5
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! [. . .] Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowls of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth!
(Nietzsche 2006: 6)
The struggle to be free of the true world is an abiding theme in the mature Nietzsche. We find it expressed from Dawn (1881) onwards. From this point Nietzsche sees that his earlier distinction between the world as Apollonian individuation and as Dionysian oneness retains the two-worlds structure. This is the lingering mark of Schopenhauer on his thinking, of the difference between the world as representation and as will, a distinction which itself echoes Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves.
I will argue in this chapter that, despite Heidegger’s suggestions to the contrary, Nietzsche is aware that the world as will to power risks being as much a true world as any heavenly beyond. As a world of becoming, nothing can be said of the world’s being. All that matters is that the true world is no longer true, and Nietzsche (2003: 199) is insistent at the end that this is as much as he has demonstrated, but that it ‘alone is the great liberation’ (Nietzsche 2005: 182). This undermines Heidegger’s attempt (to which we will return at the end of the chapter) to portray Nietzsche as the one who, in merely reversing the order of the two worlds, remained stuck with the true world. Nietzsche’s notion that the death of the true world is itself the liberation shows that he does not think that a world of becoming is any more the true world than its metaphysical opposite. When the true world dies we are left without any truth of the world at all, and this is freedom – the possibility of new worlds.
This is why Nietzsche could not be further from a world-weary sage. Affirming that there is no true world does not mean accepting the world of the ‘realists’:
This, oh this is bitterness for my bowels, that I can stand you neither
naked nor clothed, you people of the present!
All uncanniness of the future, and whatever caused flown birds to
shudder, is truly homelier and more familiar than your ‘reality’. (Nietzsche 2006: 94)1
For Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, there is in fact nothing more false nor malicious in the world than the claim that we should just let the world be, not lifting a finger against it. To say, for instance, that those who kill and abuse the people should be left to their own devices (since, that way, the people will learn to renounce the world) is world-slander of the highest order (Nietzsche 2006: 164). Nietzsche’s anti-realism, rather than any otherworldliness, is also the reason he can give Zarathustra the words: ‘this mountain is teeming, my kingdom is no longer of this world, I need new mountains’ (Nietzsche 2006: 220). Rather than affirm the real world, then, Nietzsche’s affirmation would have us create the world: ‘And what you called world, that should first be created by you: your reason, your image, your will, your love itself it should become!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 164). The real world is only the true world in new clothes.
Nietzsche’s anti-cosmos
Nietzsche, like Paul, is no friend of cosmos. The realization that the world does not form a unity is what is decisive (2005: 182). In the Late Notebooks (2003: 23), Nietzsche argues that if the world process could reach a final state, if a cosmos could arise, then this could not have failed to have occurred already. Indeed, Nietzsche claims (2003: 211) to be seeking a conception of the world which can do justice to just this fact. For if the world were at all capable of being, if everything had its place in an ordered whole even for a second, then all becoming would cease along with all thinking of it. The very fact of thought as movement proves, for Nietzsche, that the world is ‘incapable of being’. Nietzsche (2003: 199) makes of this insight ‘that the world does not aim for permanence’ the sole contribution of his thought. Thinking world such that, at its highest point, there is no equilibrium is what thought must prove itself capable of. And this is exactly what Nietzsche (2003: 38) attempts to think in perhaps his most extended definition of world:
And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end; [. . .] as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and ‘many’, accumulating here while diminishing there; an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back [. . .] a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue – this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying.
For Nietzsche (2003: 42), the idea that the world is ordered and, conversely, that the appearance of chaos implies a world that is false or ‘incompletely known’ is nothing other than the ‘fundamental prejudice’. A theme found throughout Nietzsche’s writings is that the world must not be seen as a harmonious order. Suffering pervades existence, which is why all that separates Nietzsche from Schopenhauerian pessimism is that Nietzsche’s is a pessimism of strength rather than weakness. In Dawn (2011: 9), this imperative not to find harmony in the world is carried through even to its opposite, as Nietzsche warns that cosmic disharmony is likewise an inadequate image of becoming for attributing, if negatively, too much coherence to the world: ‘Against the imaginary disharmony of the spheres. – We must oust from the world anew the many types of false grandeur, because they go against the justice that all things are entitled to demand of us! And to that end, it is necessary not to want to view the world as more disharmonious than it is!’ This thought of a finite world that cannot be endlessly creative with its chaos will culminate, later, in the thought of the eternal return. It is the thought that separates Nietzsche’s world from being simply another world of flux. It is also the thought that undermines Heidegger’s charge that Nietzsche missed the obvious order that characterizes any world. For the eternal return, as Deleuze (1983, 1994) shows, is a selection of that which differs, and thus the world is in the final analysis ordered as absolute creativity (though this order is purely immanent to what is ordered – there is no doer behind the creative deed that is world).
Nietzsche is not far from Paul in seeing the cosmos of Roman Antiquity as a projection onto the world of a closed imperial order that wanted the universe to be as timeless and unchanging as it hoped its own rule to be. In this dream of an eternal empire, Rome expressed its own driving ressentiment, since, for Nietzsche (2006: 111), ‘this alone is revenge itself: the will’s unwillingness toward time and time’s “it was”’. In Dawn (2011: 52), Nietzsche writes that, at the dawn of the common era, for two centuries the world had seen Rome conquer people after people such that the circle seemed closed, the future fixed, as if all things were ordered to last forever. Rome knew how to turn everything, even the very order of the world, ‘into its prehistory and its present’. Nietzsche returns to this argument in his late notebooks (2003: 130), repeating the point that the supposed order of the world is but a projection of hierarchical social order:
How far interpretations of the world are symptoms of a ruling drive [. . .]
