to steer his readers away from the simple judgement ‘suffering is bad’. But we may wonder how suffering can fail to be bad. An assumption often made (and treated as obvious) in philosophical ethics and in common sense thinking is that suffering is bad in itself, intrinsically bad, bad because of its very nature. In one way Nietzsche does not deny the badness of suffering. He describes the suffering to which we should say ‘Yes’ as ‘hard’, or as ‘dreadful and questionable’ (Reference BittnerWLN, p. 173), thereby acknowledging the badness that is essential to suffering by virtue of its being negatively undergone (at the very least disliked). Suffering feels bad, it strikes us in an adverse manner. It is commonly thought that this feature of suffering (which we may call its phenomenal badness) renders suffering normatively bad in itself, in other words that we have reason not to want suffering, reason to avoid or prevent it, simply because it feels bad. Derek Parfit finds such intrinsic normative badness compatible with Nietzsche’s positive evaluations of suffering: ‘He [Nietzsche] writes for example, that “profound suffering makes noble”, and is the source of all great achievements. Such suffering would be instrumentally good by having good effects. That is compatible with the view that all suffering is intrinsically or in itself bad’ (Parfit Reference Parfit2011: 571). On this reading, each episode of suffering, if considered independently of whatever ‘growth’, creative ‘form-giving’, or other element of flourishing it may lead to, would be normatively bad in itself – something we have reason not to want – simply by virtue of its being suffering,Footnote ⁷² whatever other reasons there might be to value it positively in relation to wider circumstances. However, Nietzsche himself makes no mention of suffering’s having intrinsic normative badness. We may suggest two possible interpretations of this fact. The first is that he never even raises the question whether suffering is intrinsically bad. To do so would be irrelevant to the kinds of evaluation he wants to make of suffering’s significance within a particular life, and thinking in terms of an intrinsic badness of suffering in isolation from the rest of life would tempt us down the path of the ‘morality of compassion’ with its allegedly impoverishing aspiration to abolish suffering as such. A second reason for Nietzsche’s not mentioning an intrinsic normative badness of suffering, however, would be that he considers suffering not to have any intrinsic value at all beyond its simply feeling bad.

While Nietzsche is not in the business of theorizing about different species of value (intrinsic, instrumental, and the like), this second interpretation chimes with the idea that in practice he adheres to what we may call normative contextualism. Bernard Reginster explains that view as follows:

As we said earlier, the significance of any particular suffering for Nietzsche depends on whose the suffering is and what relations it stands in to other events. The reason he thinks it is a mistake to evaluate suffering as ‘hateful and evil’ is that its significance for the sufferer cannot be determined except in relation to the ‘whole inner sequence and interconnection’ of which it is a part (Reference WilliamsGS 338). This suggests that for Nietzsche there is no determinate value to suffering considered in isolation.

Note that the same kinds of consideration should argue against Nietzsche’s finding suffering good in itself, despite some notebook passages from 1887 might seem superficially to suggest such a view. Nietzsche there calls suffering ‘part of the highest desirability’ (Reference BittnerWLN, p. 207), and under the title ‘My new path to “Yes”’ he advocates

Nietzsche calls this his ‘new version of pessimism’, recalling the ‘pessimism of strength’ he mentions in his self-criticism of The Birth of Tragedy (ASC, 1). We may assume that these dreadful but desirable aspects of life are those that involve suffering. Still, this passage does not isolate these aspects and assign them desirability in themselves, that is, outside of all relations they may stand in. Suffering is desirable because of what it is ‘fruitful’ for, for the value it lends to achievements in particular contexts. Nietzsche is not propounding the improbable view that every instance of suffering is good simply by virtue of its being suffering. Nor is he committed to thinking suffering is good in every context. We have seen him assert that every enhancement of humanity is achieved through suffering; but he does not say that every suffering achieves an enhancement – something it would be absurd to claim, given that some suffering remains meaningless and leads to nothing, and some is such as to break even the strongest person. For example, it is hard to see Nietzsche’s own eventual mental collapse and prolonged incapacity as having enhanced anything or being good in any way. We have already seen, moreover, that there are instances of suffering over which Nietzsche himself expresses sadness and indignation rather than any positive evaluation.

