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Nietzsche’s “View from Above”¹

Michael Ure

In the past decade, there has been a renaissance of scholarly interest in Nietzsche’s relationship to Darwinism and other contemporary evolutionary theories.² This scholarship demonstrates that in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Nietzsche attempted to make contemporary naturalism the basis of a new method of historical inquiry and a new style of moral criticism and experimentation. Arguably this scholarship has successfully challenged Martin Heidegger’s attempt to purge Nietzsche of the “alleged biologism,” which early critics and commentators had associated with his philosophy.³ In the recent debate, most commentators agree that Nietzsche is a naturalist of one stripe or another, and the main interest lies in identifying his interpretation of nineteenth-century naturalism.⁴

Yet this period also marks the highpoint of Nietzsche’s engagement with the Hellenistic model of philosophy.⁵ In the middle period, Nietzsche is attracted by the general Hellenistic notion of philosophy as a practice or way of life. He explicitly conceives the moral schools of antiquity as “experimental laboratories” whose arts of living “we” might freely use to attain equanimity.⁶ “What engages Nietzsche” as Julian Young observes of The Wanderer and his Shadow “are ideas common to all ancient philosophies.”⁷ One of the common ancient ideas that attracted Nietzsche in this period was the idea of surveying human life, as if from above.⁸ This perspective then fits well with his whole overall approach of his reasoning in terms of a medical diagnosis and therapeutic suggestions.

In this chapter, I argue that we can develop a fuller appreciation of Nietzsche’s therapeutic philosophy by seeing how he sought to renovate the ancient model of philosophy in light of the new naturalisms. He sought to retain the Hellenistic notion that a global evaluation of life follows from “physics,” or a systematic view of nature.⁹ Hellenistic philosophers conceived the elevation of the soul as the principle justification of “physics.”¹⁰ In this philosophical framework, physics was inseparable from the understanding and realization of the good life. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, I argue, Nietzsche attempts to refract the new naturalistic theories through the ancient model of philosophy and its “spiritual exercises.” This chapter shows that Nietzsche’s philosophy stands at the intersection of two very different naturalistic traditions: classical and Hellenistic naturalisms that conceived physics as part of a philosophical therapy, and nineteenth-century evolutionary naturalism that focused on empirically grounded, causal explanations of natural phenomena. I suggest that Nietzsche attempts to use the ancient model of philosophy to “incorporate” these new naturalisms. Nietzsche emulates the ancients by trying to make science “therapeutic” or “liberating” and does so partly by drawing on ancient spiritual exercises.

In particular, I argue that Nietzsche hinges one particular ancient spiritual exercise—the “view from above”—to the new naturalisms. It is partly for this reason that, despite his naturalistic commitment to formulating causal explanations compatible with scientific findings, his texts look, as Janaway rightly observes “starkly unlike scientific literature.”¹¹ In line with that Hellenistic tradition, Nietzsche frames nature to achieve a fundamental value conversion from ordinary emotions to the philosophical passion of joy. In this way, Nietzsche’s philosophy sharply diverges from modern naturalism. This chapter charts his shifting analysis of the relationship between his conceptions of nature or “physics” and his “ethics” conceived as a basic evaluative orientation or philosophical passion. It suggests that in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche tries to convert his newly discovered positivist value neutrality into an ethical stance, which we might call the “stoicism of the intellect.” In Daybreak, he oscillates between an Olympian and a Stoic “view from above,” both of which enable free spirits to take joy in nature.

Nietzsche’s Dilemma: Positivism or Classicism?

In the late 1870s, Nietzsche evinces ambivalence about the classical model of philosophy as a transformative practice that enables its practitioners to achieve the good life. On the one hand, he recognizes that the classical and Hellenistic attempt to make “physics” the basis of ethics necessarily carried with it epistemic dangers. If philosophy is predominantly considered an art of living, then it is easy to see how and why unpalatable truths might be sacrificed for the sake of flourishing or happiness.¹² On the other hand, Nietzsche seems reluctant to simply jettison this philosophical framework and rest content with the positivist program. He is just as concerned with addressing or ameliorating the potentially “tragic” consequences of pursuing knowledge or science at any cost.

Nietzsche then identifies the following dilemma: adopt the Hellenistic schools’ stance of making physics a handmaiden to human flourishing with its associated epistemic risks, or adopt positivism but only at the “tragic” cost of a certain kind of disenchantment or despair. The dilemma turns on the idea that truth and flourishing might be incompatible. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche nominated as his fundamental insight the claim that there is no necessary connection or preestablished harmony between truth and flourishing.¹³ We cannot, so he claims, reasonably assume the utility or value of truth for life, for “truth” may prove inimical to life. Worse still, so Nietzsche claimed, we can only discover this incompatibility between life and truth ex post facto. According to Nietzsche, if we adopt the new positivist approach, we cannot avert the dangers it carries because we cannot know about them in advance. In the case of the consequence or impact of knowledge on life, the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. On Nietzsche’s analysis, then, if the classical model carries epistemic dangers (the sacrifice of truth), the new positivism carries “existential” dangers (the sacrifice of flourishing or “happiness”). This led Nietzsche to formulate the following question: “Can we (consciously) live in ‘untruth’ in order to survive and flourish or can we somehow incorporate science?”¹⁴

One of his main responses to this dilemma, so I shall argue, was to draw on the ancient schools’ spiritual exercises (or askesis), especially the “view from above,” to incorporate the discoveries of the new naturalisms. In this sense, then, Nietzsche was unwilling to relinquish the classical notion that the role of philosophy is to facilitate human flourishing. Even in his so-called “positivist” period, he sought to maintain and revive the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life or practice that shapes or transforms its practitioner’s basic “ethos” or disposition. It is indicative of this commitment that Nietzsche was never content simply to report or develop “scientific” discoveries; he always remained equally concerned, indeed often more concerned, with the effects and “after-effects of knowledge.”¹⁵ Nietzsche did not simply draw on contemporary naturalistic explanatory models or attempt to formulate his own causal accounts of moral phenomena. He also sought to identify both the emotional effects of such knowledge and to find ways of making it the basis of a positive ethical conversion. Like the classical philosophers, Nietzsche remained vitally concerned with how physics or science might fold back onto and transform agents. In the following sections, I examine how Nietzsche deploys the view from above to resolve the dilemma of “life” versus “truth.”

Human, All Too Human: Free Spirit as Stoic of the Intellect

In conceiving philosophy as an art of living that enables individuals to overcome various malaises and in doing so to achieve a fully flourishing life, Nietzsche made himself an epigone of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition. In the middle period especially, Nietzsche seems committed to reviving philosophy as a therapeutic practice aimed at achieving eudaimonia. This is particularly evident in the way he makes frequent use of the famous Hellenistic analogy between philosophy and medicine, the philosopher and the physician.¹⁶ Nietzsche believes that a philosophy worthy of the name is a practice that aims to cure disease and restore full health.

Yet at the same time that he seeks to reclaim philosophy’s practical-therapeutic character with its eudaimonistic orientation, Nietzsche also entertains a general concern about the dangers of a philosophical orientation that gives priority to the issue of “happiness” or “well-being.” He worries that once philosophy constitutes itself as a practice that aims to transform the lives of individuals so that they can achieve ataraxia and autarkeia, it must part company with science. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche crystallizes this problem in his pointed criticism of the Socratic schools. Their eudaimonistic orientation, he argues, only serves to restrict scientific inquiry.¹⁷ This observation pinpoints one of his ongoing anxieties about practical philosophy: it purchases serenity only at the price of disturbing scientific investigation.