Contemplating the world morally. The social feelings of the order of rank are displaced into the universe: immovability, law, fitting in and equating are, because they are most highly valued, also sought in the highest places, above the universe, or behind the universe…
From the standpoint of Nietzsche’s thought of world, cosmos must be seen as one of Apollo’s deceptions: ‘the eternity of the beautiful form; the aristocratic law that says “Thus shall it be forever!”’. In place of such alluring chimeras, Nietzsche (2003: 79) will propose a starker yet truer beauty: ‘Dionysos: sensuality and cruelty. Transience could be interpreted as enjoyment of the engendering and destroying force, as continual creation.’
A significant distortion of cosmos is its imputation of purpose to the world. Freedom can only be imagined ‘as purposeless, roughly like a child’s game’ (Nietzsche 1962: 116). For the Nietzsche of Dawn (2011: 96), we must overcome our fear of the ‘great cosmic stupidity’ and recognize that even throws of the dice that issue in that which ‘exactly resembles purposiveness’ is what we would expect of a game of chance played for all eternity. One of Zarathustra’s gifts, indeed, is to restore chance as ‘the most ancient nobility of the world’, a chance which, in being given back to all things, ‘delivered them from their bondage to Purpose’. Now in place of the spirit of gravity2 (the dark and heavy clouds of Providence) is found the pure blue sky of accident, innocence, chance and mischief. This sky is the deep blue of ‘the well of eternity’ in which all things are ‘baptized beyond good and evil’ (Nietzsche 2006: 132). The world is beyond good and evil because, as that play of forces on the basis of which all valuations are made, the value of the world simply cannot be estimated (Nietzsche 2005: 162).
If the order of cosmos is, for the ancients, also the mark of its beauty (recalling that kosmein first denoted ornamentation), then Nietzsche (2011: 272) again demurs. It is ‘knowledge even of the ugliest reality’ that is beautiful, since nothing is beautiful in itself. Man forgets that he is the cause of the beauty of the world, that the ‘human, all too human beauty’ which he has projected onto the heavens is indeed only a humanization, and that, in fact, ‘nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that a human being is the standard of beauty’ (Nietzsche 2005: 201). Cosmos, like all worlds, would then be a creation, but this time the creation of a fictitious world in which there are beings and places. Nietzsche (2003: 245) is clear: the only necessity in the world is that of becoming. ‘Let us here remove the two popular concepts “necessity” and “law”: the first puts a false compulsion, the second a false freedom into the world.’ Nietzsche’s necessity is the play of chance, a necessity that plays ‘blissfully with the string of freedom’ (Nietzsche 2006: 158). This identity of being and the game of chance is already a theme in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks from 1873, where Nietzsche (1962: 58) quotes Heraclitus approvingly: ‘“The world is the game Zeus plays,” or expressed more concretely, “of the fire with itself. This is the only sense in which the one is at the same time the many.” Heraclitus, having caught sight of the law in becoming, understood this law to be identical with the play of necessity. And what he saw ‘must be seen from now on in all eternity’ (Nietzsche 1962: 68).
One of the most significant aphorisms to establish the difference between cosmos and Nietzsche’s world is found in The Gay Science (2001: 109). Here Nietzsche warns us against ‘assuming in general and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighbouring stars’. The order of the world is disorder, ‘for all eternity chaos’, and this is where its necessity is found rather than in any ‘order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom’. At this point Nietzsche lists the adjectives that the ancients used to describe the world. These descriptions of world are but ‘aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ and they could never capture the eternally repeated tune, ‘which must never be called a melody’, of the cosmic musical box. Nietzsche repeats his warning from Dawn that, if we are to do justice to blind becoming, then, strictly speaking, we cannot even attribute to the world the opposite of order – the world is neither reason nor unreason, since both of these judgements would arise from us as anthropocentric visions of the world. None of our judgements apply to the world and so we should be cautious of deifying ‘again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world’. Rather than the great ‘Unknown One’, Nietzsche’s world (2001: 238) is far too capable of ‘ungodly possibilities’, of ‘devilry, stupidity [and] foolishness’. For it is a world interpreted after ‘our own human, all too human’ folly.
Nietzsche’s rejection of cosmos also implies, in turn, the nullification of natural law. Indeed, Nietzsche had already warned in Dawn (2011: 279) that the idea of a moral world-order is delusional. In The Gay Science (2001: 110) this is put explicitly: ‘Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses.’ In the absence of a law-like order to the world, there can be no infringements either. This sentiment is repeated forcibly in Genealogy of Morality (2014: 25), where this world is described as having a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course, ‘not because laws govern it, but because laws are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences in every moment’.
The difference of Nietzsche’s thought of world from any idea of cosmos means that, as Deleuze argued (1983: 29), Nietzsche’s eternal return should not be confused with the eternal return of Antiquity. What Nietzsche’s ancients could not see, with the possible exception of Heraclitus, was that the play of chance is the only necessity of the eternal return, its only law the law of becoming. The eternal return of the ancients rather accuses becoming by maintaining its injustice and seeing in the eternal return the restitution of this injustice.
The true world is a lie
World of phantoms in which we live! Inverted, topsy-turvy, empty world, dreamed full and upright nonetheless.
(Nietzsche 2011: 88)
Nietzsche insists time and again that the true world of Platonism is false and mendacious – ‘Away with this “inverted world”!’ (Nietzsche 2014: 313). In Dawn (2011: 28), the driving force behind the fiction of the true world is a blend of escapism and the will to power, specifically pride. Beyond the consolation that it offers for those who suffer, there is also a feeling of exultation to be had from suffering if it is conceived as enabling an approach to the true world. In Genealogy of Morality (2014: 225–6), the ascetic priest is described as denying life in order to construct a bridge to the other world and as growing more triumphant the more his capacity for life decreases, since in this ascetic ideal lies his ultimate victory. Yet to revel in pallid images of the beyond and to sport with beings that are ‘invisible, inaudible [and] intangible’ is also to display contempt for our sensorily tangible, seductive and evil earth below (Nietzsche 2011: 35–6). The true world is a ‘curse on reality’, a devaluation of the only world there is (Nietzsche 2005: 71). It falsifies and cheapens this world such that no goal can be had for our earthly existence. Perversely, this sense of purposelessness below provides a feeling of being at home in the true world above, a world where no reality survives (Nietzsche 2005: 150). But such is to be expected from those who, because they suffer from life, rage: ‘Then let the whole world perish!’ These Nietzsche (2011: 189) calls ‘The world destroyers’.