There are passages where Nietzsche calls into question the very notion of something’s having value ‘in itself’. He writes: ‘“Virtue”, “beauty”, “goodness in itself [an sich]”, goodness that has been stamped with the character of the impersonal and universally valid – these are fantasies and manifestations of decline’ (Reference RidleyA 11). He complains that ‘people found higher value – what am I saying! value in itself ! – in the typical signs of decline and conflicting instincts, in “selflessness”’ (Reference RidleyEH, ‘Destiny’, 7), but at the same time warns against flipping over into viewing egoistic instincts as good in themselves: ‘Selfishness is worth only as much as the physiological value of the selfish person: it can be worth a lot or it can be worthless and despicable’ (TI, ‘Expeditions’, 33). Likewise, there is no such thing as ‘health in itself ’ (Reference WilliamsGS 120), and ‘what helps feed or nourish the higher type of man must be almost poisonous to a very different and lesser type’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 30). In general, ‘[w]here basic issues about value or lack of value are concerned, people with convictions do not come into consideration. Convictions are prisons’ (Reference RidleyA 54). Believing in the truth of ‘suffering is bad in itself ’ in abstraction from suffering’s relations to specific types of person and situation would surely be one such imprisoning conviction for Nietzsche. Read as a normative contextualist, Nietzsche refrains from characterizing suffering either as good in itself or as bad in itself – he assigns it no invariant value across different contexts, or at any rate none that truly gives suffering its significance in anyone’s life. If an opponent were to press the conventional point that suffering must be considered bad in itself because its phenomenal badness automatically gives us reason not to want it, we can imagine that Nietzsche would at best regard the point as irrelevant. For him the value that counts is always contextual – the significance of suffering in someone’s life.

Nietzsche, then, concentrates all his attention on exoteric values: the values that particular sufferings have in their relations with other aspects of life. Not all such values are instrumental, however. Sufferings may have value as indispensable parts of good organic wholes. In an organic whole ‘the good in question cannot conceivably exist, unless the part exist also’ (Moore Reference Moore and Baldwin1993: 81). When suffering is instrumentally good – as is often the case with painful or distressing medical procedures, for example – it derives it goodness wholly from the good end to which it is a means: if the end could be achieved without the suffering, the suffering would no longer be good, while the end, if it came about without any suffering, would still be good. By contrast, in the case of an organic whole, the good of the whole could not survive the absence of any of its parts. So if suffering is part of a good organic whole, it is indispensable to the goodness of the whole. Patrick Hassan (Reference Hassan and Came2022, Reference Hassan2023: 249–252) has recently developed a theoretical model of organic wholes that fits with Nietzsche’s view that it is only within a particular context that suffering has any determinate value.Footnote ⁷³ Hassan builds on Reginster’s account (see Section 3.1) which gave prominence to ‘resistance to the will in striving’ (Hassan Reference Hassan and Came2022: 125). In such a case, someone is actively pursuing a goal and desires the difficulty in achieving that goal because the difficulty is an indispensable part of, rather than a means towards, what gives the activity value. This pattern is manifested, for example, in ‘the struggles of artistic creation or the frustrations of inquiry’ (Reginster Reference Reginster2006: 233–234). Hassan employs a distinction, originally drawn by Jonathan Dancy (Reference Dancy2003), between two ways in which the value of a part may relate to the value of the whole. The part may be an enabling condition or a contributor. An enabling condition would retain its value whatever it became part of: something bad then might enable the goodness of a whole of which it is part. If this were how Nietzsche conceived the relation of suffering to a flourishing life, his opponent could still charge that the suffering in a flourishing life was something intrinsically bad.Footnote ⁷⁴ But if a part of a valuable whole is conceived as a contributor, it ‘changes its value depending on the context. A particular thing, X, may be of negative value in one context, but upon forming a whole in another context can increase or decrease in value (i.e., X contributes value to Y)’ (Hassan Reference Hassan and Came2022: 118). An analogy may help. A vivid yellow brushstroke in a van Gogh painting is, let us say, an indispensable contributor to the positive (aesthetic) value of the whole painting. But the brushstroke in other connections need not have the same value. Placed anywhere in Vermeer’s View of Delft it would be bad and contribute to a bad whole; as an accidental dab on a wall, it might be neither good nor bad.

