Nietzsche’s Truth

In the months before his final descent into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche made the following declaration and prediction: “I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed, required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not a man; I am dynamite.” 

And so he was. The man who practiced and perfected the art of “philosophizing with a hammer,” who pronounced that “God is dead,” who called on his readers to follow him in exploring regions “beyond good and evil,” who gleefully declared himself the Antichrist, who unconditionally denounced human equality and democracy, who claimed that “a great war hallows any cause,” who praised the “blond beast” who “might come away from a revolting succession of murder, arson, rape, [and] torture with a sense of exhilaration and emotional equilibrium, as if it were nothing but a student prank”—this man was indeed explosive. One might even say that today, over one hundred years after his work was discovered by European intellectuals, Western culture has yet to come to terms with the fallout produced by the detonation of his most volatile ideas. 

In the epilogue to his Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski catalogues the philosopher’s influence, and it reads like a comprehensive intellectual history of the twentieth century. The irrationalist vitalism that helped to inspire fascism; artistic movements from symbolism to art nouveau, expressionism, and Dada; Ernst Jünger’s ecstatic militarism; Heideggerian existentialism and antimodernism; the Counter-Enlightenment critical theory of the postwar Frankfurt School; the violent surrealism of Georges Bataille and, through him, the varying postmodern irrationalisms of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida; the neopragmatic conviction that “truth is an illusion that helps us cope with life”—all of these and many other radical cultural, intellectual, and political movements descend directly from Nietzsche. They are his legacy to our time. 

For some—primarily those who take their intellectual bearings from outside the thoroughly Nietzscheanized humanities departments of the modern university, as well as the handful of conservative dissenters within them—there will be little in this legacy of atheistic immoderation to admire. But however we judge the often decadent productions of twentieth-century high culture, Nietzsche himself continues to merit the most serious attention, and not merely because of his considerable influence. The fact remains that Nietzsche is one of the most brilliant philosophers and prose stylists in the history of Western letters. His formidable challenge to so much that so many of us continue to hold dear simply cannot be ignored by thoughtful men and women. 

But how ought we to approach the task of evaluating Nietzsche’s work? The answer is far from clear. For Nietzsche is a deeply contradictory thinker, and glancing at the dozens of books devoted to his thought in the philosophy section of any good bookshop, it can seem that there are, in fact, many Nietzsches. Most scholars have assumed that his work amounts to a defense of radical right-wing politics, but many today think him more compatible with the far left. His books contain numerous misogynistic passages, but that hasn’t discouraged feminists from claiming to find support for their program in his ideas. Some think his teaching is meant to inspire public actions, but many others have seen in his writing an aesthetic call to private cultivation and creativity. Competent scholars have declared that his work is hopelessly incoherent, while at least one leading philosopher has claimed that Nietzsche was the “last great metaphysician in the West.” And then there are those who think that Nietzsche’s texts can and should mean anything their readers want them to. This abundance of interpretations makes any attempt to render an informed and comprehensive judgment of his work exceedingly difficult. 

Thanks to Safranski’s biography, that task has now become considerably easier. As in his 1994 biography of Martin Heidegger (Between Good and Evil; English translation, 1998), Safranski manages to summarize his subject’s ideas with admirable fluency—and without ever mistaking his own role for that of an advocate. Safranski also proves himself to be a master of what might be called philosophical narration, drawing on just the right amount of detail from Nietzsche’s personal background and historical milieu to provide a context for his philosophy while rarely allowing those details to overshadow the ideas that form the core of Nietzsche’s life. 

The Nietzsche that emerges from Safranski’s study is a man who, from his teenage years until his mental collapse at the age of forty-five, tirelessly devoted his formidable intellect to making sense of the world in terms of its intrinsic meaninglessness. The case of Nietzsche thus presents us with the peculiar spectacle of a philosopher who began his intellectual life, not from a position of openness to an elusive truth not yet grasped, but rather from an unshakable conviction that he had already found it—and that all of human experience and history had to be reconceived in its light. 