However, while Nietzsche recognizes the epistemic shortcomings of these classical and Hellenistic philosophies, he also acknowledges that contemporary sciences generate a range of “existential” or “ethical” difficulties. Science’s explanations, he claims, destroy metaphysical and other prescientific views that hitherto provided the species with moral guidance or action-orientation. “(O)ur mode of thinking,” as he explains, threatens to become “inimical to life” insofar as it annihilates both “religion” and “morality.”¹⁸ “Science,” as Habermas glosses Nietzsche’s point, “is not emancipatory, but nihilistic.”¹⁹ In Daybreak, Nietzsche elaborates how scientific causal explanation undermines morality as an action orienting interpretation of the world:

In the same measure as the sense of causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality decreases; for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed as the foundations of customs – the real world is much smaller than the imaginary – and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom: morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. ²⁰

Nietzsche’s concern is that causal analysis demonstrates that our “motives” have been based on “errors.”²¹ “With each step of scientific development,” as Habermas explains this point, “archaic world views, religious outlooks and philosophical interpretations lose ground. Cosmologies, as well as all pre-scientific interpretations of the world that make possible action orientation and the justification of norms, lose their credibility to the degree that an objectified nature becomes known in its causal connections and subjected to the power of technical control.”²²

We encounter here a fundamental tension in Nietzsche’s philosophy between his positivistic commitment to scientific explanation and his commitment to philosophy as a practice integral to human flourishing. On the one hand, Nietzsche appears to concede a monopoly of knowledge to modern science, and in doing so rejects metaphysical claims. On the other hand, from the point of view of “practical” or “therapeutic” philosophy, scientific knowledge itself is necessarily problematic because it dispenses with metaphysics’ innate connection with practice or life.²³

The difficulty Nietzsche faces is how to retain a commitment to science, and the positivist notion that only empirically verified hypotheses count as knowledge, without losing this connection to the classical ideal of philosophy as a way of life. Science threatens to leave the human species without any value orientation or “meaning,” and yet, as Nietzsche acknowledges, this need for “meaning” or “purpose” has become one of its newly acquired and unique needs.²⁴ Nietzsche, Habermas remarks, recognizes that the positivistic sciences’ dissolution of dogmas “produces not liberation, but indifference.”²⁵

Yet it might be more accurate to say that Nietzsche’s first response to this dilemma is to conceive positivist neutrality or indifference as liberation. Nietzsche’s attempt to find a silver lining in positivism stands somewhat at odds with his “official” position that the question of the value or utility of science is beyond the scope of legitimate philosophical discussion. Like all other natural phenomena, he argues, science is not designed for a purpose. In Human, All Too Human 38, Nietzsche draws an analogy between nature’s nonteleological achievement of perfect organic adaptations (i.e., the Darwinian perspective) and science’s accidental contribution to the welfare of the human species. Later, in Daybreak, Nietzsche concedes as a matter of principle that the natural history of metaphysics may have less utility or value for the species than the metaphysical speculations it supplants. In his postmetaphysical incarnation, he assumes that scientific inquiry, including his own history of morality, does not embody or express a teleological purpose or final end that necessarily conforms to the interests of human welfare. In other words, he believes that it is a matter of contingency whether or not his natural history of morality proves a blessing or a curse for the general welfare or individual happiness. Nietzsche expresses his point in the form of a rhetorical question: “(W)hat have [known truths] in common with the inner states of suffering, stunted, sick human beings that they must necessarily be of use to them?”²⁶ If we accept a Darwinian or nonteleological notion of nature, then we must accept that, like any random variation, scientific inquiry only produces things or outcomes that prove useful to humanity as a matter of pure contingency, not because it is informed or guided by any final purpose or telos.²⁷ Whether or not scientific discoveries serve human life is just as contingent as whether or not a particular plant has medicinal properties. In both cases, it is a matter of contingency, not design. While we might hope that science is only capable of producing salutary results, we could only justify this wish, so he argues, on the basis of a fundamental metaphysical “error”: viz., the teleological belief that humankind is the goal of nature.²⁸ Until recently, we may have expected and indeed received consolation from metaphysical errors, but we have no reasons for believing that scientific inquiry will deliver consolation or cure.

For this reason, Nietzsche holds that, strictly speaking, we should bracket the question of science’s value. Yet, although he wants to bracket this question, he also observes that science will require mitigation insofar as it is currently proving itself inimical to life. If we follow science in recognizing the “goallessness” of the species, he concedes in Human, All Too Human 33, “our philosophy” is in danger of becoming “tragedy.”²⁹ It is modern sciences’ destruction of all teleological accounts of the species’ evolution, he suggests, that makes the question of science’s value such a pressing issue.

What mitigates the tragedy of science’s assault on the teleological view of nature and the corresponding notion of objective values and purposes? Nietzsche claims that our distress and contempt for life might gradually wane once we relinquish the great passions that hinged on belief in objective judgments or values. Once these passions dissipate, he suggests, free spirits can become akin to stoics who take “joy” [Freude] in contemplating nature from a standpoint of evaluative indifference.³⁰ Nietzsche conceives this indifference as science’s positive aftereffect. Free spirits disinterestedly contemplate the spectacle of nature:

Under the influence of purifying knowledge one would live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praising, blaming, contending, gazing contentedly, as though at a spectacle.³¹

Since free spirits recognize that natural events are necessities not governed by any purpose, they also understand that it is meaningless to judge them as “successes” or “failures” or to offer “praise” or “blame.” Such judgments rest on belief in objective values, purposes, or intentions. Since science shows that the values we have projected or implanted in things are metaphysical illusions, free spirits, as long as they reside in truth, must content themselves with hovering above life. They are purified insofar as they are free of the tumultuous passions, particularly the so-called “moral” emotions that hitherto arose from such metaphysical illusions.

Clearly Nietzsche’s concern is not simply with natural science’s discoveries, or the application of its methods to moral and cultural phenomena, but also and crucially with how new scientific knowledge shapes or transforms agents. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche conceives knowledge as a mechanism that purifies individuals of their will or passions.³² Science, he maintains, purifies us of passions or value-feelings that were hitherto anchored in our beliefs in objective purposes and values and in doing so leaves us in a state of indifference. We discover that values do not have any objective existence even though our passions make it appear that the world contains such properties.³³ Liberated from these value errors, Nietzsche suggests, free spirits can observe nature without will or passion. We might say then that Nietzsche’s free spirits become “stoical” insofar as they live without making value-judgments. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche advocates what he will call “intellectual” stoicism. In a later autobiographical passage, Nietzsche uses this former concept to criticize the kind of contemplative indifference he had supported in Human, All Too Human:

Perhaps I am all too familiar with . . . that stoicism of the intellect that finally forbids itself a ‘no’ just as strictly as a ‘yes’; that wanting to halt before the factual, the factum brutum . . . that renunciation of all interpretation (of doing violence, pressing into orderly form, abridging, omitting, padding, fabricating, falsifying and whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpreting) . . . .³⁴

The grounds of Nietzsche’s postmetaphysical, positivistic indifference in Human, All Too Human are distinct from the grounds of what we might call cosmological Stoicism. The cosmological Stoic achieves ataraxia through both a rejection of the passions as false judgments and a cosmological view of the universe as embodied reason.³⁵ Nietzsche’s antiteleological conceptualization of nature, which in Human, All Too Human he tends to conceive in terms of a purposeless “squandering” of energy, runs contrary to the cosmological Stoicism’s conception of a providential universe. Science, Nietzsche averred in Human, All Too Human, does not support this ancient providential cosmology; if anything it supports a naturalized Schopenhauerian view of the cosmos as eternally repeating, purposeless chain of events.

