What is the relevance of existentialism (Sartre and Nietzsche) to the philosophy of well-being?

The creative spirit envisaged in The Gay Science is thus one who, first, faces the truth as honestly as possible; second, tries to see as beautiful as much as possible of ‘what is necessary in things’, of the ‘course of nature’ and ‘its conditions’; and then, finally, falsifies those conditions that defeat this attempt – that is, turns ‘existence’ into an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ – to the least possible degree con- sistent with making life ‘bearable’.

4. Art and the self

In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche had floated the idea that the real task of ‘art’ is to make oneself tolerable to oneself (and per- haps to others) by beautifying, concealing or reinterpreting one’s own raw materials (i.e. one’s character).25 He revisits the theme in Daybreak, suggesting, first, that one should ‘reflect on one’s cir- cumstances and spare no effort in observing them’, since ‘our cir- cumstances do not only conceal and reveal’ our power ‘to us – no! they magnify and diminish it’ (D 326) – an injunction clearly related to Nietzsche’s insistence, discussed above, that one should attempt to judge correctly the ‘course of nature’ and ‘its conditions’. And then he remarks that, having reflected on one’s ‘circumstances’,

One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and . . . cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis . . . All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it?

(Nietzsche, D 560)

– an idea that is clearly continuous with the one expressed in Human, All Too Human.

It is only in The Gay Science, however, that Nietzsche’s thoughts about an art of the self acquire substance and focus (not surprisingly, since it is only there that art re-acquires real signifi- cance in his efforts to grapple with life after the death of God). And his thoughts on the topic are, in many ways, an extension of his thoughts about art in general, as set out in the previous section. Indeed, one of the passages that I have already quoted – namely,

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‘As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us’ – continues: ‘and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phe- nomenon . . . How then could we possibly dispense with art . . . ?’ (GS 107). So Nietzsche suggests that art – in the ordinary sense of works of art, or of the production of works of art – furnishes us with the resources we need in order to turn ourselves into an ‘aes- thetic phenomenon’, and so make us ‘bearable’ to ourselves. This suggestion is expanded upon a little later. ‘How’, he asks, ‘can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?’ And he answers: by

moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things round a corner and as cut out and framed; or placing them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives . . . – all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other mat- ters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life – first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

(Nietzsche, GS 299)

But the most complete and well-known expression of this thought is given in the following passage, which needs to be quoted at some length:

One thing is needful.– To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weak- nesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views . . . It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint . . . Conversely,

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it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitterly evil constraint were to be imposed on them, they would be demeaned – they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve . . . [But] one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art . . . For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

(Nietzsche, GS 290)26

Before attempting to unpack this important passage, however, we should get clear about what problem, exactly, Nietzsche’s art of the self, or art of self-stylisation, is here supposed to address.

The context, as always, is provided by the death of God. Before that event, we could understand ourselves as, essentially, immortal souls, as beings for whom two things are placed ‘high above’ all other considerations: ‘“revealed truth” and the “eternal salvation of the soul”. Compared to that, what are ornaments, pride, enter- tainment and the security of life . . . ?’ (GS 123). Under these cir- cumstances, in which we thought ‘that there was nothing of which men suffered more than their sins’ (GS 138), and believed that ‘“Only if you repent will God show you grace”’, every deed was ‘to be considered solely with respect to its supernatural conse- quences, without regard for its natural consequences’ (GS 135). Our concern for ourselves, in other words, was played out in a world in which the final upshot of that concern, its reason and vin- dication, lay somehow beyond the world, in the kind of ‘second, different existence’ invented (out of a bad intellectual conscience) by ‘the ethical teacher’.

Once the death of God is acknowledged, however, we have to understand ourselves, and so our concern for ourselves, differently. We must understand ourselves naturalistically (as all too mortal pieces of nature) and must therefore consider our deeds solely with regard for their ‘natural consequences’. We must repudiate ‘revealed truth’ and the ‘eternal salvation of the soul’ as the site and vindication of our concern for ourselves. We must, in short, find a way of living that satisfies, within the constraints of natural- ism, not only our need for ‘faith in reason in life’ – a need met, at least potentially, by works of art in the ordinary sense – but for

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faith in reason in our lives, mine and yours. And it is this need that Nietzsche’s art of self-stylisation is intended to address.