It is not suffering in life that is problematic for Nietzsche – indeed, existence is suffering – but suffering from life. In an unpublished reflection from his notebooks (cited in Bracht Branham 2004: 174–5), Nietzsche makes this all-important difference clear by way of Diogenes Laertius’s account (1991: 21) of the death of Antisthenes, the teacher of Diogenes of Sinope. On his deathbed Antisthenes cried out ‘who will release me from these pains’ and Diogenes, pointing to a dagger, replied: ‘this’. Antisthenes responded: ‘I said from my pains, not from life.’ Nietzsche writes of this ‘very profound statement’: ‘one cannot get the better of the love of life by means of a dagger. Yet that is real suffering. It is obvious that the Cynic clings to life more than the other philosophers: the “shortest way to happiness” is nothing but the love of life itself and in complete needlessness with reference to all other goods’.
In The Gay Science (2001: 69–70), Nietzsche admits that the true world cannot be torn down merely through an account of its origins in human needs and drives. Once again, this admission gives the lie to Heidegger’s notion that Nietzsche stops at replacing the true world with a truer – starker – truth of the world. The ‘misty shroud of delusion’ by which the true world came to count as real will be dispersed not by more reality but only by creators of new worlds. ‘There is another world to discover – and more than one! Embark, you philosophers!’, says Zarathustra (2001: 163). Zarathustra is the great teacher of this truth. If suffering, incapacity and weariness created all afterworlds then bearing one’s earthly head freely is that which ‘creates a meaning for the earth!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 20–2) After all, even the ‘sweet and shadowy poisons’ of the heavenly realm were taken from the earth. There is no true world, tells Zarathustra; rather, those who invent new values are the axis around which the world turns (Nietzsche 2006: 37). This is then Nietzsche’s difference, in his own understanding at least, from Spinoza, who rather stops with acquiescence ‘in the world as it is’ (Nietzsche 2003: 86). World-worship, for Nietzsche (2006: 65, 88), is rather the veneration of that which is made. Zarathustra casts his golden rod in a human sea and declares: ‘Open up, you human abyss!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 192).
Twilight of the Idols sees a resurgence of the theme of there being no true world. Heraclitus will always be right in seeing being as an illusion. The ‘apparent world’, as seen from the perspective of the ‘true world’, is the only world there is (2005: 170). Nietzsche does not mean that the world of appearance is, but that how it appears (and it can do so only from the standpoint of the true world) is all we have of it. Nietzsche sets out a number of further theses on the two-worlds problem in Twilight (2005: 171). First, the transient nature of the ‘apparent’ world is precisely what makes it real, not false. Again, this should not be taken as meaning that the world of appearance is the true world, but rather as another way of making the point that there is no true world. Saying that a world of appearance is real is the same as saying that there is no worldly reality. Second, the intransience of the true world, its being, is the very quality of not being, of nothing. The concept of being is ‘the last wisps of smoke’ of evaporating reality (Nietzsche 2005: 168).3 Yet Nietzsche also accepts the Parmenidean claim that the road of not-being leads nowhere. The true world has only been able to fabricate its being out of negation of the world of becoming, out of the absence of any true world. That the artist, and not only the ascetic priest, demotes reality is no objection to this thesis, for the former is creative with the real, selecting, reinforcing and correcting ‘reality’ as necessary in order to say ‘Yes’ to the absence of the true world. The priest, by contrast, is a pessimist who says ‘No’ to this same truth.
In The Antichrist (2005: 9), Nietzsche finds that this priestly type lingers on and, with him, the concept of the ‘true world’. Noting that most German scholars, himself included of course, were themselves the sons of pastors, Nietzsche bemoans the influence of Kant for reintroducing, by the back door, the idea of morality as the essence of the world. If the true world is no longer demonstrable in Kant, then his priestly genius is that it also thereby becomes irrefutable. In Kant, our world, the world of appearance, becomes once again a shadow world of phenomena which are understandable only in relation to the ‘absolutely false world, that of being, [which] has been turned into reality’. Kant’s success, for Nietzsche, is a theological success, and therefore truly a failure. And before Kant, Spinoza too had rid himself of the moral order of the world only ‘so as to have “God” remain, a world that holds its ground in the face of reason…’ (Nietzsche 2003: 86). Nietzsche (2003: 145) returns to this theme of Spinoza seeking to save the God of reason by contrasting Spinoza’s valorization of ‘what remains eternally the same’ with Nietzsche’s own preference for ‘the value of the shortest and most fleeting, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the snake vita [life]’.
Unlike Kant’s, Nietzsche’s world as appearance is not a means to safeguard the true world, but rather an invitation to face, but also to use, the fact that ‘the world’s value lies in our interpretation’ – ‘this theme runs through my writings’. ‘The world which matters to us is false’ in the sense that it is a ‘fictional elaboration’ of our limited observations and thus is in flux (Nietzsche 2003: 80). But this world of becoming that we only ever grasp in a way that also becomes is not thereby invalidated, ‘for there is no “truth”’, by which Nietzsche clearly means being (ibid.). Indeed, Nietzsche’s own interpretation of world, which consists in imprinting ‘upon becoming the character of being’ is itself the will to power (in Nietzsche’s estimation, ‘the highest’ such will) rather than any claim to a true world (2003: 138). Even the antithesis of true and illusory world is itself nothing but the result of an earlier valuation: ‘we have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general’ just as we ‘have taken the fact that in order to prosper we have to be stable in our belief, and made of it that the “true” world is not one which changes and becomes, but one which is’ (2003: 148).