Nietzsche later rejected the “stoicism of the intellect” that characterized his ethical stance in Human, All Too Human. Yet even in this text, he only half-heartedly celebrates intellectual stoicism. If positivism engenders a kind of contemplative neutrality, he implies, it is worth only “two cheers”: it may free the species of grand moral commitments and passions based on errors (e.g., guilt, sinfulness, remorse) and contribute to the amelioration of material existence, but it does not satisfy those metaphysical needs religion satisfied, particularly the need for belief that existence has a purpose or telos. That is to say, while the scientific assault on metaphysical beliefs and presuppositions liberates free spirits from the burdens of responsibility, guilt, and sin, its attack on teleological commitments also leaves them without grounds for the belief that individual or collective endeavors have a final end or purpose. Positivistic skepticism therefore generates a new sense of innocence (“irresponsibility”), but only by eliminating the metaphysical presuppositions that underpinned both moral passions and future oriented passions like “hope.” Without these teleological commitments, he claims, the free spirit must “pour mockery and contempt on the passions which reach out to the future and promise happiness in it.”³⁶

In this case, “a free, fearless hovering above men, customs, laws and traditional evaluations of things must suffice him as the condition he considers most desirable.”³⁷ While Nietzsche suggests that free spirits take “joy” in this view from above, he also concedes that the fact free spirits can communicate nothing more than this state of indifference counts as “one more privation and renunciation.”³⁸ Though he does not state it explicitly, presumably Nietzsche conceives their first privation as merely hovering above existence they believe is devoid of purpose or goal, rather than engaging passionately in events that they believe realize a higher purpose. “(A) man who lives only to know better” he remarks “must forgo almost everything upon which other men place value.”³⁹ Most notably, free spirits renounce those moral passions and judgments that turn on the belief that nature expresses or embodies a metaphysical purpose that conforms to human wishes for redemption from suffering at the end of time or history. Nietzsche implies that a passionate life is tied to a belief in objective moral values and final ends and that, measured against this life, the free spirit’s stoicism of the intellect must seem like a renunciation or living death. Nietzsche suggests that the free spirits’ second privation consists in having nothing more to communicate to others than their “joy in this condition” of passionless contemplation.⁴⁰ Their “glad tidings” are nothing more than a disengaged hovering above existence. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche’s joyful science is a curiously joyless affair.

In The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche returns to the issue of how to frame the scientific insight into nature’s purposelessness in a way that inspires or warrants joy. His first response is to use the ancient model of the “view from above” as a device for cognitively reframing nature. This philosophical “elevation” dramatically transforms the reception of nature as a nonteleological chain of events that cause humanity “purposeless” suffering. Nietzsche conceives it as an exercise that makes it possible for free spirits to take pleasure in mocking humanity and liberate themselves from taking its sorrows and sufferings seriously. It is an antidote to a certain form of compassion. He shows how a certain kind of philosophical joy might derive from ascending to a higher perspective.

We can see this move in The Wanderer and his Shadow 14 “Man, the comedian of the world.” Here he conceives the view from above as an exercise that makes human suffering a source of amusement or comedy. It enables the philosopher to laugh at humanity’s grandiose belief that it is the telos of existence:

Let us hope there really are more spiritual beings than men are, so that all the humour shall not go to waste that lies in the fact that man regards himself as the goal and purpose of the existence of the whole universe and that mankind will not seriously rest satisfied with itself as anything less than the accomplisher of a universal mission.⁴¹

Nietzsche uses the view from above to deflate the seriousness that accompanies the metaphysical belief shared by Kantian and post-Kantian philosophers that humanity is the goal or “meaning of creation . . . the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history! – Vanitas vanitatum homo!”⁴² Nietzsche explains the teleological conception of nature as a symptom of vanity or “cosmic narcissism”: humans believe in their species’ metaphysical import in order to avoid the pain of recognizing the cosmic insignificance of existence. As Nietzsche succinctly puts it later: “What truly enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering.”⁴³ Teleological conceptions of nature serve to justify or give meaning to the “evil” of suffering. Nietzsche claims that humanity “would never have come into existence” without metaphysical errors: for example, the error of freedom of the will and the error that it is the goal or purpose of creation.⁴⁴ The fundamental human feeling, he suggests, remains “metaphysical” or a feeling based on the belief that humanity has a metaphysical significance or purpose.

Once we bracket the Kantian and Hegelian metaphysical “conceit,” he claims, we must recognize that the human species history is no more significant than the history of any other species. From the point of view of Nietzsche’s postmetaphysical, nonteleological conception of nature, the Kantian and Hegelian notion of humanity’s metaphysical telos is analogous to “the ant in the forest” imagining that “it is the goal and objective of the forest.”⁴⁵ However, thanks to Kantian and Hegelian metaphysicians, Nietzsche suggests, humanity now suffers from cosmic narcissism: the erroneous belief that its realization or completion is the ultimate goal of the whole universe.⁴⁶ Any challenge to this metaphysical teleology therefore comes at the price of wounded narcissism and undermines what has hitherto been the basis of humanity’s fundamental feeling. Humanity imagines that its destruction would also mean the end of the universe.⁴⁷

Nietzsche uses a cosmic (or astronomical) perspective to imply that biological life itself is a contingent eruption devoid of any metaphysical import. From this cosmic perspective, the destruction of biological life or humankind has no significance; nothing special or unique is lost. The genesis and demise of biological “life” is merely one natural process among others, despite humanity’s vain belief that it is the ultimate objective or purpose of existence. Nietzsche then imagines a hypothetical creation story:

If a god created the world then he created men as the apes of god, so as always to have on hand something to cheer him up in his all too protracted eternities. The music of the spheres encompassing the earth would then no doubt be the mocking laughter of the all other creatures encompassing man. That bored immortal tickles his favourite animal with pain, so as to take pleasure in the proud and tragic way this vainest of all creatures displays and interprets his sufferings and in his spiritual inventiveness in general – as the inventor of this inventor.⁴⁸

What would amuse such a god about his favorite animal is the vanity and pride of this insignificant creature interpreting its sufferings as if they carried the most profound cosmic or metaphysical significance. Nietzsche replaces the harmonious music of the spheres with mocking laughter at humanity’s absurd vanity. This god-like perspective humiliates humanity. From this “Olympian” view, humanity’s metaphysical self-delusion is risible: humanity takes its redemption from suffering as the final purpose or goal of existence when its suffering is merely a means for a god’s amusement.⁴⁹

Yet as Bernard Williams observes, the mere idea that the species’ suffering is an amusing spectacle for the gods cannot alone serve to make these sufferings bearable for individuals. On the contrary, the idea that the gods amuse themselves by tickling the species with pain might serve to justify ontological ressentiment.⁵⁰ What joy could there be in recognizing oneself as the plaything of a malevolent god who delights in one’s suffering (Schadenfreude)? One possibility here is that human actors and sufferers identify themselves with these gods. This is what Nietzsche proposes in The Wanderer and his Shadow when he hopes that there are more spiritual beings than men who can enjoy the comic spectacle of human suffering in the manner of the gods who view them from the heights of Olympus.

Daybreak: Free Spirit as Olympian or Sage

In Daybreak, the “view from above” is central to Nietzsche’s account of the new “dawn” that he hopes will bring to a close the species’ metaphysical “night.” We can see this in two important claims he makes in this text. Nietzsche claims that science is motivated by the “exaltation” or “elevation” that free spirits derive from sacrificing humanity on the altar of knowledge. Knowledge, he asserts, is a prize that justifies this sacrifice. In this sense, he believes that the passion for knowledge entails an Olympian attitude toward humanity: free-spirited philosophers delight in the suffering they cause by pursuing their passion for knowledge. Second, Nietzsche praises their intellectual courage to assume the sage’s view from above and see nature without metaphysical and moral illusions. In this context, he explicitly draws on the ancient sage’s “view from above” as a “spiritual exercise” or cognitive device for reframing nature as an object that elicits and warrants “joy.” By adopting the sage’s view from above, he suggests, they take a “generous” view of nature, affirming it as a whole rather than morally condemning it on the basis of the sufferings of its parts.

