Nietzsche’s Struggle against Pessimism

Patrick Hassan’s book traces Nietzsche’s engagement with pessimism from its onset prior to the writing of BT, through the change of HH, and into his later works. The book’s governing aims are to clarify what the term “pessimism” applied to in German intellectual life of the 1860s to 1880s and to establish that Nietzsche’s understanding of and reaction to pessimism is not all about Schopenhauer. As the progenitor of philosophical pessimism, Schopenhauer naturally figures prominently in the book, but Hassan urges us throughout to remember that Nietzsche was living in the world of Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Bahnsen, Olga Plümacher, Agnes Taubert, Phillip Mainländer, and Eugen Dühring, that he read all these sources, often diligently, and that they are in the foreground of Nietzsche’s ongoing struggle with pessimism. In one respect, Hassan can be seen as taking over the baton from Frederick Beiser’s book Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford University Press, 2016), which dealt in detail with the Pessimismusstreit but stopped short of an account of Nietzsche’s relation to it. Rather than giving exhaustive exegeses of these less-studied contemporaries, Hassan strategically introduces their various claims in a way that illuminates Nietzsche’s arguments. The book is rich in detail (to which a short review cannot do justice), lucidly written, and well supported by evidence from the writings of the above authors, from Nietzsche’s published writings, and from Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks.Hassan catalogues various kinds of argument for pessimism used in the period. Some are peculiar to Schopenhauer (such as his argument that this is the worst possible world), some more widely shared, for example that there is no historical progress, that the world is inherently in contradiction with itself, that genuine happiness is impossible, and that our highest values tragically cannot be realized even though we must strive for them (the latter characteristic of Bahnsen). However, in fixing what pessimism was for Nietzsche, Hassan claims that “Hartmann . . . became the face of pessimism from the 1870s onwards, and not Schopenhauer” (48). Nietzsche first read Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten in 1869 and was influenced by it, negatively in the sense that he found it shallow and disgusting, but positively in the sense that it firmed up his conception of what pessimism could be as a rational, philosophical doctrine. Hence “pessimism proper” is the evaluative thesis “that life is not worth living, that non-existence is preferable to existence, for everybody, in every circumstance” (27), which is supported by the descriptive claim that suffering outweighs pleasure in any life, via the suppressed premise that “pleasure is the only intrinsic good, and suffering the only intrinsic bad” (35).Viewing the early Nietzsche in the light of these more immediate influences enables Hassan to cut through much of the tangle that can beset commentary on the ensuing BT. There is little analysis here of Nietzsche’s portrayal of the Hellenic world and little speculation concerning how much of Schopenhauer Nietzsche’s text really commits him to. Instead, Nietzsche’s agenda is firmly that of early 1870s Germany, where Hartmann and other contemporary pessimists were most concerned to combat quietism. They faced the accusation that once pessimism was accepted as truth, there was a danger of paralysis in modern society, a resigned or withdrawn lack of motivation to improve life or make social progress. Their neo-Kantian opponents could use Schopenhauer as their key witness since he had praised quietism as an appropriate and welcome consequence of philosophical pessimism. But one of Hartmann’s aims was to reverse Schopenhauer’s position: pessimism, Hartmann maintained, was compatible with, and even fostered, genuine moral progress. Bahnsen also wished to fend off quietism but otherwise took a different view: although moral ideals were not in fact realizable, the pessimist must strive heroically toward them. Hassan deftly presents BT as intervening in this debate and standing broadly in line with Hartmann and Bahnsen in seeking a way to show that accepting the pessimist descriptive thesis need not land one with Schopenhauerian resignation and the devastating condition of “practical pessimism” (BT 15). What distinguishes Nietzsche’s position within this pessimist landscape is that he does not disapprove of practical pessimism on moral grounds, instead undertaking “a reformulation of the problem of quietism in existential terms” (78), and that his solution to the problem lies in art.This insightful reading of Nietzsche’s first