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small village of Röcken, Germany. His father, Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, died five years later of “softening of the brain,” leaving Nietzsche to be raised (along with his sister Elisabeth) by his mother, Franziska, and two unmarried aunts. The young Nietzsche was both intellectually precocious and astonishingly self-absorbed. He wrote his first philosophical essay, “On the Origin of Evil,” at the age of twelve. By thirteen, he had written his first autobiography. He would go on to write eight more over the next ten years, each of them concluding that, in Safranski’s words, “his life was exemplary.” 

Despite Nietzsche’s early penchant for self-aggrandizement—a tendency that would mark all of his written work—both he and his family believed for some time that he would follow in his father’s footsteps to become a pastor. But at some point between 1859 and 1861, while Nietzsche attended an elite boarding school, he began to break decisively with his faith. Although he asserted in his 1859 autobiography that “God has guided me safely in everything as a father would his weak little child,” by May 1861 he had concluded that the idea of God was, in Safranski’s words, “unfathomable,” because there was simply “too much intense injustice and evil in the world.” 

These first tentative steps away from Christianity were quickly followed by others. In an essay composed on his Easter vacation in 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche would wonder “how our view of the world might change if there were no God, immortality, Holy Spirit, or divine inspiration, and if the tenets of millennia were based on delusions.” Safranski explains how this thought quickly generated a series of puzzles that would set Nietzsche’s philosophical agenda for the rest of his life: “Might people have been ‘led astray by a vision’ for such a long time? What kinds of reality are left behind once religious phantasms have been taken away?” 

Over the next few years, Nietzsche would wrestle with his suspicion that all received truths are illusory. Although he had planned to study theological and classical philology at the University of Bonn when he arrived there in the fall of 1864, he dropped his concentration in theology after a single semester. By the following summer, he would write to his sister that, although it would be easy to continue believing in the comforting tales of their youth, “the truth is not necessarily in league with the beautiful and the good.” On the contrary, he wrote, the truth can be “detestable and ugly in the extreme.”

From this point on, Nietzsche would devote his life to breaking from—and then reflecting on how mankind might thrive after having left behind—“the first and last things.” Early in his university education, Nietzsche thought of himself as continuing the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he described as his “liberator” from dogma and tradition. As Safranski writes, Schopenhauer confirmed Nietzsche’s youthful intuition that “the inner nature of the world is based not on reason and intellect but on impulses and dark urges, dynamic and senseless.” “True life,” Schopenhauer claimed, is pure “will,” which “roars behind or underneath it.” The challenge was learning how to live in light of the truth that all apparent meaning and purpose in life is in fact an illusion. At first Nietzsche was intrigued by Schopenhauer’s own proposal—the self-negation of the will, culminating in quasi-Buddhistic peace and passivity—but he soon rejected it on the grounds that it amounted to an attitude of defeat in the face of “nothingness.” Nietzsche longed to find a way to love and affirm life, despite its meaninglessness. 

Such concerns preoccupied his thinking as he continued his education in classical philology under the renowned scholar Friedrich Ritschl, first at Bonn, and then at the University of Leipzig. So impressed was Ritschl by his student that in 1869 he recommended Nietzsche for a professorship at the University of Basel before he had completed either his dissertation or postgraduate thesis—an honor as rare in the nineteenth century as it is today. When Nietzsche finally produced a monograph, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the expectations were thus very high among his colleagues. They certainly did not anticipate that Nietzsche would completely forsake the scholarly norms of the philological profession to write a highly speculative, even revolutionary account of ancient Greek culture that was largely inspired by his own existential fixations. 