Since all our categories of reason are sensual in origin, we simply lack the capacity to separate a true world from a world of appearance. And if our world of appearance contains nothing material, then there is nothing immaterial, either (ibid.). The opposite of our world of appearances ‘is not “the true world” but the formless, unformulatable world of the chaos of sensations – thus, a different kind of phenomenal world, one not “knowable” by us’ (2003: 161). Beyond the world as it appears for us there is no (true) world in itself but only more appearance. Nietzsche wants to restore illusoriness from that which is unreal to reality itself. In a world without being, a world essentially of relationships, identical cases are themselves the illusion, if one necessary to life (2003: 250).
Nietzsche is telling the truth – he identifies as a Cynic after all – about a world of becoming in which the principle of identity, and its foundation in the appearance that things are the same, is no longer tenable. This means that there can be no truth as knowledge of the world. ‘A world of becoming could not, in the strict sense, be “grasped”, be “known”’ (2003: 26). Yet Nietzsche knows that this concern for the truth of becoming, even if it appears to take the seeker out beyond truth as metaphysically conceived, is still the will to truth itself. In The Gay Science (2001: 201), this much is admitted – the will to truth, as a will to know, is, in a world of appearance and becoming, hostile to life and might well be a concealed will to death. It is certainly only a disguised will to power: ‘my will to power follows also on the heels of your will to truth!’ (2006: 90). Even godless anti-metaphysicians such as Nietzsche himself, inasmuch as they seek the truth of the world, look to a world of being, a world other than our transitory world of ‘life, nature, and history’. Nietzsche (2001: 201), too, takes his fire ‘from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which is also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine’. But with Nietzsche this flame of truth will be put to more nihilistic uses still. Rather than devaluing the world, as the metaphysicians have done, Nietzsche, knowing that behind the will to truth there is only will to power, will deny it. There is no true world, and this, if it can be faced, is the liberation. If the will to power is what persists in the will to truth (what is in truth), then the will to truth can be understood not as a means to power (as if there was something outside the will to power) but as the test by which the will to power overcomes itself – what becomes in the will to power.
That ‘the lightning bolt of truth struck precisely what was highest so far’, namely the true world, does not mean that truth is disposed of; rather ‘Everything that has been called “truth” so far is recognized as the most harmful, treacherous, subterranean form of lie’ (2005: 150). We cannot have truth as knowledge of the world, but we can have truth as exposure of the lie. Of course, by the same token, this ‘lie’ cannot be measured against ‘the world’; it is rather a refusal of any false comfort. In a manner that echoes the parrhēsia of Antiquity, Nietzsche’s noble type is open with himself (2014: 230). He refuses the ‘hiding places, secret passages and back doors’ of the man of ressentiment, who is defined precisely by his inability to acknowledge that the true world is only his world, an otherworld made by one who cannot endure this world of appearance (ibid.). Nietzsche’s truth is of the order of the test – it is a principle of change rather than stasis. If Foucault’s genealogy of the will to knowledge (2013) is correct, this truth would take Nietzsche back to the world of the heroes told of by Homer. It would also place him in the line of Diogenes, a genealogy that Nietzsche had already written himself into.
‘The world is perfect’4
The true world, for Nietzsche, emerges as a consequence of morality, since it is good and evil that, having no place in this world, requires a foundation beyond it. Morals make God necessary (Nietzsche 2005: 22), a God who then lends his weight to the innumerable judgements of this world, judgements that have made it appear ugly. This is why saying yes to a world that has become ugly is so crucial to Nietzsche’s attempt at overcoming nihilism. ‘Reality’ is not intrinsically ugly, the world is intrinsically nothing at all, but metaphysicians have made it so with their otherworldliness. Overcoming the nihilism of otherworldliness therefore requires affirmation of this world in all its acquired ugliness: a richness of joy that thirsts even ‘for pain, for hell, for hate, for disgrace, for the cripple, for world – this world, oh you know it well!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 263). We must love this world as we find it not because this world is essentially lovable – Zarathustra does not like those who consider everything good and this world the best (2006: 155; see also 2001: 204) – but because it is our fate.
Just as the world is not intrinsically ugly, neither is it intrinsically beautiful. Nietzsche (2003: 24) has no time for pantheistic world worship, which he finds in Spinoza, seeing it as an attempt to fill the space left by the infinitely creative God. This world can become beautiful, really for the first time, through our saying yes to it in a way that it could never have been without initially becoming ugly, without that first no: ‘what would be “beautiful” if the contradiction had not become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: “I am not ugly?”’ As Nietzsche (2014: 2) puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘we, whose task is wakefulness itself’, are the heirs to all the strength that the struggle against [Platonism] has cultivated to maturity’. This is the deeper sense in which nihilism is necessary for Nietzsche. Only once having found the true world to be a lie do we find whether we are strong enough to ‘admit to ourselves illusoriness, the necessity of lies, without perishing. To this extent nihilism, as the denial of a true world, of a being, might be a divine way of thinking’ (2003: 149). The challenge to love this world unreservedly – a task that, as the test of the eternal return, decides everything – is only given to us because first there was the nihilism of the true world.