book leaves some more traditional concerns unanswered. Hassan discusses BT 18, in which Nietzsche contrasts three kinds of illusion (finding a kind of parallel with Hartmann’s drei Illusionsstufen, though for Hartmann these are sequential stages in the history of human culture). Nietzsche’s three cultural illusions are “Socratic,” “artistic,” and “tragic.” Hassan suggests it is only the “artistic” approach that “has the capacity to ward off quietism” (87). By contrast, “The Tragic approach is characterized by a Buddhistic striving to negate the will, producing a culture of ascetic resignation and quietism” (86). There is a difficulty here, since in Nietzsche’s trio of illusions it is the tragic that provides “the metaphysical consolation that beneath the whirlpool of phenomena eternal life flows indestructibly onwards” (BT 18)—it is precisely the combined Dionysian–Apollonian remedy against quietism that Nietzsche champions. By contrast, the “artistic” member of the trio, “the seductive veil of beauty,” is the purely Apollonian form of art that predates tragedy. Nietzsche uses the term “art” ambiguously, sometimes, as here, for something purely Apollonian (a concept not thematized by Hassan), at other times to include tragedy. Hassan does not fully explain Nietzsche’s reason for holding that tragedy, rather than art in general, provides the “metaphysical consolation” that wards off practical pessimism. There is also the issue of Nietzsche’s heavy use of Schopenhauerian terminology in BT. Hassan appears to adopt the now dominant view that Nietzsche cannot be presupposing “a wholly Schopenhauerian metaphysical framework” (73), but he later states that the account of tragedy’s metaphysical consolation and Dionysian ecstasy “clearly presupposes something close to a Schopenhauerian metaphysics” (89). How close, in what respects, and how the metaphysics is meant to be consoling are questions left hanging. Toward the end of the book, the message becomes more mixed still: “BT broadly accepts the metaphysical explanation for the ‘horror and absurdity of existence’ . . . in terms of a Schopenhauerian ‘Will’ as thing-in-itself” (222).An important innovation in Hassan’s approach is the emphasis he places on HH, which occupies two out of his book’s seven chapters. Nietzsche’s new naturalism in HH calls into question the status of metaphysics, and a newly worked out view of valuing leads to the claim that pessimism and optimism become meaningless since we cannot assess the value of “life” or “the world” in any general sense. Nietzsche at this stage holds that it may be possible that a world-in-itself exists but that metaphysical speculation about it is useless. To this Hassan adds an analysis of Nietzsche’s new view concerning value judgments, developed, on this account, under the influence of Paul Rée’s empirical method of “historical philosophizing,” but also of Eugen Dühring’s book, Der Werth des Lebens (1865). This last claim may surprise readers familiar with Nietzsche’s later disparaging remarks about Dühring, but Hassan gives evidence that Nietzsche made copious notes on Dühring’s influential book in the summer of 1875 and argues that what Nietzsche came to believe about valuing chimes well with Dühring’s positivist and sentimentalist views.Pessimism now emerges as incoherent. It attempts to assign negative value to the world in itself, but Nietzsche holds that any such judgment must be “unjust” because all evaluation is grounded in sentiments or affects, which are oriented by the drives of the valuer. Hassan notes that Nietzsche’s position in HH may be simply that we have no capacity to know the overall value of life. But he suggests an alternative interpretation according to which any such value claim makes no sense. This line is not unambiguously present in HH, although it is to be found in later writings. A further important point is that in HH Nietzsche does not lose interest in philosophical pessimism but is concerned with why it still has an appeal. Schopenhauer had been adamant that human beings have a need for metaphysics and claimed that his metaphysical pessimism revealed the “moral meaning” of the world. Nietzsche continues to recognize the draw of that vision and diagnoses that the loss of belief in it can itself be a form of suffering. This loss, combined with a sensitivity to the empirical suffering of the world, can lead to the danger of “despair” in a different way: “Pessimism as a claim to knowledge about the world’s value would be abandoned, but pessimism as a practical evaluative judgement may remain” (142). On the other hand, in HH Nietzsche temporarily abandons the notion, characteristic of the pessimists, that human suffering is an “innate and static condition” and flirts with the