The discussion of the previous section should tell us to expect, first, that this art is to be done out of a good intellectual conscience and therefore, second, that its falsifications will be as modest as is consistent with making life – my life, your life – bearable. And these expectations give us a way into GS 290, the passage that chiefly concerns us here. We may note, to begin with, that the first thing that self-stylists do is to ‘survey all the strengths and weak- nesses of their nature’, that is (as Nietzsche would later put it), to ‘open their eyes to themselves’ (GM III.19), to be honest with themselves about themselves. So this builds in the intellectual con- science from the outset. The second point to note is that is that it is ‘strong’ characters who revel in self-stylisation, while the ‘weak’ resent the constraints that it represents or requires. This indicates two things. First, that since those constraints include the constraint of being honest with oneself about oneself, the exercise of the intellectual conscience requires strength of character. This is per- haps hardly surprising; but it is an important point, and is one that Nietzsche went on to make explicitly: ‘the strength of a spirit’, he suggests, ‘should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure – or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified’ (BGE 39). The other thing indicated by the strength and intellectual conscience of the self-stylist is that he honestly acknowledges the self-imposed constraints of his style, an acknowledgement construed by the ‘weak’ as self-abasement, as submission to servitude. The self-stylist must be able to see as beautiful, that is, not only ‘what is necessary in things’, but also those self-imposed necessities that constitute his ‘style’ – an undertaking which, because those necessities are imposed out of a good intellectual conscience, requires a kind of honesty of which the ‘weak’ are incapable. (A final thing to note: here, in Nietzsche’s insistence on the self-stylist’s need for ‘long practice and daily work’ at his task, is the re-emergence of another theme from Human, All Too Human, namely, the indissoluble connection between the best sort of art and the humble-sounding virtues of the ‘serious workman’ [HH I.163].) But these are all points that

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Nietzsche will take up again, and take further, in the writings con- sidered in Chapter Five.

The expectation that a ‘good’ intellectual conscience is involved in self-stylisation is thus borne out, I think. The second, correlative expectation is borne out too: Nietzsche clearly signals that the self- stylist’s self-falsifications are very modest – as modest, presumably, as is consistent with the attainment of ‘satisfaction with himself’,27

with making his life bearable. From this point of view, Nietzsche’s horticultural metaphors are well-chosen. To ‘cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beau- tiful fruit tree on a trellis’ is only possible, after all, given a willing- ness to work with the grain of the materials that one has available; one must judge correctly the ‘course of nature’ and ‘its conditions’. And the landscape-gardening images that populate the ‘One thing is needful’ passage point in the same direction. The self-stylist has learned exactly ‘what we should learn from artists’, in other words, and is engaged in rounding things off, in joining up his materials, so as to finish the poem. He is not engaged in a self-regarding analogue of the ethical teacher’s ‘invention’ of a ‘second, different existence’. The character to which he is to give style is, emphatically, his.

The foregoing is clear enough, I think, in showing that Nietzsche’s version of an art of the self is continuous with what he says about art, ordinarily so-called, elsewhere in The Gay Science. It is much less clear, however, in suggesting what such an art of the self might amount to in practice. We can say what it doesn’t amount to – for instance, that it hasn’t got anything to do with the more obviously self-serving kinds of self-deception: the intellectual conscience is fundamental to it, after all. And we can perhaps indicate what sort of thing a person’s ‘style’ must be, namely, whatever structure of (modest) self-falsifications is sufficient to render his or her life bear- able.28 But beyond that? It is hard to say. Here, though, are two thoughts. The first is that Nietzsche himself wasn’t all that clear what he had in mind, and that that fact became unignorable to him by the time he had finished his next work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The second thought is that, in his final writings, he did succeed in working out what, in The Gay Science, he might perhaps have meant by an art of the self. These thoughts are among those to be explored, or tried out, in the final two chapters of this book.

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one shape of the shadow of God, after all). And I suggest, and devote the remainder of this chapter to trying to show, that Nietzsche’s later thoughts about art, agency and the self can indeed be understood in something like this way.

4. Becoming who you are

The key idea here is that of becoming ‘who you are’, which Nietzsche had begun to take seriously some years earlier. An aphorism in the 1882 edition of The Gay Science reads: ‘What does your conscience say? – “You shall become who you are”’ (GS 270); and Nietzsche expands on the thought in a later section called ‘Long live physics!’. It is important, he says, not to take the deliverances of conscience at face value, as if their source somehow guaranteed their truth: ‘Your judgement “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences and lack of experiences’; indeed, ‘that you take this or that judgement for the voice of con- science . . . may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and have simply accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right’ (GS 335).