The dependence of this world that can be loved on the nihilism of the true world does not dawn as late for Nietzsche as Heidegger argued when restricting it to the last year of his active life: 1888. To be sure, it does not seem to have come fully to light in Dawn (2011: 113), where the contrast is drawn between the true world, this time in one of its Christian guises as a world of universal love (which Nietzsche finds a horrifying world of selflessness), and the utter baseness of ‘the charming animal world in which we live’, where it is mercifully possible to be undisturbed and unloved. Elsewhere in Dawn (2011: 123–4), Thucydides is compared favourably to Plato for his delight ‘in all that is typical in humans and in events’ which makes him the last to cultivate an ‘impartial knowledge of the world’ before the otherworldliness of Plato sets in.5 Here, the true world is simply a wrong turn to be retraced in order to bring thinking back down to earth. Indeed, when Schopenhauer is acknowledged (2011: 135) for catching sight of the real world in all its devilry (if not of the beauty of this devilry!), the emphasis is precisely on how this reality has again become visible. The true world is not yet a condition for the ‘real world’, but only that which has, until now, obscured its reality.
But starting in The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche (2001: 110) begins to acknowledge this irreducible relation between ‘true’ and ‘real’ worlds, arguing that it is ‘only against a world of purposes’ that the word ‘accident’ has a meaning. The sense of the world as chaos is only found in contrast to an ordered cosmos. In the fifth book of The Gay Science (2001: 203–4), which was added to the second edition of 1887, this idea appears again. Nietzsche starts by giving the impression that those who would bless this world are able to do so because they have pushed beyond the mystifications of the true world, in the process becoming ‘hard-boiled, cold, and tough in the realization that the way of the world is not at all divine’. It is the scepticism of the true philosopher rather than the nihilism of the true world that has won through to the insight that though ‘the world is not worth what we thought’, it is no less valuable for that. Rather than being a residue of nihilism, this world appears as the final measure, the ultimate value, to which all values, even the new values of the Dionysian destroyer–creators, are subordinate. Nothing can excel the value of the real world, and to imagine so is but an ‘aberration of human vanity’.
However, in this very same aphorism, Nietzsche goes on to unpick the idea that man as the judge of the world – namely world negation – is only negative. In a dramatic about-turn, Nietzsche first builds up the pose of ‘man against the world’ as a piece of ‘monstrous stupidity’ that ‘has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it; we laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world”, separated by the sublime presumptuousness of the little word “and”!’ But then there is a pause for thought:
But by laughing, haven’t we simply carried contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable to us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition – an opposition between the world in which until now we were at home with our venerations – and which may have made it possible for us to endure life – and another world that we ourselves are: a relentless, fundamental, deepest suspicion concerning ourselves that is steadily gaining more and worse control over us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrible Either/Or: ‘Either abolish your venerations or – yourselves!’ The later would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism? That is our question mark.
Nietzsche’s question mark reveals a growing sense that reverence for this world cannot simply be a matter of unveiling the unreality of the true world.
The pivot in Nietzsche’s thought here seems to be Zarathustra (2006), with its overarching emphasis on world as the creation of new values. We have already remarked on ‘On the Spirit of Gravity’, where nausea at man ‘creates wings and water-diving powers’ and where ‘the earth is to be loved’ for its ‘many good inventions’ (see also ‘On the Sublime Ones’) rather than for anything in it that might be true. But it is ‘The Seven Seals’ that offers the most tantalizing glimpse of Nietzsche’s growing awareness that he has the nihilism of the true world to thank for this world that he loves: ‘if I ever sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, blessing the world, loving the world, next to the monuments of old world maligners – because I love even churches and God’s graves, once the sky’s pure eye gazes through their broken roofs’ (Nietzsche 2006: 185).
The close juxtaposition of world-blessing and world-slandering here should not be identified only with reaction, with the intention to bury the curse beneath the blessing. Zarathustra loves even churches, and not just because they now have holes in their roofs but because it is through these holes that the sky first gazes with its pure eye. This world can be loved because it has been slandered, can be won because it was first lost – ‘only where there are graves are there resurrections’, sings Zarathustra (2006: 88).
In Genealogy of Morality (2014: 284), this insight is mixed with the earlier condemnation of the slander of the world as born of a bad conscience with all that is natural (‘senses, instincts, nature, animal’) in this world. But the insight is retained nonetheless: elsewhere in the text (2014: 276) the bad conscience that besmirches the world is described as a sickness, ‘but a sickness as pregnancy is a sickness’. To understand this ‘sickness’ pregnant with possibility it will be necessary to go back again to an earlier point of view (presumably to a time before metaphysical world-slander began to take hold), but only ‘first of all’. By implication, love of this world will not be achieved by returning to a true world before the world was cursed.
In Nietzsche’s late work, Ecce Homo (2005: 71), there is something of a return to the earlier idea that the true world is only an invented world that mendaciously denigrates ‘reality’, but this reality can nonetheless only be conceived ‘as it is’ by those strong enough for it (who are thus revealed as the types of men that Zarathustra wants) (2005: 72–3). In the Late Notebooks Nietzsche (2003: 179–80) admits that in this sense his thought is a theodicy, a justification of evil in the world, if this time without reference to God. Nietzsche’s honesty that he is doing theodicy reminds us that he is never in any doubt that loving the world as we find it is difficult. Why so difficult? How is the world’s ugliness even possible? Thanks to metaphysics, and its association of beauty with that which endures unchanging, a world of becoming cannot but be seen as ugly. But metaphysics itself is rooted in something deeper: psychologically, it offers ‘a means of preservation’ in a precarious world of becoming. For becoming, as not only an eternally creating but also ‘an eternally-having-to-destroy, is inseparable from pain’ (Nietzsche 2003: 79). Nietzsche seems to be exchanging his earlier perplexity at how this world became ugly for a deeper appreciation that the world must appear ugly to those who suffer from its ceaseless becoming.
In the Late Notebooks (2003: 116–21), Nietzsche offers a reason for love of this world. Honest contemplation of the world as we find it is not only a test of the strongest wills (can the world be loved even though it has no point?) but also provides a way back from a disenchanted world to a world with purpose. What is this new purpose? It is nothing other than the purposelessness of existence, which, given that it is affirmed at every moment of existence, is itself the truth of such existence. Purposelessness is the ‘purpose’. But it is clearly a purpose that required first the sense of purposelessness that only the death of God could bring:
Nihilism appears now not because displeasure in existence is greater than it used to be, but because we have become more generally mistrustful of a ‘meaning’ in evil, indeed in existence itself. One interpretation has perished; but because it was regarded as the interpretation, there now seems to be no measure at all in existence, everything seems to be in vain. (Nietzsche 2003: 17)
Nietzsche (2003: 118) calls us to have the courage of this thought ‘in its most terrible form’. This is the thought of an existence ‘without meaning or goal, but inevitably recurring, without any finale into nothingness: “eternal recurrence”. That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (‘meaninglessness’) eternally!’ But at just the point where we seem to have stripped all meaning from existence, we find that the affirmation of meaningless is that meaning: ‘if we remove the idea of purpose from the process do we nevertheless affirm the process? – This would be the case if something were achieved at every moment of it – and always the same thing’.
Nietzsche uses this argument (which he here acknowledges Spinoza got to first, a generosity he was never capable of in his published works) to suggest that a pantheistic affirmative stance towards all things might be possible. After all, only the moral true world has been overcome in European nihilism. There may still be room for a true world beyond good and evil: ‘Would a pantheism in this sense be possible?’ If we felt that we were this purposeless world-process then we could ‘welcome triumphantly every moment of general existence. The point would be precisely to experience this fundamental trait in oneself as good, as valuable, with pleasure’ (Nietzsche 2003: 118).
Nietzsche’s theodicy is the other side of the ‘pessimism of strength’, which is the test of the eternal return: can existence be affirmed, in its very purposelessness, to repeat for all eternity? Nietzsche wants us to progress to the stage where the pessimism that prompted the test, and the strength that were needed to pass it, are surpassed ‘in an absolute saying Yes to the world, but for the very reasons that used to prompt one’s No to it: and thus a Yes to the conception of this world as the actually attained, highest possible ideal’ (2003: 180). This is pure Spinozism. But notice that this world is here a conception that is attained by way of Nietzsche’s negative theodicy. The world is justified by its lack of justification; because there is nothing to justify it, neither is there anything before which it stands accused.
Nietzsche’s theodicy does not, as Leibniz’s does, justify this world despite some of the things that happen in it. Rather, that we must not judge the world means, in a world of force relationships in which everything is connected to everything else, that we must not condemn any action whatsoever: ‘to want to reject anything at all means rejecting everything. A reprehensible action means a reprehended world’ (2003: 244). Zarathustra (2006: 263) puts this same point in a positive register: ‘love it eternally and for all time’.
Heidegger’s Nietzsche
We encountered Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche (1991) earlier, but now is the time to take a closer look. After all, Heidegger’s Nietzsche is a thinker who, though he seeks to overcome the true world, ends up giving the true world its last and most decisive formulation.
For Heidegger, Nietzsche realizes only right at the end that the overturning of Platonism cannot be merely its inversion. As long as the supersensuous (true) world and the sensuous (apparent) world, the above and below, merely changes places, then the very structure of Platonism remains firmly in place (1991, I: 201). Prior to this belated realization, Nietzsche’s true world is becoming and the apparent world is in being. The true and apparent worlds have therefore swapped places and ranks, yet the deeper distinction of a true and an apparent world is not itself called into question. Indeed, the exchange of places of the two worlds is only possible with this distinction acting as its foundation (1991, III: 124).
In Heidegger’s estimation, the overcoming of the nihilism of the true world requires not the elevation of the apparent world to take the place of the true world, but the setting aside of the true world itself. And when the true world is put aside does the apparent world remain? ‘No. For the apparent world can be what it is only as a counterpart of the true. If the true world collapses, so must the world of appearances. Only then is Platonism overcome’ (ibid.).
For Heidegger (1991, I: 202), this ‘twisting free’ of Platonism, with its essential difference from the earlier inversion of Platonism, happens only in Nietzsche’s final creative year (1888). It is Nietzsche’s last and decisive step, but also for that reason unclear in its full import and wider implications. Indeed, Heidegger (1991, I: 203) implies that Nietzsche’s realization that he had for so long been reproducing Platonism when he thought he was overcoming it is what precipitated his descent into madness: ‘Whoever believes that philosophical thought can dispense with its history by means of a simple proclamation will, without his knowing it, be dispensed with by history: he will be struck a blow from which he can never recover, one that will blind him utterly.’
Heidegger’s supporting evidence that 1888 is the decisive year comes from a number of texts. First, there is a note on nihilism from the notebook covering November 1887 – March 1888 (2003: 218). In this note, Nietzsche observes that growing ‘disbelief in any metaphysical world’, far from being the other side of nihilism, is actually its last stage. For disbelief in the true world of metaphysics is still a crisis of the true world. If the true world is and always was an invented world, then the world was never devalued in the first place and Nietzsche protests too much. However, the crucial passage, for Heidegger, is in Twilight of the Idols (1888):
‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps?
... But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!
(Noon; moment of shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) (Nietzsche 2005: 171)
In the section that culminates with this insight, Nietzsche traces ‘the history of an error’, which is the error of the true world. At first, that is in Plato, the true world is not yet elsewhere, but exists only for the wise man who is also the man of virtue. The rejection of the sensuous world is carried out not in the name of another world but in the name of the truth of this world, which is its ideal. The supersensuous is the idea, the true being, of this world (Heidegger 1991, I: 204). The second stage of the error of the true world is the taking up of Plato’s supersensuous world in Christianity, by which the true world is displaced to an elsewhere accessible only to the sinner who repents. In this stage the unbroken world of the Greeks, still in one piece in Plato, is fractured forever. No longer is human being grounded in what is obtainable (if only for philosophers), here. And so ‘In Plato’s stead, Platonism now rules’ (Heidegger 1991, I: 204). The supersensuous becomes the beyond.