All of Nietzsche’s work begins from the assumption that, viewed in itself, the world is a meaningless and purposeless chaos. As he would write in his notebooks in 1888, less than a year before his mental breakdown, “For a philosopher to say, ‘the good and the beautiful are one,’ is infamy; if he goes on to add, ‘also the true,’ one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly.” In The Birth of Tragedy and the shorter essays he wrote in the early and mid-1870s, Nietzsche proposed that human beings “can become healthy, strong, and fruitful” only when they live within an “enveloping atmosphere” that protects them from having to face this ugly truth without mediation. The enveloping atmosphere consists of protective illusions that come to be taken as truths by those who live within its “horizon,” which enables them to “endure without being destroyed.” But these second-order truths—or “myths”—must not entirely conceal the meaninglessness that they cover over. Rather, the myths must grant partial access to the authentic truth. In its translucence to truth, the mythical horizon allows human beings to both face and “forget” the ugliness in just the right proportions. 

The Birth of Tragedy is an interpretation of how the ancient Greeks achieved this balance between truth and untruth more perfectly than any other culture in history and why that balance eventually collapsed; it also suggests how German culture might acquire an analogous state of equilibrium in modern times. Nietzsche associates the impulses or drives that enabled the Greeks to live and thrive in the partial light of the “terror and horror of existence” with the Olympian gods of Apollo and Dionysus; he claims that in different but complementary ways they made possible the “continuous redemption” of the “eternally suffering and contradictory” character of the world. 

The first of these impulses—the Apollonian—responded to the “mysterious ground of our being” by answering our “ardent longing for illusion.” It used beauty and artistry, measure and proportion to conceal from the Greeks, at least partially, the “substratum of suffering and of knowledge,” and left the individual half-conscious “in his tossing bark, amid the waves” of human existence, in a kind of “waking dream.” According to Nietzsche, Sophocles’ Antigone, with its stark and yet balanced conflicts between competing duties, stands as a particularly vivid example of the Apollonian in action. 

But the full accomplishment of Greek tragedy cannot be grasped by conceiving it entirely in terms of Apollonian dreams. It must be complemented by the contrary Dionysian impulse, which pulled in a very different direction. In a frenzy of intoxication, which Nietzsche associates with the orgiastic violence of the ancient world’s Bacchic festivals, the Dionysian at once exposed the “mysterious primordial unity” from which all things spring and produced “complete self-forgetfulness” on the part of individuals. This “mystic feeling of oneness” culminated in a transfiguring experience in which man “feels himself a god [and] . . . walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his [Apollonian] dreams.” 

According to Nietzsche, the Greeks achieved greatness by synthesizing their Apollonian and Dionysian drives in the tragic dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the greatest of their plays, the Greeks were exposed to the ideal quantities of truth and illusion. In a play such as Oedipus Rex, they were granted a glimpse of the abyss, and yet that glimpse was so artfully presented in “an Apollonian world of images” that their “nausea” was transformed into “notions with which one can live.” 

But the tragic balance was extremely difficult to maintain. Nietzsche claims that the democratic character, heightened self-consciousness, and “cheerfulness” of Euripides’ plays signaled that the tragic age of Greece was coming to an end. But the deepest cause of its demise could be found elsewhere, in a “newborn demon,” whose approach to life so opposed the Dionysian element in Aeschylean tragedy that it was subsequently vanquished from the Greek stage, and henceforth from the history of the West. That demon was none other than Socrates. 

The middle chapters of The Birth of Tragedy contain what might be the most forceful critique of Socrates since Aristophanes lampooned him in The Clouds during the ancient philosopher’s own lifetime. Nietzsche contends that Socrates stood in profound opposition to the “drunken revelry” of tragedy, falsely teaching human beings that “using the thread of causality, [they could] penetrate the deepest abysses of being.” Even worse, he taught that “to be beautiful” something must be “intelligible,” and that “knowledge is a virtue.” The Socratic “theoretical man” lives to uncover the truth at all costs, assuming that doing so will be an unambiguous benefit to mankind. While the tragedians had understood the importance of the surface of things, the Socratic philosopher, stubbornly and naively convinced of the goodness of truth, pursues it without restraint—and the results are catastrophic. 