What is needed to rectify this ‘faith’, he claims, is ‘an intellec- tual conscience’, a ‘conscience behind your “conscience”’(ibid.) – a determination, precisely, to think about yourself, ‘to scrutinize [your] experiences as severely as a scientific experiment – hour after hour, day after day’ (GS 319). By these means we can

become who we are – human beings who are new, unique, . . . who give themselves laws, who create themselves! To that end we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order become creators in this sense . . . So, long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics – our honesty!

(Nietzsche, GS 335)

Thus, it is our ‘intellectual conscience’, our ‘honesty’, that both says ‘You shall become who you are’ and also makes becoming who you are possible.

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At one level, Nietzsche’s thought here is straightforward. One becomes who one is by getting to know oneself, and by getting to know the conditions under which one operates (‘everything lawful and necessary in the world’). One ceases, on the one hand, idly to accept falsehoods about oneself – for instance, that one has an infallible organ of judgement, one’s ‘conscience’, whose deliver- ances are somehow independent of one’s ‘instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences’ etc. – and one ceases, on the other hand, to accept falsehoods about the world – for instance, that it is governed by ‘providential reason and goodness’ (GS 277), or that it is somehow organized with human purposes in mind, or indeed with any pur- pose at all.21 At this level, then, one becomes who one is by hon- estly acknowledging, first, that one is essentially just an animal, rather than a creature with supernatural capacities, and, second, that the world in which one has one’s being, in which one must act and try to make sense of oneself, is a world without God. We nec- essarily misunderstand ourselves, Nietzsche holds, if we fail to acknowledge either kind of truth.

But we are more than merely animals. Unlike the other animals, we also have a ‘second nature’,22 a nature produced by culture. And it is this that is expressed through our practices, including those practices in which various misunderstandings of ourselves are encoded. An animal without a ‘second nature’ could no more mis- take itself for a transmitter of the ‘voice of conscience’, or for an inhabitant of a divinely ordered world, than it could enter into a contract, form a friendship, or go to war. Our ‘second nature’ is what makes us ‘interesting’, as Nietzsche later has it,23 and the ‘experiences’ that are rooted there are pre-eminently among those to be subjected to the ‘intellectual conscience’. In order to ‘become who we are’, then, we must be honest with ourselves not merely as pieces of nature, as animals in an undesigned world, but as pieces of ‘second nature’, as animals whose character and circumstances are significantly constituted by culture.

There are many ways in which we can misunderstand ourselves. We can, as it were, be factually wrong about some matter concerning nature or second nature. Or we can adopt, perhaps unconsciously, a perspective on such matters that systematically occludes or distorts them. Nietzsche is particularly interested in misunderstandings of

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this latter kind – in habits of thought that have the effect of making whole dimensions of ourselves and of our worldly circum- stances obscure to us. The most famous example, of course, is the perspective that Nietzsche diagnoses under the label ‘morality’.24

But that is a diagnosis that advances along several fronts: here, I will focus on just one of these, and attempt to indicate how Nietzsche understands the relation – obscured, he holds, by ‘moral- ity’ – between our becoming our own ‘creators’ and our being the ‘discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world’.

Two passages from The Gay Science that we have visited before are helpful here. The first is the one where Nietzsche speaks of the ‘great and rare art’ of giving ‘“style” to one’s character’:

It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan . . . Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime.

(Nietzsche, GS 290)

For our present purposes, four points are worth making about this passage. First, what Nietzsche is here describing is a form of self- creation, that is, a version of becoming who you are; second, this form of self-creation depends upon self-understanding, upon sur- veying one’s nature and identifying the strengths and weaknesses in it; third, weaknesses or uglinesses are sometimes removable; and fourth, irremovable uglinesses are to be concealed if they cannot be ‘reinterpreted’ and transformed. The first two points connect this passage directly to our discussion so far: becoming who you are depends upon the exercise of the intellectual conscience. And the remaining two points provide the connection to the second pas- sage:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

(Nietzsche, GS 276)

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The connection comes to this: becoming who you are requires that you distinguish between what is and what is not necessary in things, including yourself (a job for the intellectual conscience). What is not necessary, and is weak or ugly, should be removed. What is necessary should, if weak or ugly, either be concealed (‘Looking away shall be my only negation’ [ibid.]) or else ‘reinter- preted’, so that one learns to see it as beautiful, as a strength.

A distinctive conception of the relation between self-creation and necessity – whether in nature, second nature or circumstance – is implicit in these passages, and it is this that Nietzsche regards as obscured by the perspective of ‘morality’. He develops the point explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil. ‘Morality’, he claims, trades on an impossible notion of freedom. It encourages ‘the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance and society’. It encour- ages, that is, a quite peculiar conception of autonomy, according to which one is properly self-governing and properly responsible for one’s actions only to the extent that what one does is the product of ‘“freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense’, a freedom that is supposedly operative independently of one’s nature, one’s second nature or one’s circumstances. But this, observes Nietzsche, ‘is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far’; it involves the desire ‘to pull oneself up into exis- tence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness’. And – cru- cially – it encourages one to perceive in every necessity ‘something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure and unfreedom’ (BGE 21).

The truth, Nietzsche holds, is quite otherwise. As the self-styl- ization and the amor fati passages make clear, he treats necessities of various kinds as material to be exploited and, where possible, affirmed. Indeed, he treats them as conditions of effective action, rather than as impediments to it, and hence as integral to the pos- sibility of freedom, rather than as limits upon it:

one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom – the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm. How much trouble the poets and orators . . . have taken . . . – ‘submitting abjectly to capricious laws’, as anarchists say,

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feeling ‘free’ . . . But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety . . . and masterly sureness, . . . in thought itself . . . , in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws’; and in all seriousness, the probabil- ity is . . . that this is ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ – and not that laisser aller.

(Nietzsche, BGE 188)

So Nietzsche offers a picture of freedom that roots it explicitly in the ‘tyranny’ of ‘capricious laws’, which is to say, in the necessities that constitute our second nature.

Only someone who acknowledges the rules of language has the capacity – the freedom – to communicate in it. Only someone who acknowledges the laws of chess has the freedom to castle his king, say. Only someone who acknowledges the norms and courtesies of conversation has the freedom to engage in one. And so on, for any human practice at all. To resent such ‘necessities’ as a threat to one’s ‘“responsibility”’, to one’s ‘belief in’ oneself, to one’s ‘per- sonal right to [one’s own] merits at any price’ would be, quite simply, to render oneself impotent (BGE 21). Yet it is precisely such a resentment that ‘morality’, with its fantasy of freedom in the ‘superlative metaphysical sense’, expresses. Nietzsche’s point, then, is that if we are to understand ourselves as actors in the world as it is, we have to acknowledge that certain necessities are integral to our agency, to our ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’.25 And this is a form of self-understanding – a finding of the intellectual conscience – that the peculiar perspective of ‘morality’ necessarily occludes; which is one of the reasons why it stands in the way of our becoming who we are.

When Nietzsche says, therefore, that we must become ‘discover- ers of everything lawful and necessary in the world’ if we are to become ‘creators’ of ourselves, part of what he means is that we must determine which of the circumstances of our existence really are necessities. Some of these circumstances, for instance ‘moral- ity’, may appear to be or may present themselves as being necessi- ties,26 when in fact they are only contingent sources of self-misunderstanding: such circumstances are uglinesses or weak- nesses, and they should be removed. Other of our circumstances really are necessities. And, of these, some will be ineluctably ugly,

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and will have to be concealed or looked away from.27 The remainder, however, are to be understood – perhaps via ‘reinterpretation’ – as conditions of the possibility of agency, of freedom. And it is through the acknowledgement and affirmation of these that the discovery, development and – perhaps – the perfection of one’s capacities is to be realized. To the extent that those capacities are realized, one has succeeded in becoming who one is.

It is not surprising that Nietzsche should link this process to art and creativity. Artistry is law-like, in the sense that it is possible to go wrong, to make mistakes. Yet the laws against which these mis- takes offend often declare themselves only in the moment at which they are breached, indeed in the breaching of them. And this is why getting something right feels like – is – getting what one was after all along, even when one could not have said in advance pre- cisely what that was. In this way, successful artistry is also a form of self-discovery – it is the discovery, in the lawfulness of one’s actions, of the innermost character of one’s intentions:

Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his most ‘natural’ state is – the free ordering, placing . . . , giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’ – and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through con- cepts

(Nietzsche, BGE 188)28

– and this, in turn, is a large part of the reason why Nietzsche so consistently connects self-creation to having one’s own laws. In becoming who we are, he says, we become ‘human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!’ (GS 335); self-stylists ‘enjoy their finest gaiety . . . in being bound by but also perfected under a law of their own’ (GS 290); ‘the “individual” appears, obliged to give himself laws and to develop his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self- enhancement, self-redemption’ (BGE 262).

So artistry represents a limit case of Nietzsche’s understanding of agency.29 Like every kind of agency, artistry is possible only for those who acknowledge necessity as a condition of, rather than as a

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limit upon, their freedom to act. We misunderstand ourselves if we misunderstand this. But in artistry we also perpetually discover ourselves, as our actions express those ‘thousandfold’ unformula- ble laws which are, Nietzsche suggests, most truly our own. We become most fully who we are, as he puts it at one point, when we become the ‘poets of our lives’ (GS 299).

5. Art and the self

This gives some of the background against which Ecce Homo needs to be read, since much of it is devoted to explaining – or perhaps to dramatizing – how Nietzsche himself has become who he is. But Nietzsche does not merely present his life as a work of art; he pre- sents it as a fully achieved work of art, one that exhibits ‘masterly sureness’ throughout – that shows at every point his ‘sureness of instinct in praxis’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 6).

It is important to bear this latter point in mind, if the text is to stay in its proper focus. It can appear, for instance, that Nietzsche’s conception of amor fati must have changed since 1882. In The Gay Science, as we have seen, amor fati involves learning ‘to see as beautiful what is necessary in things’ (GS 276), which leaves it open just how much is necessary in things (an indeterminacy that is vital if self-stylization, for instance, is to remain intelligible). In Ecce Homo, by apparent contrast, we read this: ‘My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity . . . – but to love it’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, 10), which may suggest that Nietzsche now regards every- thing as necessary.

But this is misleading. His claim, rather, is that a great human being is one who has learned to see as beautiful every circumstance of his life, has learned to treat every fact about himself and his world as necessary conditions of his freedom to act and to create himself under laws of his own. And this achievement may well require that quite a lot that is true of him now has only become true of him because of (unnecessary) things in his life that he has changed – for instance, that he has cast off certain weaknesses or

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uglinesses that masqueraded as necessities: examples that Nietzsche gives in his own case include ridding himself of the con- viction that he is just ‘like everyone else’, of ‘a forgetting of dis- tance’ between himself and others, an ‘“idealism”’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, 2). Or perhaps the great human being has altered one set of circumstances in his life so as to accommodate another, as Nietzsche reports himself to have altered his diet and his environs in order to accommodate his physiology (EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, 1,2). Nor does this mean that he must necessarily have cause to regret the status quo ante, to want things ‘to be different . . . backward’. For he may well understand it as a condi- tion of his having arrived where he is now that he had to overcome things as they were before: ‘he uses mishaps to his advantage’, Nietzsche says; ‘what does not kill him makes him stronger’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 2).

The best way to construe amor fati throughout Nietzsche’s work, then, is as an ethical attitude towards the world, rather than as a (disguised) metaphysical thesis about how much of the world is necessary. Indeed, the only difference between 1882 and 1888 is that whereas in The Gay Science the presentation had been aspira- tional (‘I want to learn more and more . . . ’), in Ecce Homo the learning-process is presented as complete. He now (he claims) affirms all of his worldly circumstances: ‘How could I not be grate- ful to my whole life?‘ (EH, ‘On this perfect day’);30 and, in this lim- iting case, he achieves ‘masterly sureness’ in every aspect of his existence – he has ‘learned’, as Nietzsche elsewhere puts it, ‘to love’ himself (GS 334).31

These points bring out another strong continuity between the work of the earlier and the later 1880s, a kind of naturalized theod- icy that Nietzsche first airs in the section of The Gay Science that immediately follows the amor fati passage:

Personal providence.– There is a certain high point in life: once we have reached that, we are, for all our freedom, once more in the great- est danger of spiritual unfreedom . . . For it is only now that the idea of a personal providence confronts us . . . – now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best . . . Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness . . .

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– . . . it proves to be something that ‘must not be missing’; it has a profound significance and use precisely for us.

(Nietzsche, GS 277)

The ‘high point’, clearly enough, is attained when one has learned to affirm all of one’s worldly circumstances, when one’s amor fati is complete; and the ‘danger of spiritual unfreedom’ is posed by the temptation to believe that there must, as an explanation for this, be ‘some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every little hair on our head’, a supernatural source of ‘providential reason and goodness’ in our lives (GS 277). The danger, in other words, is that one will start to misunderstand oneself (to become who one isn’t) by believing that it is a condition of one’s freedom that there be a God who ensures that all is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds.

The truth, of course, in Nietzsche’s view, is that the condition of one’s freedom is not a benevolent God, but nature, second nature, and one’s attitude to these. If we are ‘strong enough’, he says, then ‘everything has to turn out best’ for us (EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 2), for which the credit should be given, not to anything supernat- ural, but to ‘our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events’ (GS 277). As an example, Nietzsche describes how his illness has had ‘a profound significance and use precisely for’ him: sickness can

be an energetic stimulus to life . . . This is, in fact, how that long period of illness looks to me now: I discovered life anew, . . . myself included, I tasted all good and even small things in ways that other people cannot do so easily . . . [Indeed,] the years of my lowest vitality were the ones when I stopped being a pessimist.

(Nietzsche, EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 2)

Nietzsche’s illness has turned out to be for the best, to be one of those things that ‘“must not be missing”’.

So if a traditional, more or less Leibnizian, theodicy seeks to show that every apparent evil is a necessary part of God’s benevo- lent grand plan, Nietzsche’s naturalized version of it urges us to find a perspective on our circumstances from which even the most

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grim-seeming of them can be regarded as indispensable to us. In place of Leibniz’s ambition to redeem the whole world from a God’s-eye point of view, that is, Nietzsche’s hope is that individual lives might be redeemed from the point of view of those who live them, from a first-person perspective.32

This dimension of Nietzsche’s thought is largely backward- looking. One is to look back and interpret one’s past as having been for the best; but one is to do so from a present whose character – whose rightness – is partly to be constituted by one’s success in this very enterprise. Of course, one’s past might need a good deal of interpretation in order to bring this off. It is not as if one had been all along the deliberate architect of one’s life – indeed, one must not be such an architect:

you [must] not have the slightest idea what you are. If you look at it this way, even life’s mistakes have their own meaning and value . . . [Here, know thyself ] is the recipe for decline, . . . misunderstanding yourself, belittling, narrowing, mediocratizing yourself . . . – the threat that instinct will come to ‘understand itself’ too early. – In the mean- time, the organizing, governing ‘idea’ keeps growing deep inside, – . . . it slowly leads back from out of the side roads and wrong turns, it

gets the individual qualities and virtues ready [which] will prove to be indispensable as means to the whole . . . Looking at it this way, my life is just fantastic [– the product of ] the lengthy, secret work and artistry of my instinct.

(Nietzsche, EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, 9)

To have turned out well, from this point of view, is to be able to interpret one’s development as the unconscious unfolding of one’s latent potential, as the gradual, invisible piecing-together of a coherent self. And the ‘happiness’ of such a development lies, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘in its fatefulness’ (EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 1).

In Ecce Homo, then, Nietzsche presents his life as a species of artistry, in several senses. First, his life as it now is is one that he can affirm in all of its circumstances; he has learned to treat every- thing about himself and his world as necessary to his freedom to act and to create himself under his own laws. Second, he has inter- preted his history in such a way that everything in it is ‘for the

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best’, so that his past unfolds like a work of art. And third, he attributes that unfolding to the ‘artistry’ of his ‘instinct’, since much that contributed to its course was not (and perhaps could not have been) consciously chosen. In each of these senses, Nietzsche portrays himself as the poet of his life, and hence as one who has become who he is.

So what – in light of this – are we to make of Ecce Homo? I sug- gested in the Introduction to this book that Nietzsche’s autobiogra- phy is not in any interesting or important way the product of insanity. But it may now seem as if the truth is if anything worse than that – that Ecce Homo is actually no more than a self-help manual, of a sort that endorses a peculiarly self-serving variety of positive thinking. It may seem, too, as if the demands of the ‘intel- lectual conscience’, upon which I have laid a good deal of weight, have disappeared without trace. One is, it appears, opportunistically to reinterpret one’s past in a way that makes it seem providential. And one is to take seriously the thought – the fantasy, surely – that one might regard one’s life as a work of art, and oneself as its moment-by-moment creator.

The first thing to say, and as I’ve already noted, is that Nietzsche remains fully committed at this period to the value of honesty and the intellectual conscience.33 Sections 50–56 of The Anti-Christ contain one of the longest discussions of ‘the service of truth’ (AC 50) in any of Nietzsche’s works, and he summarizes that discussion in Ecce Homo: ‘How much truth can a spirit toler- ate, how much truth is it willing to risk? This increasingly became the real measure of value for me . . . [E]very step forward in knowledge comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself’ (EH, Preface, 3). These are not the words of a witting fantasist, or of one bent on falsifying his past. Moreover, the positions – such as ‘morality’ – against which Nietzsche most consistently ranges himself in Ecce Homo, and which he labels ‘idealism’, he regards as ‘errors’ and as the products of ‘cowardice’ (ibid.).

But Nietzsche’s objection to ‘idealism’ is not merely that it falsi- fies the world – by pretending that there is a God, for example, or by pretending that freedom in ‘the superlative metaphysical sense’ is possible. It is also that ‘idealism’ devalues the world, by accord- ing the highest value to its own inventions, at the world’s expense

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and out of resentment against it – out of a ‘deadly hostility to life’ (EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, 8). And this means that Nietzsche’s own project also has two dimensions. One is to diagnose the errors of ‘idealism’; the other is to suggest how life and the world might still have value for us once we have refused to resort to supernatu- ral or metaphysical remedies. The thoughts canvassed a moment ago are an important part of Nietzsche’s attempt to engage with the second of these issues. They are, in effect, an exploration of the intuition, mentioned earlier, that ‘As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us’ (GS 107).

It is true that nothing could correspond to living one’s life, from moment to moment, as if it were a work of art. So in this sense, Nietzsche’s self-presentation does have the air of fantasy about it. But two points are worth making. The first is that, as I have argued, Nietzsche understands artistry as a limit case of agency in general, a limit at which one is, as it were, perfectly intelligible to oneself. And while it is surely true that that limit is not occupiable indefinitely, it is at least visitable from time to time; and it seems plausible to say that one is better off, by and large, for being closer to it than otherwise. And if this is right, it is hard to see why one might not try to imagine, as Nietzsche does, what it would be like if, per impossibile, one could occupy that limit for the whole of the time – if only as a way of dramatizing a regulative ideal. The other point is that the expression of Ecce Homo is often hyperbolic. In part, of course, this is just to say that it is exaggerated, and to that extent the present point is the same as the first. But hyperbole is also a means of self-deflation, a form of deliberate over-statement that is meant to be seen through, if not at once then at least pretty quickly. And from this point of view, it is not implausible to read Nietzsche as debunking his aesthetic ideal, as admitting that it is not fully realizable, at the same time as he dramatizes its realization.

So one shouldn’t worry about the essential honesty of Ecce Homo, I think. Nor is it very troubling to think that it might be taken as a self-help manual, as a promoter of positive thinking. Positive thinking is surely better than the reverse; and, if Nietzsche is right that supernatural or metaphysical remedies are hard to do without, it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that, in their absence, some self-help might be needed. Nor, finally, do the

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charges of self-servingness and opportunism seem well-directed. Nietzsche is explicitly out to serve the self; he says so repeatedly. And one can pointfully be charged with opportunism only when there are alternatives available to one. Confronted with some grim fact about one’s past, one can of course try to forget it; indeed, Nietzsche speaks warmly and often about the value of forgetting.34

But if that is not possible, it is scarcely opportunistic to try to see it instead as something that ‘“must not be missing”’, that has ‘a pro- found significance and use precisely for us’. To refuse to recuperate what one can out of life is to turn one’s back on it. And that, according to Nietzsche, is exactly what ‘idealists’ do.

In my view, the foregoing represents the most valuable strand in Nietzsche’s later aesthetics, as well as marking the culmination of a number of themes that had played a distinctive role in his thought since at least the mid-1870s. It is also, I think, a valuable corrective to that other strand in Nietzsche’s work – the one that issues in the thought of eternal recurrence, and that finds expres- sion in his notion of the Dionysian art of ‘becoming’. There, the role of art is to supply a (dishonest) fantasy that is to replace a reality that one cannot face – it is, in effect, to hold out the prospect of becoming an impossible (non-)self, a (non-)self that is insulated, as nothing can be insulated, from the very conditions of its own existence. In contrast to this, the art of exemplary agency, the art of becoming ‘who one is’, is, first, relatively modest, second, at least arguably possible, and, third, something that, if it can be done, can only be done with a good intellectual conscience. In each of these respects, therefore, this latter conception of art is not only preferable to the former, it seems to me, but is also authentically connected to the best and most distinctive of Nietzsche’s contribu- tions to philosophy as a whole. Here, in other words, is one way in which the shadow of the dead God might, at least potentially, be dispelled from within; and it is for this, surely, that Nietzsche should really have reserved the label ‘Dionysian’.

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Chapter 5

1 Nietzsche also prepared a collection of aphorisms, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in his final year (1888); but these are all excerpts from his ear- lier works.

2 See, e.g., GM P6. For discussion, see Ridley 2005. 3 For an excellent discussion of this passage and its implications, see

Clark 1990: 109–117. 4 It is unclear to which stage the metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy

belongs (stages 1–3 are occupied, respectively, by Platonism, Christianity and Kantianism).

5 Although there may be the odd exception to this claim – see section 3, below.

6 As Julian Young has rightly pointed out (1992: 117–118). My reading of Nietzsche in this and the next section is broadly consonant with Young’s discussion, which I have found very helpful.

7 See also, e.g., GM II.17, where we hear of ‘hammer blows and artists’ violence’.

8 See, e.g., D 560. 9 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Bk. I, section 5, 1952.

10 See Plato, Symposium 206b–207a, 1951. 11 Thus ‘Romanticism’, in Nietzsche’s usage, does not match the sense of

that term as it is encountered in standard historical or critical contexts. 12 The putatively ‘Apollonian’ artist is nowhere in sight in all of this. 13 Cf. TI IX.49. 14 As in Chapter One, the issue here is not so much whether Nietzsche

was right about Schopenhauer, as what Nietzsche took himself to have reason to repudiate in Schopenhauer. (For what it’s worth, and despite Nietzsche’s strictures, it seems to me that his views in this context are very probably either compatible with Schopenhauer’s, or else a good deal closer to Schopenhauer’s than he recognized.)

15 The final section is a quote from Zarathustra. 16 See also the preceding section, TI X.4. 17 We are, in fact, as Young also notes, back in the territory of the ‘child’s

play’ discussed in Chapter One. 18 The only references in Twilight of the Idols to eternal recurrence are

this one, and one made in the (closely related) section that precedes it, TI X.4.

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19 There is an extra irony to be brought out here. In Book V of The Gay Science and in the Genealogy Nietzsche diagnoses the scientism that underpinned Human, All Too Human and, arguably, the first four books of The Gay Science as a symptom of a less than perfectly good intellectual conscience, and concludes that faith in science must henceforth be strictly conditional (see, e.g., GM III.12). At the same time, however, he seems intent on ratcheting up the faith in art. From something that really was conditional in the 1882 edition of The Gay Science, he arrives, in Twilight of the Idols (and in Zarathustra), at a faith in it that appears to be absolute. So if scientism is dethroned, it seems that aestheticism is to take its place – a fact that tells us some- thing about the internal economy of Nietzsche’s own intellectual con- science.

20 For a detailed and provocative discussion of this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, see Conway 1997.

21 See, e.g., GS 109. 22 See, e.g., D 38. 23 See, e.g., GM I.6. 24 i.e. Christian morality – and, just as importantly, the reincarnation of

that morality in Kant. 25 Cf. TI, IX.38. 26 See, e.g., BGE 202. 27 Cf. BGE 39. 28 This is, in effect, Nietzsche’s version of Kant’s claim that nature gives

the rule to art, and does so via genius. The chief difference between the two is that, in Nietzsche’s case, it is second nature that gives the rule.

29 For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Ridley 2007. 30 Inscription placed between the Preface and the first chapter. 31 GS 334 provides an essential hinge between the notions of amor fati

and of becoming who one is. 32 Nietzsche does occasionally seem tempted by supra-mundane world-

redemption, especially when he starts talking about ‘eternal recur- rence’. But, as I suggested in the previous chapter, eternal recurrence is different from amor fati, and it is the strand of his thought that stems from the latter that concerns us here.

33 The wobble discussed in section 3, above, notwithstanding. 34 See, e.g., EH, ‘Why I Am So Wise’, 2; GM II.1.

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