idea, characteristic of those on the other side such as Dühring and Marx, that social and economic conditions can be improved to remove a great deal of suffering.Moving into Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, Hassan writes that “[w]ith the publication of The Gay Science in 1882, Nietzsche’s attitude towards pessimism reaches its final form” (155). He identifies three forms of critique toward pessimism: “psychological,” “existential,” and “perfectionist.” The psychological critique has two facets: that philosophical pessimism emanates from a state of degeneration and sickness and that it manifests a form of revenge against the world. Here again Hassan documents the fact that the most common objection to pessimism in the period was that it sprang from a melancholic or disaffected temperament or a kind of physical and psychological degeneracy. Another neglected figure, the English psychologist and opponent of pessimism, James Sully, is invoked here (and elsewhere in the book). Nietzsche’s psychological critique can be seen as of a piece with these contemporary criticisms, his innovation being his use of the much-discussed drive psychology to characterize forms of health and sickness. We are given an account of “metaphysical revenge,” in which philosophical pessimism is a rationalization that serves as “the disguised outlet for taking an imaginary revenge upon life by projecting one’s sufferings onto the world” (175). Ressentiment is thus an attitude not just toward persons or specific social arrangements, but to life or the world. In fact, it turns out that this kind of ressentiment is not distinctive of pessimism because it is said to be the origin of all metaphysics as such, including those that posit “a better world beyond” (179). Hassan does not quite make this explicit, but the claim—plausible enough—must be that for Nietzsche the seemingly optimistic hope embodied in theistic or Platonic metaphysics is also a derivative of the same imaginary revenge that underlies philosophical pessimism. This leads to a treatment of Christianity as the pinnacle of pessimism (just as Schopenhauer said it was), criticized for “the morbidity and vindictiveness in its worldview” (187). Hassan argues that this critique in terms of psychological origin is more important to Nietzsche than that which stems from the debilitating effects of Christianity on “higher humans” and the like.The main themes in Hassan’s treatment of the “existential critique” of pessimism are nihilism, eternal recurrence, and art. He centers his account of nihilism on affective nihilism, which is a continuation of the themes of quietism, practical pessimism, and psychological debilitation discussed earlier. Hence Hassan argues that nihilism in the later Nietzsche should not be seen as separate from his engagement with pessimism. Eternal recurrence, likewise, is to be understood against the background of the Pessimismusstreit. Hassan follows a major recent trend in treating GS 341 as presenting a thought experiment meant to elicit an emotional reaction. Schopenhauer, Mainländer, and Hartmann had all used a similar idea as a “diagnostic tool” to foster the thought that no one would choose to live their life over again. (Hartmann’s case is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s and Hassan suggests that Nietzsche may even be parodying it [212].) The point is that while the pessimists saw the thought experiment as confirming the truth that nonexistence was preferable, Nietzsche instead treats it as a way of exemplifying the difference in psychological type between the sick pessimist and the ideal life-affirmer.Finally, in this chapter on “existential critique,” Hassan sees art as crucial to life affirmation from GS onward and is happy to see this as “a sharp reversion back to the view of BT” (217). This claim may be questionable. Many commentators have suspected that Nietzsche’s later formulation, “as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us” (GS 107), may be urging something different from the earlier “is . . . eternally justified” (BT 5). Hassan implicitly calls the one a repetition of the other. He attributes “aestheticism” to Nietzsche, “the view that aesthetic categories can be as action-guiding as moral values, and ought to be at the heart of our evaluations of typically ethical domains, namely, character, motivation, and action” (223). The aestheticist perspective is to be labeled “Dionysian.” But what are these aesthetic categories? Hassan mentions beauty, but rightly adds that Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetic experience is “an intoxication (Rausch) akin to sexual arousal” (226). If we have reverted to BT, we should be dealing again with two different