In Daybreak, then Nietzsche attempts to resolve the tension between truth and life. This resolution takes the following form: science or truth might prove fatal for those whose ethical and existential orientation is anchored in metaphysical convictions and hopes, but free spirits can make the pursuit of truth a passion that elevates them above distress so that they can enjoy nature as a spectacle. In other words, he recognizes science as a fatality for those wedded to metaphysical errors and illusions (e.g., teleology), but as the pathway to reclaiming joy in the spectacle of nature for the free spirit.⁵¹ Yet clearly Nietzsche cannot derive this philosophical joy in nature simply from identifying or reporting new scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Science alone cannot transform the naturalist’s emotional or affective orientation toward life. In Human, All Too Human, as we have seen, Nietzsche claims that the postmetaphysical, “disenchanted” view of nature might liberate free spirits from the burden of the prospective passions of desire and fear. However, this salutary transformation, he observes, hinges on a person’s “temperament.”⁵²

In Daybreak, he now emends and develops his account of science and its relationship to philosophical passions. Nietzsche emends this claim by suggesting that science not only liberates free spirits from certain passions, but also that it satisfies certain kinds of passions, particularly a certain kind of joy or delight. Nietzsche develops this account by showing more clearly how science or “physics” only facilitates this transformation if it is mediated by certain kinds of spiritual exercises. It is not merely free spirits’ temperament that determines the impact of science on their emotional order, but also these exercises. In Daybreak, Nietzsche implies that an Olympian or sage-like “view from above” is required to take joy in nature.

Here his conception of this “view from above” wavers between Stoicism’s untroubled, serene spectatorship based on the judgment that nature’s “cruelty” is a necessary or fated part of the whole, and the Olympian view of suffering as a delightful, entertaining spectacle. From the heights of Olympus, the gods enjoy the spectacle of human strife and suffering; from their cosmic view from above, Stoics conceive nature as a rational whole that justifies its parts. Olympian gods maliciously yet serenely enjoy the tragic drama of human existence from the vantage point of immunity granted by their immortality; Stoics enjoy the universe’s perfect lawfulness by identifying themselves with nature as a whole. We can distinguish these two “views from above” in terms of different types of laughter. We might call Stoic laughter “euthumi” and Olympian laughter Schadenfreude.⁵³ The former expresses Stoics’ peace of mind and cheerfulness based on a view from above that generates a rationalist cosmology; the latter expresses an Olympian delight in the spectacle of human striving and conflict. The Olympian gods are emotionally absorbed in the agonistic drama of human agon hence their fluctuating affections for their mortal heroes and favorites. Yet, as Halliwell suggests, the Olympians can maintain their delight in this spectacle because they are immune from its terrible consequences and they alone have the option of divine withdrawal and detachment.⁵⁴ Though he never self-consciously distinguishes these two strands, and indeed they often intersect or overlap in his middle works, for the sake of clarity we can distinguish his usage of these two “exercises.”⁵⁵ As we shall see, these two variations of the ancient trope of the view from above, the Olympian and Stoic are woven into the fabric of Nietzsche’s philosophical “naturalism.”

In Daybreak, Nietzsche revises the ground of his commitment to naturalism or science. In Human All Too Human, as we have seen, he suggests that through their scientific drive free spirits unintentionally cause those wedded to metaphysical illusions to suffer nihilistic despair. By contrast, in Daybreak, he identifies the free spirit’s enjoyment of the suffering they create for others as one important motive fuelling their pursuit of science. Nietzsche suggests that science not only purifies free spirits of fear and desire, but also that it is motivated or inspired by a certain type of passion. Science, Nietzsche claims, “sublimates” the ancient gods’ delight in the spectacle of suffering.

In Daybreak 45, he suggests exaltation in human sacrifice has been humanity’s highest and most powerful ideal. Nietzsche posits this divine cruelty as a potential motive force of science. Nietzsche speculates that the ancient moral exaltation in sacrifice, which he traces to early Sittichlichkeit communities and their religious “imaginary,” might be harnessed to a new end: the pursuit of knowledge.⁵⁶ He believes that free spirits might now sublimate or transfigure the exaltation the gods derived from the spectacle of human sacrifice; it might become the motive driving their commitment to knowledge at any price.⁵⁷ Nietzsche countenances the view that it might be “worth” sacrificing humanity to satisfy this passion for knowledge:

If ever the constellation of [a self-sacrificing mankind] appears above the horizon, the knowledge of truth would remain as the one tremendous goal commensurate with such sacrifice, because for this goal no sacrifice is too great.⁵⁸

From the free spirit’s god-like perspective, knowledge of truth trumps all other values, including life itself. Science, he acknowledges, may have a “tragic ending”—the species’ extinction—but this is of no matter, or more precisely this is the best outcome for those who like Olympian gods are exalted by this spectacle. Free spirits tie the knot between knowledge and sacrifice. We might identify their motto as “Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus.”⁵⁹ They sacrifice humanity to satisfy their passion for knowledge:

Perhaps mankind will even perish of this passion for knowledge! – even this thought has no power over us! But did Christianity ever shun such a thought? . . . (If) mankind does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for mankind an end in fire and light or one in the sand?⁶⁰

Nietzsche’s free spirits are intoxicated by knowledge as a fatal passion:

Indeed we are perishing from this passion for knowledge! But that is no argument against it. Otherwise death would be an argument against the life of the individual. We must perish as individuals and as humanity!⁶¹

Nietzsche constructs an apparently tragic dilemma for humanity: whether it chooses the path of passion or weakness, it risks annihilation; it is simply a question of whether we want it to go out with a “bang” or a “whimper.”⁶² We might compare Nietzsche’s account of the free spirit’s sacrificial passion for knowledge in Daybreak to Kierkegaard’s famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.”⁶³ Nietzsche logic of cruelty inverts Kierkegaard’s logic of sacrifice. Kierkegaard’s Abraham suspends the ethical in obedience to a higher, divine commandment; he sacrifices his son for the sake of a higher moral duty: unconditional piety or fidelity. Nietzsche, by contrast, imagines his free spirits in the position of gods who demand that mortals sacrifice themselves for their pleasure. Kierkegaard depicts mortal creatures sacrificing themselves (or their own) for the sake of fidelity to God. Nietzsche pictures free spirits as gods sacrificing mortals for the sake of their own elevation or exaltation. Nietzsche’s free spirits are analogous to Olympian gods enjoying the spectacle of suffering, not to Christian moralists sacrificing themselves for God. In this sense, Nietzsche conceives sacrifice as a mechanism through which free spirits can participate in the joys of immortal, god-like creatures. He conceives knowledge and the intellect as motivated by “evil” drives, that is, drives that find satisfaction in witnessing or causing harm.⁶⁴ Science, he implies, is a “sublimation” of the ancient gods’ delight in the spectacle of mortal suffering. In short, science is a sublimation of archaic cruelty. ⁶⁵

Nietzsche believes we are mistaken to think that “the evil drives of humanity” play no part in science.⁶⁶ The evil drives, he claims, play an important role in motivating the pursuit of knowledge. “To think otherwise than is customary” he observes “is . . . the effect of . . . strong, evil inclinations: detaching, isolating, defiant, gloating (schadenfroher), and malicious (hämischer) inclinations.”⁶⁷ Their pursuit of knowledge is an effort to satisfy this Schadenfreude. However, we need to carefully distinguish between Nietzsche’s diagnosis and his evaluation of science’s motives and effects. He identifies evil inclinations like Schadenfreude and malice as among the causes of science; anyone who breaks with custom and opinion, in the manner of heretics and free spirits, is motivated by such drives. When Nietzsche evaluates this circumstance he is acutely aware of the potential damage free spirits cause others in satisfying their “evil” drives. Yet, ultimately, he judges that this malice and the damage it causes is a tragic necessity of greatness.

In Daybreak 562, for example, Nietzsche suggests that free spirits produce tragedies—they break the hearts of those who love them best by breaking with their opinions. He suggests that free spirits must assuage the grief they cause their loved ones by deserting or rejecting shared opinions (Meinungen). Here, in one of his most tender meditations, he stresses that free spirits need to make reparations to their loved ones for inflicting on them this unwanted, undeserved suffering. Nietzsche uses Odysseus’ trip to Hades or his down-going (“untergehen”) to illustrate this reparative impulse.⁶⁸ By using this Odyssey allusion, Nietzsche also implies that he thinks it is impossible for free spirits to undo or heal the sorrow they cause through the pursuit of knowledge. In the relevant passage, Odyssey meets the shade of his mother who tells him that she died of grief and longing for him while he was away at war. Three times Odysseus attempts to embrace her, but he discovers that like all shades she is incorporeal and his arms simply pass through her body. Tragically, Nietzsche implies, the free spirit’s pursuit of knowledge irreparably damages those nearest to him or her.

Nietzsche claims that the harm free spirits cause others is a tragic necessity. It is a necessity not in the sense that the harm is unforseeable or unavoidable, but in the sense that it is a condition of their existence. For Nietzsche, inflicting harm is a necessary condition of greatness. In GS 28, Nietzsche identifies greatness with hard-heartedness, or more literally an absence of charity (Unbarmherzigkeit).⁶⁹ Great individuals pay no heed to cries for compassion. “At times,” he writes, “our strengths propel us so far ahead that we can no longer stand our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome and still have it no other way. Thus we become hard against that within us that wants to be spared; and our greatness is also our mercilessness [or heartlessness].”⁷⁰ Greatness entails acting without regard for one’s own preservation. Great individuals spare themselves nothing. Compassion, mercy, charity—all, so he claims, stands in the way of their greatness.

Nietzsche characterizes GS 28 as “a parable for the whole effect of great human beings on others and on their age: precisely with what is best in them, with what only they can do, they destroy many who are weak, insecure, in the process of becoming, of willing, and thus they are harmful.” In GS 325, Nietzsche makes it clear that he thinks individuals can only attain greatness by inflicting great pain on others and resisting the temptations of compassion:

What belongs to greatness – Who will attain something great if he does not feel in himself the power to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least; weak women and even slaves often achieve mastery at that. But not to perish of inner distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering that is great; that belongs to greatness.⁷¹

How do great individuals and free spirits overcome their compassionate distress for those they harm? Nietzsche identifies the Olympian gods enjoyment of human tragedy as the alternative to compassion, the primary moral prejudice he aims to eliminate as the species’ guiding morality. Nietzsche sees Olympian spectatorship as one way great individuals overcome their distress over the general purposelessness of existence, especially the purposelessness of suffering, and their distress over inflicting suffering on others. In Daybreak 144, he contrasts two responses to others’ misfortune and suffering: suffering with them (Mitleid), and the “art of the Olympians.” We can only aid or comfort these sufferers, he suggests, if we have learned this art and henceforth “edified” (erbauten) ourselves by their misfortunes instead of being made unhappy by them. What does Nietzsche mean by “edified” in this context? What would it mean in his terms to be edified by the spectacle of others’ suffering? We might assume that Nietzsche identifies edification with acquiring knowledge that might be useful in helping to respond to or treat this suffering.

However, in D 144, Nietzsche does not connect being edified by others’ misfortune with therapeutic knowledge. Consider the sentence that immediately follows on and elaborates his suggestion that we learn to edify ourselves by others’ misfortune: “But that is somewhat too Olympian even for us: even though we have, with our enjoyment of tragedy, already taken a step in the direction of this ideal divine cannibalism.”⁷² Here Nietzsche spells out the nature of this “edification” as enjoyment or pleasure in the tragic hero’s misfortune, through which, he suggests, “we” have moved toward a form of “ideal divine cannibalism.” In this closing sentence of D 144, Nietzsche is decidedly not suggesting that we should learn more about others’ suffering for the sake of curing it or helping them overcome it. Rather, he suggests that we learn how to feed off it for our own pleasure or enjoyment. Nietzsche’s analogy makes this clear: spectators should be to those they see suffering as cannibals are to their human sacrifices. They feast on others’ suffering. That Nietzsche thinks that this may be beyond “us” now, or be too Olympian for “us,” in no way implies he eschews this as a positive response. On the contrary, he identifies his “spectatorial” cannibalism as both “ideal” and “divine.”

Of course, this Olympian perspective is not the only response to suffering Nietzsche canvasses in D (or elsewhere). However, as we shall see, he clearly takes this as the philosophical free spirit’s best or ideal direction. Elsewhere in D and even more clearly in unpublished drafts, Nietzsche identifies a very different alternative to the morality of compassion: not god-like gloating over human suffering, but practical effective care. In these notes, Nietzsche objects to compassion/Mitleid not in the name of this higher Olympian delight, but in the name of a more effective treatment of suffering. Glossing Kant’s “Doctrine of Virtue” in section 34 of the Metaphysics of Morals, Nietzsche claims that “real pity [Mitleid] actually only doubles the suffering [Leid].”⁷³ To this utilitarian criticism of pity, understood as a contagious sharing of suffering, he adds the following observation: “[pity/Mitleid] is perhaps itself the source of the inability to help.”⁷⁴

Nietzsche’s point is acute. Contemporary empirical psychologists claim that in sharing in others’ suffering, we are unable to effectively help them because we need to attend to our own suffering.⁷⁵ Indeed, Nietzsche observes that not only do we inhibit our capacity for helping others by sharing their suffering, we may also reinforce their suffering by mirroring it back to them: “If we let ourselves be made gloomy by the lamentation and suffering of other mortals, and cover our own sky with clouds, who is it who will have to bear the consequences of this gloom? These other mortals, of course . . . .”⁷⁶ Nietzsche recognizes that emotional contagion can engender a negative mimetic feedback loop. In the unpublished notes, he offers an alternative to emotional contagion: “only when one knows about [suffering], but does not suffer, can one act for the sake of the other, as a doctor.”⁷⁷ Nietzsche’s unpublished reflections therefore offer a promising theory of practical compassion, which hinges on knowing that and how others suffer, rather than on sharing their suffering.

However, Nietzsche himself values the Olympian view from above as the highest or “ideal” response to mortal suffering. Compared with this Olympian view, he suggests, compassion can only make matters worse for both the sympathizer and the sufferer.⁷⁸ We can aid and comfort sufferers, he suggests, not by echoing their lamentations, but only by learning the Olympian art of delighting in human misfortune. Nietzsche thinks we somehow help our fellows by ascending to these Olympian heights. Presumably he means that, since taking the Olympian view is the only worthwhile response to human suffering, we can aid others by exemplifying this god-like enjoyment of human misfortune. We show them how they too might ascend above humanity. Nietzsche unequivocally values the Olympian view from above as the highest or “ideal” response to mortal suffering. The Nietzschean physician counsels us to ascend to Olympus in order to extirpate ordinary, mortal emotional responses to misfortune: fear, distress, pity, and so on.

Nietzsche’s later explicit evaluation of Olympian spectatorship as the “highest” philosophical perspective underscores this point. In BGE, Nietzsche identifies the highest ranked philosophers as those who can assume the Olympian view of humanity as an object of amusement or Schadenfreude.⁷⁹ Like the Olympians, they enjoy mockery and they cannot contain their laughter even during the holy rites of mortals. They laugh at the “expense of all serious things.”⁸⁰ Nietzsche underlines the fact that the “golden laughter” of those he dubs the highest-ranked philosophers derives from their mockery of others. He does so by identifying their laughter with the type of laughter Hobbes proscribed. Hobbes conceived laughter as a type of pusillanimous vainglory. Laughter, he claimed, is the expression of the feeling of superiority we derive from comparing ourselves against others’ imperfections and deformities.⁸¹ Nietzsche rehabilitates the Olympians’ mocking, vain, and superior laughter at the defects of mortals as the model of philosophical wisdom:

The Olympian vice. – In despite of that philosopher who, being a real Englishman, tried to bring laughter into ill-repute among all thinking men – ‘laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome’ (Hobbes) – I should actually risk an order of rank among philosophers depending on the rank of their laughter – all the way up to those capable of golden laughter. And supposing that gods, too, philosophize, which has been suggested to me by many an inference – I should not doubt that they also know how to laugh the while in a superhuman and new way – and at the expense of all serious things. Gods enjoy mockery: it seems they cannot suppress laughter even during holy rites.⁸²

Nietzsche’s highest-ranked philosophers (or joyful scientists) derive their superiority from their god-like philosophical perspective and its mocking laughter.⁸³ Ultimately, then, Nietzsche privileges the Olympian view from above as the ideal response to mortal suffering. It enables free spirits to enjoy the spectacle of human tragedy, and it prevents them from succumbing to the great distress they feel when they inflict suffering on others. Nietzsche’s free spirits cannot afford to sympathize with human suffering; they must rise above it and enjoy it. That Nietzsche advocates this Olympian vice is a measure of just how strongly he felt the temptation of compassion. Though he suggests that free spirits must inflict suffering on others for the sake of their own greatness, he also recognizes that they risk perishing by resisting their own “inner distress” at causing others “great suffering.” According to Nietzsche, greatness requires inflicting suffering and overcoming compassion for the victims.

In Daybreak, however, Nietzsche oscillates between this Olympian “view from above” and its Schadenfreude and the Stoic/sage-like “view from above” and its euthumi. In some passages, Nietzsche explicitly draws attention to his dependence on the classical and Stoic conception of the relationship between knowledge, the self and its evaluative and affective orientation toward existence. In Daybreak 450, Nietzsche suggests that the allure of knowledge for passionate spirits is precisely as a Stoic exercise in freeing oneself from a partial or “egocentric” perspective on nature:

Does it not thrill through all your senses – this sound of sweet allurement with which science has proclaimed its glad tidings, in a hundred phrases and in the hundred and first and fairest: ‘Let delusion vanish! Then “woe is me!” will vanish too; and with “woe is me!” woe itself will be gone’. (Marcus Aurelius)⁸⁴

Here Nietzsche first connects the scientific elimination of delusion (den Wahn) with the purging of individuals’ unhappiness about their own condition (woe is me!). From this, Stoic perspective individuals lament their own fate (“woe is me!”) only because they suffer from delusions about nature or their place within the cosmos. These delusions must be such that they justify and inflame grievances regarding their own individual fate. Science, Nietzsche maintains, seduces passionate individuals with the promise that it will eliminate the grounds not simply of their own personal discontent, but all sources of distress and lamentation. To this extent, it seems to promise a new happiness or joy. The Stoic sage, we might recall, has his own kind of good emotions (eupatheia), which includes joy (chara). In antiquity, materialist philosophies and cosmologies were tightly connected with good emotions. The Stoic sage, for example, had his own kind of good pathos including “well reasoned elevation” or joy, and cheerful spirit (euthumia), which derives from the joy the sage takes in the universe’s self-sufficiency.⁸⁵ Physics or science redeems its promise by eliminating the egocentric view of nature that fails to see how every event is a necessary part of the whole. That it is to say, science rejects the egocentric view that evaluates nature in terms of its satisfaction of individuals’ prudential concerns.

Nietzsche’s identification of this perspective with Marcus Aurelius makes it clear that he thinks Stoicism exemplifies how science informs or shapes one’s ethical and affective comportment. Nietzsche sees Stoic philosophy as an example of how individuals can accede to the truth about nature in a way that extirpates painful, disturbing “passions,” or more specifically, eliminates the need to lament their individual fate. For the Stoics, science or physics is a spiritual exercise, which consists in looking down at things from above, including oneself, or from the point of view of nature as a whole. Referring to Seneca’s Natural Questions, Hadot notes that the “soul of the philosopher, looking down from the heights of the heavens, becomes aware of the puniness of the earth, and the ridiculousness of the wars fought by human armies . . . over miniscule stretches of territory.”⁸⁶ In Stoic philosophy, physics is an exercise that enables philosophers to see human matters in their true dimensions; the view from above, for example, makes it possible for them to “see” the insignificance of individual cares and in doing so it eliminates the passions that disturb their serenity. “The goal of physics as a spiritual exercise” Hadot writes “was to relocate human existence within the infinity of time and space, and the perspective of the great laws of nature.”⁸⁷ Marcus Aurelius exemplifies this philosophical exercise: “When you are reasoning about mankind, look upon earthly things below as if from some vantage point above them.”⁸⁸

Once we see things independently of this ego-standpoint, as Marcus Aurelius exhorts, it becomes possible to make different esthetic and moral evaluations of nature and the cosmos. From the point of view of nature, a view the Stoic philosophers identify as seeing things from above, egoistic cares are correctly identified as matters of indifference. Physics is an exercise that corrects mistaken evaluations. In Stoic philosophy, therefore, the importance of physics lies in its effect on the soul’s emotional order. It frees the Stoic from pathological disorders. Hadot suggests that the ancient philosophers, particularly the Roman Stoics, practiced “physics” as a spiritual exercise that transformed their value-judgment of the world. Marcus Aurelius, he observes, claimed that all the phenomena we judge to be repugnant or ugly are in fact intimately linked to the processes, course, and development of the world, which in turn can be traced back to universal Reason.⁸⁹ “If one possesses experience and a thorough knowledge of the workings of the universe,” Aurelius writes, “there will be scarcely a single one of those phenomena which accompany natural processes as a consequence which will not appear to him, under some aspect at least, as pleasant. Such a person will derive no less pleasure from contemplating the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts than he does from all the imitations, which painters and sculptors provide thereof . . . it is not just anyone who can derive pleasure from [such phenomena]. Rather, only that person who has become truly familiar with Nature and her works will do so.”⁹⁰

In Daybreak 551, Nietzsche explicitly turns to ancient philosophers to identify what he calls “future virtues.” Ancient philosophy, he suggests, establishes the exemplary model for these virtues. To cultivate these virtues, he implies, free spirits must reclaim the ancient philosophers’ practice of natural knowledge or physics as a spiritual exercise. Nietzsche rehabilitates the sage’s view from above as the key to a certain “generous” or “magnanimous” ethical disposition towards nature:

Perhaps there will come a time when . . . courage in thinking will have grown so great that, as the supreme form of arrogance it will feel itself above man and things - when the sage will as the most courageous man, also be the man who sees himself and existence farthest beneath him – This species of courage, which is not far from being an extravagant generosity, has hitherto been lacking in mankind.⁹¹

Nietzsche associates this courage in thinking with seeing things from a great height, one of the standard tropes of ancient philosophy. It is the ancient sage who takes this god-like, empyrean view of temporal, worldly affairs. Nietzsche speculates that our future virtues may in some sense reprise the ancient sage’s virtues. Nietzsche obviously and self-consciously borrows the “view from above” from the ancient philosophical tradition. He highlights the fact that he is recycling the classical philosophical tradition and its spiritual exercises by explicitly associating the view from above with the classical/Hellenistic figure of the sage (der Weise). In ancient philosophy, of course, the sage represents the fulfillment of the philosophical way of life. Nietzsche claims that the effects of modern science may prove to be similar to those that classical and Hellenistic philosophers sought to realize through ancient “physics”: viz., the greatness of soul that remains unmoved or untroubled by existence. Just as classical philosophers understood “physics” as a spiritual exercise intended to bring about greatness of soul that assents to the world, so too Nietzsche believes science might have a similar outcome: an extravagant generosity.