Applying this structure to Nietzsche’s views on suffering: just as the brushstroke retains its vividness across contexts, so suffering retains its phenomenal badness; but suffering can be normatively good in a temporal and causal whole in which resistance is creatively overcome and normatively bad when it forms part of a whole that is just misery and failure. And, as Nietzsche’s words suggest, if you try to abstract a particular suffering from the ‘sequence and interconnection’ in which it occurs, you lose any appreciation of its value for the person to whom it occurs. The whole – the extended sequence of psychological states and dispositions that includes suffering and some form of achievement – contains suffering as a part that contributes value to it. But we need say neither that undergoing the suffering was good ‘in itself’, nor that it was bad ‘in itself’. On this reading, Nietzsche’s reason for saying that suffering in general should not be seen as an objection to life is that a particular suffering has no determinate value except as part of a whole, the ‘whole inner sequence and interconnection that spells misfortune for me or for you’ (Reference WilliamsGS 338). This is of course a theoretical construction, going beyond what Nietzsche says. But it is compatible with his warning not to regard suffering as an evil that must be removed from life; and it saves him on the one hand from saying wildly that suffering is universally or generically good and on the other hand from conceding ground to the ‘morality of compassion’ by acknowledging an intrinsic badness to suffering.

Hassan considers his account of the value of suffering, like Reginster’s, to be limited to ‘a particular kind of suffering: resistance to the will in striving’ (Hassan Reference Hassan and Came2022: 125), where the resistance is desired as part of what gives the striving value. But it must be said that these are not the most obvious cases of suffering. There may even be an argument that some such desired resistances (which may rightly be considered difficulties or challenges) should not even be classed as suffering. (It’s a challenge writing this Element, but I’m not sure it should make it onto the list of my life’s sufferings.) But even if we agree that these are sufferings, they are not the paradigms that form an ‘objection to life’ from the point of view of Nietzsche’s ‘No-sayers’. The prime exhibits in the case ‘against life’ are adventitious sufferings, the afflictions we do not will for ourselves, what happens in ‘the hospitals, military wards, and surgical theatres … prisons, torture chambers and slave stalls … battlefields and places of judgement, and … all the dark dwellings of misery that hide from cold curiosity’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer2010: 351). By contrast, Christianity does not regard the hardships of Michelangelo’s achievement in the Sistine Chapel as exemplifying the ‘problem of suffering’, nor have philosophical pessimists proclaimed life not worth living because mountain climbers, philosophers, and many others embrace difficulty as part and parcel of their activities. The suffering that counts most ‘against life’ is undesired and cuts across our goals rather than being integral to our achieving them.Footnote ⁷⁵

Hassan limits his account to ‘resistance to the will in striving’ (Hassan Reference Hassan and Came2022: 113). But this limitation is arguably unnecessary. Hassan’s ‘contributor’ account may apply also to unwanted sufferings, resulting in a more robust response to the ‘No-sayers’. Recall the case discussed in Section 4.3: the musician whose paralysis was for him ‘the one thing that happened in my life that I needed to have happen’. The paralysis presumably befell the musician unwanted; it was not ‘suffering in pursuit of his goals’, or a resistance he desired for the sake of a challenge. But, we might argue, the suffering of paralysis became an indispensable part of a sequence of events in which growth occurred for him – he attained, perhaps, greater self-understanding, increased commitment to what he valued, a deeper, changed sense of self (see Nietzsche’s similar descriptions at Reference WilliamsGS, Preface, 3), to all of which his particular suffering was essential. The same suffering might counterfactually have occupied a different sequence: depression, self-pity, and a shutting down of aspiration. But if, in Nietzsche’s view, suffering has no invariant value across contexts, then the same suffering which would have been bad in one sequence can be good in the other. This presents a radical and unsettling revaluation of the value of suffering. Nietzsche can regard even profoundly undesired sufferings – becoming paralysed, being sexually assaulted, experiencing repeated bipolar episodesFootnote ⁷⁶ – as positive features in an individual’s life if and when they are necessary parts of an ‘inner sequence and interconnection’ that leads to growth and achievement.