In the first formulation of an argument he will greatly refine in his later work, Nietzsche claims that the philosopher’s headlong lunge toward the truth ends up exposing the “lies concealed in the essence of logic.” When this happens—when the philosopher uncovers the fact that logic is a human construction imposed on the chaos of reality—logic effectively “bites its own tail” and refutes itself. In Nietzsche’s view, this is exactly what has happened in the hyperlogical culture of the modern world: the theoretical optimism first defended by Socrates had reached a kind of termination in which human beings begin to sense the awful truth that its most fundamental premises are fictions. They have thus also begun to grasp (in Nietzsche’s own work) the wisdom of the pre-Socratic tragedians, who understood, if only half-consciously, that mankind “needs art as a protection and a remedy” for truth. 

That modern man confronts an unprecedented crisis of meaninglessness is a view that Nietzsche would hold throughout his career. What changed was his account of how it came about and his proposal for how we should respond to it. In his early work, he believes that modern man requires a new “beautiful illusion” to replace the crumbling Socratic culture of the West. This new mythology would serve the same function that the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles did for the Greeks. When it comes to specifying where we might find a new mythology to accomplish this much needed “rebirth of tragedy,” Nietzsche announces with considerable bombast that it will arise from the neopagan, mythopoetic operas of Richard Wagner.

Nietzsche had met Wagner in 1868 and quickly developed an intense friendship with the composer and his wife, Cosima von Bülow. Over the next few years, the three shared their innermost cultural and philosophical hopes with one another—so much so, in fact, that by the time of the publication of his first book, Nietzsche could write to a friend that “I have formed an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how close we are now and how fully our plans mesh.” Those plans, unveiled in the final third of The Birth of Tragedy, involved nothing less than the satiation of modern man’s spiritual “hunger” by providing him with a neotragic horizon within which the “significance of life” could be “redeemed” just as it had been for the pre-Socratic Greeks.

It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche’s colleagues greeted his book with a mixture of incomprehension and disdain. Expecting the philological wunderkind to produce an exercise in meticulous scholarship, they were shocked to discover that he had chosen instead to issue a rallying cry to cultural revolution. What Safranski fittingly describes as Nietzsche’s academic “excommunication” began almost immediately. Over the next few years, he divided his time between convalescing from a series of illnesses, teaching a handful of students he deemed “incompetent,” and writing a number of brilliant but decidedly nonacademic essays on Schopenhauer, Wagner, David Friedrich Strauss, and “The Benefits and Drawbacks of History for Life.” His alienation from academic life finally culminated in his resignation from the University of Basel in 1879. He would spend the next ten years as a nomad traveling throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Italy while devoting himself almost entirely to philosophical reflection and writing. 

Although Nietzsche’s work continued to show signs of Wagner’s influence for several years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, the two men gradually drifted apart during the 1870s. As Safranski suggests, Nietzsche eventually became disillusioned with his own early proposals to cure modern disillusionment. While Nietzsche once hoped that Wagner could inspire a renewal of meaning and purpose in modernity, by the end of the decade he had come to consider the composer a purveyor of kitsch who embodied the most decadent aspects of modern culture. It is even possible to say that Nietzsche wrote his next major work, Human, All Too Human (1878), in order to inure himself against the kinds of hopes that Wagner’s music had inspired in him. 

If Nietzsche began his earliest philosophical reflections from the assumption that “truth is ugly”—and that all meaning arises out of a creative attempt to cope with this ugliness—the post-Wagner Nietzsche was, if anything, more radical in his refusal to accept any “metaphysical solace.” As before, modern man had fallen into meaninglessness, but now there was no possible redemption from it—and this we were supposed to accept as good news. In Human, All Too Human and Daybreak (1881), an almost Voltairean Nietzsche exulted in his own capacity to endure with a smile what Pascal had described as the “horror at the infinite immensity of spaces.” Not until 1882’s The Joyful Science did Nietzsche begin to develop the profundity that characterizes his mature and most justly admired work. 

Like its immediate predecessors, The Joyful Science is a collection of numbered aphorisms ranging in length from a few words to several pages. This style, which Nietzsche employs in most of his later works, enables him to shift topics in unpredictable ways. An aphorism on politics might be followed by one on art, science, religion, psychology, German Idealism, newspapers, ancient philosophy, Renaissance history, or modern literature. Sometimes one aphorism builds on another, producing a sustained argument or interpretation; at other times the jarring juxtaposition between them leads to deliberate disorientation. It is amidst the chaotic stream of brilliantly disjointed insights and observations that the reader of The Joyful Science comes upon aphorism 125, “The Madman.” 

Nietzsche begins this one-and-a-half-page masterpiece of modern disenchantment by describing a madman who “lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’” Then, as those in the square gawk and laugh at the lunatic with embarrassed disapproval, he cries out: “Whither is God? . . . I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers . . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” 

Nietzsche was hardly the first modern figure to espouse atheism. The most radical writers of the Enlightenment suspected that God was a fiction created by the human mind. G. W. F. Hegel famously declared that modernity is “Good Friday without Easter Sunday.” And throughout the nineteenth century, a series of authors, from Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to Charles Darwin, claimed that religion is a human projection onto a spiritually lifeless world. Nietzsche agreed with this tradition in every respect but one. Whereas most modern atheists viewed their lack of piety as an unambiguous good—as a mark of their liberation from the dead weight of authority and tradition—Nietzsche responded to his insight into the amoral chaos at the heart of the world with considerable pathos. If in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak he flirted with the facile cheerfulness so common to his fellow atheists, beginning with aphorism 125 of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche showed that he now understood with greater depth that the passing of God has potentially devastating consequences for Western Civilization. This is the madman’s requiem aeternam deo:

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

If God is dead, then man has completely lost his orientation. There is no human dignity, no equality, no rights, no democracy, no liberalism, and no good and evil. In the light of Nietzsche’s insight, a thinker such as Marx looks extraordinarily superficial, railing against religion on the one hand while remaining firmly attached to ideals of justice and equality on the other. He has failed to grasp the simple truth that if God is dead, then nothing at all can be taken for granted—and absolutely everything is permitted. 

But how could God be dead? The idea is permeated by paradox. If God is who He claims to be, then it is obviously impossible for Him to have “bled to death under our knives,” as the madman declares. (Of course Christians believe that, as the Son, God did die at our hands, but Nietzsche intends the madman’s statements to apply to the triune God in His monotheistic unity.) God may come to be ignored by a world too fixated on earthly goods to notice Him, but clearly He is not vulnerable to human malice or indifference. Unless, of course, He never existed in the first place. Perhaps then it would make a kind of poetic sense to speak of God “dying” once people have ceased to believe in Him. In this case, man would not simply be responsible for killing God, but also for having given birth to Him in the first place. Much of Nietzsche’s late work defends just such an interpretation, arguing that Western man is equally responsible for creating and destroying God. The most thorough statement of this view can be found in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), which purports to tell the hidden history of morality from its origins to its collapse in the modern age. 

In the beginning, there was chaos. All of Nietzsche’s books begin from this assumption. The Genealogy departs from those works in asserting that this primordial anarchy consisted of an unfocused, undifferentiated, and purposeless “will to power” that permeated all things. (Whether the will to power merely animates living creatures or acts as a metaphysical force that pervades all of nature remains unclarified.) The pointless, anarchistic violence that characterized the prehistoric world came to an end when certain individuals began to focus their will to power on the goal of decisively triumphing over others. When they finally succeeded, these victorious individuals, whom Nietzsche dubs “the strong,” foisted the first “moral valuation” onto mankind. 

In the strong (or “noble”) valuation, the good is nothing other than an expression of what the members of the victorious class do and what they affirm. And what they do is triumph ruthlessly over the weak by violence. Likewise, the opposite of the good—the bad—is defined by the strong as weakness, or the inability to conquer the strong. Nietzsche illustrates the dynamics of the strong valuation with an infamous image of birds of prey devouring defenseless lambs. The birds of prey do not choose to eat the lambs; there is thus no free will involved and nothing blameworthy about their viciousness. It’s simply what they do; what they do is the essence of who they are; and who they are serves as the measure of good and bad. 