In the fifth stage of Nietzsche’s history of the error of the true world lies nothing other, argues Heidegger, than Nietzsche’s own work prior to Twilight. Nietzsche writes (2005: 171) of this stage: ‘The “true world” – an idea that is of no further use, not even as an obligation, – now an obsolete, superfluous idea, consequently a refuted idea: let’s get rid of it!’ Nietzsche’s emphasis is instructive here. That the true world becomes obsolete does not, in itself, make it go away. Platonism remains operative and the thinker who would push beyond it must go further. Thus must Nietzsche overcome his own thinking.
If the apparent world is apparent only in the light of the true world, then the apparent world is also Platonism. Overcoming Platonism cannot stop at affirming the sensuous but requires a Yes! to the non-sensuous world of the spirit also (Heidegger 1991, I: 209). In place of the deprecation of the sensuous and the elevation of the supersensuous, there must instead be ‘a spiritualisation of the senses’ as Nietzsche puts it in his late notebooks (ibid.). The world must be rendered holy rather than true.
For Nietzsche (Heidegger 1991, III: 58), the distinction between the true and apparent worlds is what first makes the meta (beyond) of metaphysics possible. The true world enables the going beyond of what is given, which is now seen as illusory, to something else. If in Plato’s ideas (eidos) what is most in being is that which is not subject to the perishability of matter (house-ness persists even as houses continue to crumble and fall), then being becomes that which does not change, what is in permanent presence (Heidegger 1991, III: 59–60). Since nothing in this world is in such a way, this world itself becomes a world of appearance. In Nietzsche’s estimation, the reason that this world is devalued is that, given their own desire for permanence, human beings condemn a world of impermanence while valuing a (concocted) world beyond time. Metaphysical nihilism, the two worlds of Platonism and its afterlife in Christianity, is nothing but a perennial temptation of mortal man in an attempted flight from his mortality. In other words, Nietzsche finds something inevitable about metaphysical nihilism since it is but an outworking of the fundamental condition of life itself, namely valuation. We value starting from where we are and so, as mortals destined to die, we naturally value immortality.
In doing away with the true world of timeless eternity and retaining only a world of transient becoming, however, Heidegger’s Nietzsche finds himself with a problem. Because he retains the metaphysical notion of truth as adequation with how beings ‘are’, then if beings are nothing other than becoming, nothing about them is ‘true’ (in the sense of permanent) other than their being something else – their becoming. ‘Truth’ itself is the first casualty of Nietzsche’s attempted abolition of the two worlds since he leaves truth in the metaphysical world that has been rejected. The only truth of the world, where truth is understood as identification of that which is unchanging, is that there is no truth; hence Nietzsche’s infamous claim that truth is but an illusion (Heidegger 1991, III: 64). Or, to put the point another way, the true world, in the sense of an eternally self-identical world, is not true (Heidegger 1991, III: 128). The true world is the world of appearance, but, given that appearing is only appearing in relation to fixed being (something which does not exist according to Nietzsche), ‘No shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance’ (Nietzsche, in Heidegger 1991, III: 129). ‘With the abolition of the “true world” the “apparent world” also is abolished’ and the two worlds of Platonism becomes world and nothing (ibid.: 129–30).
Because truth in Nietzsche is opposed to becoming (where Heidegger, by contrast, identifies truth as aletheia – as that which comes into unconcealment), truth has no place in the world. Instead, there is only valuation – including, of course, Nietzsche’s assertion that this is a world of becoming (Heidegger 1991, III: 65). If truth is only a holding-to-be true then it is a fixing of that which essentially flows; it is thereby not true. Truth lies, though we need this lie in order to live, in order to gain a hold on a world that, in truth, offers no holds (we would perish from this truth). ‘Life’, as what becomes, is outside of truth because it is outside of all fixity – it cannot be held on to because it ‘is’ nothing other than becoming. But if truth is a letting-be, a letting come into unconcealment (a-letheia), then this problem is avoided. Heidegger’s truth survives Nietzsche’s critique of truth because in some ways it concedes this critique and simply renames truth as what becomes.
But such an argument, though tempting, would miss the essentials of Heidegger’s position, whereby becoming (in Heidegger’s sense of what comes into unconcealment) is not understood in Nietzsche’s way as chaos. Nietzsche’s truth finds itself in trouble because all truth-claims consist in our imposing regularities (valuations are regularities) on chaos. But, as Heidegger notes (1991, III: 72), where is this chaos, exactly? When we look at our ‘world’, even if it is the narrow one of, say, the educational context implied by sitting in a classroom, then we find not chaos but order. Nietzsche’s ‘world’, like that of the entire tradition before him, involves a forgetting of Being: did Nietzsche not see the world immediately around him? Did he pay no heed to his ‘own everyday experience of this world?’
In addition, Nietzsche’s truth as a kind of error does not do away with truth since error could not err unless it was in a relation with the true (Heidegger 1991, III: 126). Nietzsche is saying that metaphysical (holding-to-be-true) truth is not true; but there is still the truth of becoming. In shifting the definition of truth from being to becoming, Nietzsche retains the metaphysical sense of truth as correspondence with the world. Becoming is a more true representation of what the world is.