5.3 Aestheticized Suffering

On the interpretation discussed in the previous section, suffering can have positive value by virtue of contributing to human flourishing, as Nietzsche understands it. We envisaged Nietzsche’s ‘whole sequence and interconnection’ as a causally linked series of events in which suffering occurs and contributes to real psychological changes (however exactly characterized). By contrast, Hassan (Reference Hassan and Came2022) links the notion of organic wholes with an ‘aestheticization of suffering’ on Nietzsche’s part, a way of representing suffering to oneself. The organic whole, on this reading, is a narrative. As Nicolas Delon puts it, ‘An episode of suffering is valuable when, and insofar as, it can be incorporated into an aesthetically compelling sequence of achievement that required overcoming resistance’ (Delon Reference Delon2022: 3607).

Nietzsche construes the aesthetic in two principal ways in his mature works: a spectator’s pleasure in regarding something’s beauty and an artist’s creation of form. As Aaron Ridley observes, ‘form … is conceived by Nietzsche along traditional (perhaps Romantic) organicist lines’ (Ridley Reference Ridley, Gemes and Richardson2013: 418). The nature of ‘form-giving’ plays a role, for example, in Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience, where he describes dominant agents ‘impressing a form’ on a subservient people to make them into a civilized whole: ‘[I]n a short time something new stands there, a ruling structure that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and related to one another, in which nothing at all finds a place that has not first had placed into it a “meaning” with respect to the whole’ (GM II: 17). A whole in this case is something created anew by artistry. Nietzsche says of Goethe, ‘he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself … He said yes to everything related to him’ (TI, ‘Skirmishes’, 49). In another well-known passage, Nietzsche links Yes-saying to beauty:

Nietzsche sometimes couples beauty with form-giving. His ‘rare art’ of ‘giving style to one’s character’ involves fitting one’s strengths and weaknesses ‘into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye’ (Reference WilliamsGS 290). Recall also his insistence that ‘in the human being there is … creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 225). By combining such pronouncements we can perhaps construe Nietzsche’s conception of the aesthetic as a composite of beauty, form-giving, and organic wholeness. In many cases the raw material on which form is impressed is in some sense oneself, and pleasure is found in standing back from what one has actively created out of oneself and appreciating it.

For Hassan, ‘suffering’s value is altered by giving it a certain perspective in a narrative – that of heroic struggle – that makes it an object of aesthetic pleasure’ (Hassan Reference Hassan and Came2022: 127). In what I have called the ‘flourishing strategy’, suffering is found to have value in that it leads to positive changes. The aestheticization strategy, by contrast, posits a ‘Yes-saying’ attitude that consists in representing the suffering in a positive way. This strategy puts Nietzsche still broadly in line still with the impulse behind The Birth of Tragedy, except that now he tends to think less of formal art works representing the suffering of mythical characters and more of us representing our own suffering. ‘We should learn from artists’, he says, because we ‘want to be poets of our lives’ (Reference WilliamsGS 299). One may construct a narrative in which one represents the experience of the hardship of illness or distress as overcome through admirable resilience; or presumably, like Dickens’ Miss Havisham, one may construct a narrative in which the same suffering has ruined one’s life forever. The ‘value of suffering’ changes, depending on which narrative it is made a contributor to. Nietzsche shows a subtle awareness of the way in which self-interpretation acts to construct our sense that life is going well for us ‘now that we see how everything … turns out for the best’ (Reference WilliamsGS 277):

There is, he says, a temptation to think some ‘providence’ or ‘petty deity’ is making things turn out the best for us. But no: this supposed perfection in our lives results from ‘our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events’ (Reference WilliamsGS 277): we are its authors.

One may wonder how separable the flourishing strategy and the aestheticization strategy are. It would be naïve to think that ‘psychological growth’ is a phenomenon like physical growth in children, which occurs in subjects independently of the way they interpret themselves. One might even press the point that the ‘life’ that is affirmed must always be a life-narrative and that the ‘interconnection’ through which events gain significance to us has to be something constructed out of selected portions of our lives. At the end of 1882 Nietzsche experienced a devastating personal rejection when his friend Paul Rée and Lou Salomé, to whom he had felt himself especially close, departed together and abandoned him. He wrote ‘this last bite of life was the hardest I have chewed and it is still possible that I will choke on it’ (Reference Colli and MontinariKSB 6: 311, my translation). He could retrospectively have construed this experience either as the end of a story, with his subsequent life the beginning of quite unconnected chapter, or as a fruitful hardship which nurtured his next creative project. There is no fact of the matter as to which narrative whole a painful experience has to be part of. This may lead to a suspicion of such narratives. If what one is to affirm is a narrative representation constructed to make life seem pleasing to oneself, the worry is that one is not really saying Yes to one’s life, just to a pleasing picture of it.

Nietzsche asks, ‘What means do we have for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable when they are not?’, and answers that we should learn from artists how to interpret and value ourselves: ‘we … want to be poets of our lives’ (Reference WilliamsGS 299). From The Gay Science onwards he repeatedly presents artists as lying, simplifying, glorifying, selecting, rounding things out, hiding and reinterpreting the ugly, seeing things from a distance, round a corner, cut out of context, distorted, through coloured glass, or covered with not fully transparent skin, telling tall tales, playing tricks, taking pleasure in life only by falsifying its image, showing us falsehood with a good conscience, and helping us embrace the good will to illusion, the cult of the untrue, the cult of surface, the transformation of things so that they reflect one’s power, the will to invert the truth, the will to deception, and the will to untruth at any price.Footnote ⁷⁷ All of this makes one suspect that ‘aestheticization’ may amount to painting a pleasing picture by lying to oneself. Yet, especially in The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche champions the ruthless honesty about oneself that constitutes intellectual conscience. How to reconcile these two tendences? One thought is that such honesty comes in degrees: ‘The strength of a spirit would be proportionate to how much of the “truth” he could withstand – or, to put it more clearly, to what extent he needs it to be thinned out, veiled over, sweetened up, dumbed down, or lied about’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 39). In light of this passage, Aaron Ridley offers the following reconciliation between aestheticization and honesty:

Nietzsche implies that a total fabrication would suit only the very ‘weak’. At the other end of the scale, we could imagine that the supremely ‘strong’ human being – the future human of the ‘great health’ (GM II: 24) – could say Yes to every suffering. This future human is a myth in two senses, being both non-existent and required by Nietzsche as a sense-making ideal. Real humans need beautifying constructions.

I have suggested that Nietzsche approaches the value of suffering through both an aestheticizing strategy and a flourishing strategy. The aestheticizing strategy bypasses moral valuation, in effect saying, ‘don’t ask whether suffering is good or bad; try to construct out of the raw materials of your life an organic whole in which you can find your particular sufferings part of something beautiful’. The flourishing strategy, by contrast, challenges morality’s customary moral evaluation head-on: ‘your judgement that suffering is bad must be called into question’. Both are ways of combatting the ‘No-saying’ attitudes that Nietzsche suspects of stymying the potential ‘highest power and splendor of the human type’ (GM Preface, 6). Grasping suffering’s real benefits for one’s flourishing manifests and enhances one’s power; representing it as part of a heroic narrative displays oneself in splendour. The two strategies do not really conflict. First, for Nietzsche any such narrative creation is subordinate to the virtue of intellectual conscience, which is about the self-disciplined undermining of illusions, the opposite of self-gratification. Second, having the capacity to construct a narrative that fits as much as possible into an intelligible whole with minimum falsification is a manifestation of one’s nature as ‘creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day’ (Reference HorstmannBGE 225) and thus is itself a manifestation of flourishing as Nietzsche conceives it.