Once the meaning of good and bad has been established, a theory of justice grows up on its basis. Justice for the strong amounted to a simple sense of proportionality: when an individual incurs a debt, he must discharge it by repaying it and/or submitting to retributive punishment. Nietzsche implies that, for the strong, facing up to wrongdoing and accepting punishment was largely a matter of honor, so in societies governed by the noble valuation justice was usually meted out quickly and brutally. 

The preconditions were now in place for the birth of the gods. In Nietzsche’s view, polytheistic religions emerged out of the stories that the strong told themselves about their long-forgotten, prehistoric origins. First, they imagined that the founders of their community were just like them, only stronger—and they developed rituals of sacrifice that enabled them to express gratitude and discharge imagined debts to these founders. Then, as their community grew in power and extent over time, the founders that the strong projected onto the past became even stronger. Eventually, the founders came to be thought of as gods, who served as noble ideals for the strong to emulate as they sought to cultivate their power and cruelty. 

According to Nietzsche, it was within this context of divinely sanctioned oppression that an epochal “transvaluation of values” took place. This “slave revolt in morality” began when the weak—out of what Nietzsche calls their ressentiment and their “spirit of revenge” against the strong—started to teach a series of radically new and ingenious ideas. To begin with, they claimed for the first time that there is such a thing as free will, so the brutal actions of the strong, far from being simply “what they do,” came to be understood as the result of a choice. The weak then likewise asserted that their own failure to triumph over the strong was a result of the choice to refrain from such actions, rather than an inability to do so. For the slavish revolutionaries, all human beings are tempted by “sin” to engage in “evil,” and the strong are noteworthy above all else for their decision to embrace and even encourage such behavior, while the weak define their lives by the struggle to resist it. Thus it comes to be that what was formerly considered bad—namely, weakness—is christened as the highest good, while the formerly good—namely, strength—is transformed into evil. 

In this way, the slaves (obviously the Jews and their Christian descendants) fashioned a life-denying “ascetic ideal” to replace the life-affirming valuation of the strong. Along with it comes the notion of a new kind of deity—a God above all other gods, to whom each of us owes a debt—an “original sin”—so great that we are powerless to discharge it on our own, without His gratuitous gift of redeeming grace. Unlike the gods of the strong, who behaved like outsized brutes and whose cruelty served as an attainable ideal for the strong to emulate, the God of the slaves is so transcendently good that all attempts to approximate His holiness inevitably fall short. Far from serving as a healthy ideal, then, the ascetic God ends up negating the world and everything in it, including human beings, by His very existence. 

The ascetic ideal that gives birth to God is thus much more complicated than the valuation that preceded it. Whereas the noble valuation grew out of and enhanced the self-affirmation of the strong, the slaves adhere to an ideal that denigrates pride and therefore seeks to diminish and humiliate the self. And yet it, like all valuations, arises from out of the self and its will to power. As Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human, “Man takes positive pleasure in violating himself with excessive demands and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul. In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as a god and in doing so demonizes the other part.” In the Genealogy, Nietzsche describes this violent “self-splitting” as an example of how “life” can turn “against life,” and, in turn, actually enhance life in new and interesting ways. In seeking to attain the impossible—to become “worthy” of a God whose goodness transcends the world—the ascetic slave directs his own will against itself, and thus creates a wholly new form of cultural life founded on guilt and bad conscience. It is a culture of psychological depravity, as individuals, tutored by a new ruling class of priests, come to despise themselves, and never so much as when they begin to experience the least bit of happiness or success. 

Nietzsche’s account of how the ascetic ideal gives birth to God is ingenious. But no less so is his narrative of how it leads to God’s death, as well as its own self-destruction. Nietzsche’s narrative derives much of its shock effect from the fact that it so prof