phenomena, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Hassan appears to be invoking the former when he talks of “the power of art to mask the despair-inducing truths of reality by displaying them as constitutive parts of a beautiful whole” (217), but the latter when he refers to Rausch. Later, Hassan seeks to contrast Nietzsche’s view of tragedy with that of Bahnsen, for whom tragedy “pierces through illusions and vividly informs us of the terrifying nature of the world” (258). But how fundamentally different is Nietzsche’s view that tragedy in particular provides “not Apolline redemption through illusion but rather a representation of the fragmentation of the individual and his unification with primal being” (BT 8, emphasis added)? Hassan’s treatment of the aesthetic throughout the book could arguably be more fully developed.The central idea of the “perfectionist” critique is that the nineteenth-century pessimists are wrong to rest their claims on the assumption of axiological hedonism. This takes Hassan into some familiar themes in recent literature: greatness and the value of suffering. Hedonism, it is claimed, “inevitably leads to pessimism and nihilism” because it abandons us to the “barren emptiness of [a] relentless push-pull of trivial wants” (241). But if hedonism can be rejected, then the link between pessimism’s descriptive claim and its evaluative claim can be broken: life is characterized by suffering and can be affirmed. Hedonism is criticized here because it falsifies what is genuinely admirable about (some) human beings, namely their greatness, which Hassan cashes out in both internal and external terms, “harmonizing and controlling of one’s multitude of strong, competing drives” and “successful creative achievements that manifest will to power” (230). He adopts the common view that characterizes creativity in terms of will to power, as the desire to experience obstacles in the way to our goals.Finally, Hassan gives an analysis of Nietzsche’s rejection of the view that suffering is invariably bad. Nietzsche’s opposing view is “the pessimism of strength.” Hassan carefully analyzes the principle of organic unity and applies the distinction between parts that enable a whole to have positive value and parts that can themselves contribute positive value when in relation with other parts. He argues (plausibly, in my view) that the latter is the only construal that allows Nietzsche to attribute positive value to some suffering. It is not that suffering is always bad but sometimes part of a good whole; in some wholes it is not bad. Passages such as BGE 2 further suggest, in Hassan’s view, that Nietzsche holds a “variabilism about value generally” (251): nothing is good or bad invariably across all contexts. Hassan summarizes the perfectionist critique succinctly: “Nietzsche can be seen as occupying a unique space within the pessimism dispute. . . . Nietzsche endorses the claim that suffering is an intrinsic, ineradicable, and pervasive feature of the human condition. He simultaneously denies, however, that this entails the worthlessness of life, precisely by re-evaluating suffering in virtue of its contributing relation to the perfectionist good of great achievement” (252).Hassan turns us away from the prejudice that Nietzsche’s concern with pessimism is all aimed at Schopenhauer. But where does Schopenhauer stand in all this? Nietzsche singles out his “great teacher” as a worthy opponent but expresses only disdain for the other pessimists. Hassan argues that Nietzsche values Schopenhauer for his “vitality” and his creativity in constructing a philosophical position that raises a historically important question concerning human existence. The others are uncreative, derivative, sickly, and merely working out their “individualized sob stories” (196). A cynical reader might ask why, in that case, we should pay much attention to Hartmann and company. But Hassan’s book as a whole answers that challenge, showing them as influential writers of their time, with whom Nietzsche is in genuine philosophical engagement. Hassan finally makes an intriguing suggestion (which deserves more consideration): that Schopenhauer is distinct from the other pessimists in that for him hedonism is not a presupposition of pessimism but a consequence of it. In other words, for him it is because the world is an awful, irrational, will that as of it, are to valuing in terms of the pleasure or of our being or book makes in in the but its most distinctive is its and on philosophical pessimism and its of Nietzsche’s with an account of the Pessimismusstreit. The is a to on Nietzsche and nineteenth-century philosophy, which should be widely

Epistemology · Pessimism · Psychoanalysis · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology