Nietzsche’s Life Affirmation

 

Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Jan. ’78

“Movement away from ego,” although not as pronounced as in Kierkegaard
and Heidegger, was still existentialized in the philosophies of
Nietzsche and Sartre. Just how much distance opened between the
“acting agent” and the agent’s ego in each of these respective
philosophies was debatable, but it was there nevertheless. Also, the
concept of nothingness played a major roll in each of these
philosophies, perhaps more in Sartre than in Nietzsche, but, even so,
Nietzsche too actualized the ego’s relationship to nothingness.

Nature had a lot of meaning for Nietzsche, but only in so far as it was
understood as the “will to power.” The will to power was not
selfishness; rather it took the form of
the life-affirming meaning of an impersonal will to power. Nietzsche
said, “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion
what one is.” For Nietzsche, a solitude of sorts was necessitated by this ability to
continually affirm life. Physical solitude was admirable, but
Nietzsche’s solitude was different, a more extreme kind.
Life became affirmed at the expense of self. Life affirmation
brought with it an unavoidable upsurge of nihilism, and this nihilism
replaced the self. (This was not the same thing as purging oneself in
a protest against life. That was the way of decadence and Nietzsche
would have nothing to do with that kind of self-sacrifice.) In
life-affirmation only awareness remained, and that too got affirmed.
In life-affirmation, the “how’s,” “what’s”, and “why’s” lost all
validity. The values of unity, purpose, reason, faith, etc. vanished
when in the presence of this affirmation. Only a “yes” was permitted,
a “yes” to life, a “yes” to subjectivity, a “yes” to nothingness.
Nietzsche, in his characteristically one of a kind style, went
“outside” to get “inside.” In his pursuit of the will to power, he
ended up at the base of subjectivity, which he called by the name
“eternal recurrence.”

To be fair, a lot of negative stuff has been said about Nietzsche.
Some of it is probably true. That negativity, however, becomes
somewhat muted when you consider that Nietzsche’s nihilism is not
skepticism, it is not an attack on differences; it is the destruction
of everything and, as such, is the affirmation of everything. His will
to power necessitates a constant appeal to oneself, and, in the hands
of his Ubermensch, that appeal gets expressed in the form
of “That Which Must Be Overcome.” In the hands of the
rabble (Nietzsche’s terminology) that “appeal to oneself”
disintegrates into mere aggression, tyranny, violence, brutality and war.
In Nietzsche, the power to destroy is transformed into the power to create.
“Only among men of highest nobility,” says Nietzsche, “is it possible to
successfully exist with a steady ‘yes’ upon one’s lips;” In other words,
Nietzsche’s Übermensch was a goal for humanity to set for itself.