For Heidegger (1991, II: 89–90), Nietzsche cannot think world, except in a fairly traditional way, because he is unable to think Being as the void. Nietzsche’s sense of the world as chaos aims at a description of world as perpetual becoming in opposition to visions of the world which give it an overarching unity or form. Yet according to Heidegger (ibid.: 91; see also III: 77–83), in seeing chaos negatively as that which lacks order (but this is a mistake that Nietzsche is wise to as early as Dawn), Nietzsche fails to free himself from the metaphysical tradition and remains closed to the originary sense of chaos as khaos. Khaino means to yawn, and Heidegger insists that khaos should therefore be understood as that which stands open wide, gaping: ‘We conceive of khaos in most intimate connection with an original interpretation of the essence of aleatheia as the self-opening’ (ibid.). Chaos is yet another Heideggerian term for the open clearing of Being. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaos, which though it posits a lack of order, must posit the necessity of this lack (‘The total character of the world [. . .] is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order’ as Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science [2001: 109]), Heidegger’s ‘chaos’ is pure potentiality.
Heidegger argues (1991, II: 92) that Nietzsche’s choice of chaos as a description of the world is an attempt to avoid anthropomorphizing being as a whole. The world is neither created by a good God nor by a purposeful demiurge. Any description of the world as cosmos, with its intimations of ornamentation, order and beauty, is a humanization. But so too are the opposite notions that the world is irrational or shaped by a drive for self-preservation (hence Nietzsche’s rejection of Spinoza’s conatus as still a teleological conception of world). Self-preservation posits some purpose or goal to beings as a whole that is lacking, while purposeless ‘irrationality’ only makes sense if there is purpose in the world to start with. Beings follow no ‘laws’ of any kind, whether moral or scientific, since law itself is a moral-juridical category that pertains to human existence rather than to the world. In fact, the world not only lacks purpose but also lacks any organic unity whatsoever. The world is not an organism since organisms require something outside themselves to endure. The world is both all and, by the same token, not One (Heidegger 1991, II: 93; see also III: 80). Rather than conatus, then, the being of beings is pure will to power: while self-preservation would put a stop to change, ‘Everything that lives is exactly what shows most clearly that it does everything possible not to preserve itself but to become more ...’ (Nietzsche 2003: 257).
Nietzsche’s chaos, then, is neither a naturalism nor a materialism but an ontology of will to power. But the will to power, in excluding all talk of purpose, acts in some ways like a negative theology in which nothing can be said of the world as a whole. Nietzsche’s world is thereby ineffable, holy even (Heidegger 1991, II: 94–5):
The most fundamental point to be made about Nietzsche’s notion of chaos is the following: only a thinking that is utterly lacking in stamina will deduce a will to godlessness from the will to a de-deification of beings. On the contrary, truly metaphysical thinking, at the outermost point of de-deification, will uncover that path where alone gods will be encountered – if they are to be encountered ever again in the history of mankind.
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche narrates a thinker whose thought overcomes itself. Having determined world as purposeless becoming, even these determinations are seen, in the final analysis, as humanizations which themselves ‘scuttle the concept of chaos’ that they were supposed to serve. ‘In that case we dare not propose any determinations at all; all we can say is nothing’ (Heidegger 1991, II: 95).
***
The real world is an outcome of the ideal world, having no standing independently from it. We do not first have the real world and then the metaphysical one that idealizes it. Rather, the real world is only the world we find ourselves in defined as lack – our world as it falls short of the ideal. Intimations of worldly reality, of what is real in the world, are thereby exposed as metaphysical. The real and the ideal are inextricably entwined; indeed co-constitute each other. We do not escape the ideal by taking refuge in the real but rather entrench the ideal even further through our forgetting of how it continues to determine our reality. As Heidegger argues also with regard to Sartre’s reversal of the metaphysical prioritization of essence over existence: the inversion of a metaphysical statement remains metaphysical. And so it is with Heidegger’s Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s true world, as a now chaotic inversion of a providential order, preserves the fundamental feature of this first metaphysical world – it is the same for all eternity. That the timeless truth of the world is now becoming rather than being remains a statement of the very being of the world, which now can only ever become.
Heidegger is not wrong to claim that Nietzsche struggles to free himself from the abyss of the true world. But where Heidegger finds only a very late realization of the depth of this abyss and hints that it drove Nietzsche mad, we have demonstrated that in fact all of Nietzsche’s mature works are marked by an awareness of the abyss of the true world. If Nietzsche is the last of the metaphysicians, then this is because, for all his temptation to plunge deeper into the abyss by seeking a truer truth of the world, he is able to pull back from it. Nietzsche points to a way out from the true world.
1As Deleuze notes (1983: 182), this is what, in Zarathustra, unites the beasts of burden – the Camel and the Ass. These creatures are defined by their acceptance of a reality that is only the desert. To affirm the real is to affirm only a consequence. This is why, and unlike the Ass who can only say yes, we must be able to say no, no to a reality that is only the consequence of nihilism. ‘The world is neither true nor real but living. And the living world is will to power.’ This means that, contrary to the beasts of burden who take on the heavy load of what is, to affirm is to unburden oneself of the real world so that the living world might live (Deleuze 1983: 184). Inasmuch as Nietzsche’s Ass can only say yes to the real, to all that is negative and negating, he is a creature of ‘terrifying conservatism’ and stands, in Nietzsche’s mind, for Hegelianism and its phantom of affirmation (Deleuze 1994: 53).
2Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 252) describes this spirit as his old arch-enemy.
3Already in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche (1962: 80) had described Plato’s thought of being as ‘the rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept of all’.
4Nietzsche 2005: 58.
5Despite this direct attack on Plato, Platonism is Nietzsche’s usual target. His position on Plato, as those who follow him (Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze), is more ambivalent: ‘to speak about spirit and the good as Plato did; indeed, one is allowed to ask, as a physician: “What explains such a disease on the most beautiful plant of Antiquity, on Plato?”’ (Nietzsche 2014: 2; see also aphorism 14 where Plato’s resistance to a world-explanation built on ‘the rabble’ of the senses is seen as admirably aristocratic: ‘in this overpowering of the world and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato’, there was a ‘kind of enjoyment’ different from ‘the one offered us by the physicists of today’.)