In Daybreak 551, Nietzsche highlights the view from above as fundamental to his joyful science; it is the “view from above” that he hopes might engender an extravagant generosity toward the world. Nietzsche had earlier suggested that “miserliness” is one of the primary dangers of the postmetaphysical condition. We have discovered, he maintains, that our evaluative and esthetic predicates (good, beautiful sublime, evil) are projections of our soul, not intrinsic features of the world. For this reason, he suggests, we are tempted to retract all these predicates on the grounds that they do not properly belong to objects. Nothing is good, beautiful, sublime or evil in itself. “Let us take care” he warns “that this insight does not deprive us of the capacity to lend, and that we have not become at the same time richer and greedier.”⁹² How is it possible to recover this capacity to give away these predicates; and on what basis might we distribute them once we no longer conceive them as intrinsic attributes of objects but as projections of states of our soul? Or, as he frames it in Daybreak 551, how is it possible for abject, fearful dependents to become gift-bestowing sovereigns? It is precisely this issue of learning how to apply the predicate “beautiful” to that which is necessary that Nietzsche places at the heart of the doctrine of amor fati.⁹³ Nietzsche identifies the sage’s “view from above” as the lynchpin of this conversion. It is by seeing nature as a whole that free spirits establish grounds for a positive or “generous” evaluation of natural phenomena.

Nietzsche’s use of this figure of the sage’s view from above is central to his concept of a joyful science and its doctrine of amor fati. Hadot notes how Nietzsche anchors his doctrine of amor fati in a version of the classical view from above: “that is the soul’s flight above all things, in the immensity of the universe.”⁹⁴ In order to grasp the meaning of Nietzsche’s Latin motto, therefore, we need to understand how he transposes this ancient model of philosophy into the late-nineteenth-century philosophical context and its naturalistic doctrines. Hadot identifies a remarkable similarity between the Stoicism’s love of fate and Nietzsche’s doctrine of amor fati.⁹⁵ As Hadot conceives it, the aim of Stoicism’s spiritual exercises or discipline of desire is to make it possible for individuals to lovingly consent to the will of the Whole. In many ways, he argues, Nietzsche’s Latin phrase “amor fati” coincides with the aim of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus encapsulated the objective of the Stoic discipline of desire in his famous apothegm: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”⁹⁶ Hadot claims that the Stoic consent to fate required individuals to identify with the Whole or universal reason, and to that extent it entailed that they transcend their own individuality. “If then the self’s awareness is accompanied by a consent to events” he writes “it is opened up to the whole of cosmic becoming, to the extent that the self elevates itself from its limited situation and partial, restricted individual viewpoint, toward a universal perspective.”⁹⁷ It is because the Stoic love of fate hinges on this “cosmic consciousness,” as he calls it, that the discipline of desire corresponds to the physical part of philosophy. Stoic physics is a spiritual exercise through which individuals elevate themselves to the view of the Whole and the self qua will or liberty coincides with the will of universal reason, or logos, which extends throughout all things. Through physics as a spiritual exercise “the self as guiding principle coincides with the guiding principle of the universe.”⁹⁸

Now, as we have seen, Hadot notes that the “view from above” is also an integral feature of Nietzsche’s doctrine of amor fati. According to Hadot, Nietzsche shares with Stoicism the conception of philosophy as an art of living, the aim of which is to consent to all events, and he deploys the very same type of spiritual exercise, viz., the so-called view from above. It is a sage-like view from above that Nietzsche later conceives as the basis of his doctrine of amor fati. The view from above is the enthymeme in Nietzsche’s first statement of this doctrine.⁹⁹ Nietzsche makes this premise explicit in Nietzsche contra Wagner:

Everything which is necessary when seen from above and from the point of view of the vast economy of the whole, is in itself equally useful. We must not only put up with it, but love it. Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.¹⁰⁰

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how Nietzsche’s positivist commitments in the middle period challenge his classical commitment to philosophy as a way of life. Truth and flourishing, he concedes, are not necessarily compatible. It demonstrates that in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche attempts to resolve this dilemma by conceiving positivism’s evaluative neutrality as itself directly contributing to human flourishing insofar as it liberates free spirits from painful moral passions. Positivism might disenchant the world, but it also liberates free spirits to enjoy the spectacle of nature free from the tumult of the passions. Without metaphysical morality darkening the skies above nature, free spirits can enjoy the innocence of nature. However, in The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche acknowledges that free spirits can only delight in contemplating nature, if they can take pleasure in the purposeless suffering it inflicts on humanity. Nietzsche deploys the ancient trope of the Olympian view from above as a means of cognitively reframing nature. Taking the view from above, he implies, might make it possible for free spirits to emulate the Olympians and take delight in nature’s tragic spectacle.

In Daybreak, Nietzsche oscillates between a quasi-Stoic and Olympian view from above. In his Olympian moment, he identifies the god’s enjoyment of tragedy as one way great individuals can overcome their distress over the general purposelessness of existence, especially the purposelessness of suffering, and their distress over inflicting suffering on others. In the later parts of Daybreak, Nietzsche draws explicitly on the Hellenistic model of philosophy, the image of the sage, and the spiritual exercise of the view from above. He draws on this Hellenistic exercise to explore how free spirits might incorporate the insights of the new nonteleological, evolutionary conception of nature. Nietzsche identifies the Olympian “view from above” as a framing device enabling free spirits to delight in the spectacle of nature and the Stoic “view from above” as a device that makes it possible to affirm nature as a whole.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Keith Ansell-Pearson, Eli Friedland, Bill MacDonald, Matthew Sharpe, Gudrun von Tevenar, and especially Michael Janover for their generosity in providing critical comments on drafts of this chapter.

2 See, for example, Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

3 See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume III, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper, 1991), pp. 3947. See Claire Richter, Nietzsche et les théorie biologiques contemperaines (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911).

4 See John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Dirk Johnson, Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Cf. Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

5 See, for example, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Malden: Blackwell, 1995), p. 272; Horst Hutter, Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Michael Ure, Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2008); and Julian Young Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 277–85.

6 KSA 1881 15[159].

7 Julian Young, Nietzsche, p. 278.

8 Halliwell shows that the idea of surveying life from above became embedded in Greek cultural consciousness as a result of the picture of the Olympian gods who view human existence from a certain distance as a kind of spectacle for their own interest and consumption. The Olympian view was then taken up by Greek philosophy and incorporated into its notion of the human mind’s own capacity for comprehensive contemplation or “theoria” (literally viewing). Greek philosophy converted the Olympian’s external spectatorship into the spectatorship that takes place inside the philosopher’s soul and places it cognitively “above the world.” See Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 337.

9 Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 118–22, 128–31.

10 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 209.

11 Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 39.

12 See Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 37–40.

13 HH 517.

14 HH 34.

15 Ibid.

16 E.g. D 52.

17 HH 7; see also HH 30. Nietzsche reiterates this point in later notes, see, for example, WP 442; KSA 1888 14[141]. Nietzsche shared his contemporaries’ concerns about the epistemic dangers of the ancient model of philosophy. See Friedrich Albert Lange, History of Materialism and Criticisms of its Present Importance (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1892), p. 103; and pp. 95–6.

18 HH 34.

19 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 292.

20 D 10.

21 HH 34.

22 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 293.

23 Ibid.

24 GS 1.

25 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 292.

26 D 424.

27 See also the following unpublished 1880 note: “The passion for knowledge sees itself as the purpose of existence - if it denies purposes, it sees itself as the most valuable result of all accidents. Will it deny the value?” KSA 9, 11 [69].

28 D 424.

29 HH 33.

30 HH 34.

31 Ibid.

32 See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), pp. 638–9.

33 On Nietzsche’s “error theory” of morality in the middle period, see Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick, ‘Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: the Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics,’ in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 192–226, pp. 198–201.

34 GM III.24.

35 Adam Smith draws a similar distinction within Stoicism, see, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), VII. ii, 36–7.

36 HH 34.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 WS 14.

42 WS 12.

43 See GM 2.7.

44 WS 12.

45 WS 14.

46 See also D 37.

47 WS 14

48 Ibid.

49 I use scare quotes around the word “Olympian” here to indicate that Nietzsche significantly modifies the Homeric concept of divine laughter. According to Halliwell, the Olympian gods never laugh at the absurdity or vanity of human existence as such nor does human suffering cause divine laughter. “Nietzsche” as he explains “uses Homeric laughter to echo the ultimate insignificance of reality [HH 16], but such existential laughter is never actually sounded, by gods or men, in Homer.” See Halliwell, Greek Laughter, p. 59, fn 20, and p. 367. Hereafter, I use the term Olympian in this Nietzschean sense.

50 Bernard Williams, The Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 331–7, p. 333.

51 See also D 562.

52 HH 34.

53 I borrow this distinction from Halliwell, Greek Laughter, pp. 353–71.

54 Halliwell, Greek Laughter, p. 59.

55 Halliwell notes that Nietzsche is sometimes an advocate of a laughter of “existential absurdity,” but also of “euthumic” cheerfulness. Haliwell, Greek Laughter, p. 367. See also Jessica Berry, ‘Nietzsche and Democritus: The Origin of Ethical Eudaimonism,’ in Paul Bishop (ed.), Nietzsche and Antiquity (Rochester: Camden House 2004), pp. 98–113.

56 D 18.

57 In conceiving of scientific inquiry as potentially motivated by god-like joy, Nietzsche deliberately recalls his earlier discussion at Daybreak 18 of the Sittlichkeit gods who “are amused and put into good humour by our suffering.” In this religious “imaginary,” he observes, human suffering “steams up (to the gods) like a perpetual propitiatory offering on the altar.” In Daybreak 45, Nietzsche conceives free-spirited scientists’ relationship to humanity as analogous to these evil gods’ relationship to humanity. What motivates their pursuit of science is their desire to exalt in sacrificing humanity.

58 D 45.

59 KSA 1873 8[29].

60 D 429.

61 See KSA 1881 9: 7[171].

62 See also KSA 1881 9: 7[302]. “The passion for knowledge can come to a tragic end: are you scared? As much as with any passion! – Usually, however, you scholars are without passion, instead, you have got use to your boredom!.”

63 See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling. trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

64 See also GS 35.

65 See also BGE 229: “(T)he seeker after knowledge . . . acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty.”

66 GS 37.

67 GS 35.

68 Homer, Odyssey, Book XI.

69 GS 28.

70 Ibid.

71 GS 325. Nietzsche’s emphasis.

72 D 144. Thomas Bartscherer plausibly suggests that Nietzsche derives this idea of ideal divine cannibalism (Götter-Kanibalenthum) from Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics (1879), a German translation of which he read and annotated while composing Daybreak. See Thomas Bartscherer, ‘The Spectacle of Suffering: On Tragedy in Nietzsche’s Daybreak’, Phænex 1(2), 2006: pp. 71–93. This is the relevant passage: “. . . supposing that from the savage who immolates victims to a cannibal god [cannibalischen Gotte], there are descendants among the civilized who hold that mankind was made for suffering, and that it is their duty to continue to live in misery for the delight of their maker, we can only recognize the fact that devil-worshippers are not yet extinct.”

73 KSW 9, 2[35].

74 Ibid.

75 See C. Daniel Batson, “These things called empathy: eight related but distinct phenomena,” J. Decety and W. Ickes (eds), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), pp. 3–15.

76 D 144.

77 KSW 9, 2[35].

78 See, respectively, D 134, 144.

79 Nietzsche also identifies Zarathustra/Dionysus with this malicious laughter; see Z III 16: The Seven Seals (Or: Yes and Amen Song) and Z IV, 1: The Honey Sacrifice. I thank Gudrun von Tevenar for drawing my attention to Zarathustra’s malicious laughter. See Gudrun von Tevenar, ‘The Malicious Dionysian,’ in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

80 In considering Nietzsche’s point, we do well to remember that the Greek tragedians identified the following as serious disasters potentially worthy of pity: viz., death, bodily assault or ill-treatment, old age, illness, lack of food, lack of friends, separation from friends, physical weakness, immobility, reversals of expectations, absence of good prospects. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1386a6-13.

81 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), I.6 ‘Sudden Glory Laughter.’

82 BGE 294.

83 Elsewhere I have argued that in his middle period, Nietzsche often diagnoses this kind of Olympian or heroic laughter of total affirmation as a psychological malady and identifies healthy self-cultivation with smiling, antiheroic acknowledgment of finitude and vulnerability. Here I am suggesting that in his later works, Nietzsche tends to identify with rather than diagnose this “Olympian” ethos and that it eclipses his earlier notion of self-cultivation. See Michael Ure. ‘Stoic Comedians: Nietzsche and Freud on the Art of Arranging One’s Humours.’ Nietzsche-Studien 34(2005): 183–216; and Nietzsche’s Therapy; The Ethics of Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lanham: Lexington, 2008).

84 D 450.

85 See Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 58–9.

86 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 245.

87 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 244.

88 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VII, pp. 47–8.

89 Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 168.

90 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations III, p. 2.

91 D 551.

92 D 210.

93 GS 276.

94 Hadot, The Inner Citadel, p. 172; p. 331, n. 6.

95 Hadot, The Inner Citadel, pp. 143–46. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Hellenistic eudaimonism and the sage’s joyful assent to the universe is evident throughout HH and D. In HH 2 334, for example, he affirms the Hellenistic ideal of the sage’s self-sufficiency. See Michael Ure, ‘Nietzsche’s Free-Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy,’ Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38(2009): 60–84.

96 Epictetus, Manual, p. 8.

97 Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel, p. 146.

98 Hadot, The Inner Citadel, p. 146.

99 GS 276.

100 NCW, Epilogue, 1, italics added. This passage shows how Nietzsche brings together the Stoic view from above and evolutionary biology (“the economy of the whole”). Here Nietzsche is much closer to the Stoics in his metaphysical assumption that from the point of view of the whole of nature, every event is useful or functional. Elsewhere, by contrast, Nietzsche assumes that nature blindly produces countless random, useless, or dysfunctional variations, see, for example, HH 224.