In the Twilight of the Idols Friedrich Nietzsche states the following concerning the value of life: The consensus of the sages–I comprehended this ever more clearly–proves least of all that they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they themselves, these wisest men, agreed in some physiological respect, and hence adopted the same negative attitude to life–had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one’s fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life is thus an objection to him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men–they were not only decadents but not wise at all? [Emboldened font by me]
If judgment values concerning life cannot be estimated, then we cannot determine whether evil is ultimately justifiable or not.
I agree with your conclusion, Felix. Though if you’re going to approach the issue from that angle I’d add that we cannot determine whether good is ultimately justifiable or not. Good and evil are both judgments, and though this strikes me out of context as one of Nietzsche’s more bungled passages, I think the point we can fruitfully take from it is that our lives are lived in interdependent relationship with others, the physical world, our pasts, etc. We don’t ever stand outside our own context, in order to objectively observe. No “wise” person or wise person ever has. Living is taking chances.
Oh, right. If judgment values concerning life cannot be estimated, then we cannot determine if life is ultimately good either. I’m just considering whether I should file this in my “Known Unknowns” folder. Wondering too if it is an argument from ignorance against the problem of evil for the existence of an omnibenevolent God. If we are not in a position to evaluate life then we can’t know if there is an ultimate “greater good” that justifies whatever amount of evil there is in the world.
Nietzsche himself seems to be moving toward Sartre’s “condemned to be free” conclusion which is compatible with yours I suspect.
Yes… I understand how you do that. Nietzsche drifting toward a sort of Sartre’s position would be that, having no knowledge to conform to, therefore one is free and can only be free. Anybody then sets his/her own values and no opinion can objectively be deemed better than another.
Is that what Nietzsche says? Is that what beyond good and evil means?
I guess not. Putting that differently, there is no “vacuum”, not for Nietzsche.
Looking more closely to your quote (TI, The Problem Of Socrates, 2), Nietzsche’s position seems very different to me – and even more if one looks to the subsequent aphorisms.
The pretension to have the rational means to assess the value of life cannot be explained – according Nietzsche – on the basis of a sound philosophical research, because it shall then appear a foolish task:
The rational inquiry cannot live up to its undertaking if it is oriented to a knowledge that it can’t attain: «Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true» (my italics). Values can’t be an object of knowledge, there is no knowledge that “justifies”, there is no redemption in knowledge – redemption comes from elsewhere (from man – from life, more specifically).
I can understand that this is seen as little more than a postulate, Nietzsche doesn’t do much to explain why is that. Saying that the living is an “interested party” does not really explain why these judgements are impossible – and, if Anon wants to say that this is some «bungled passage», I guess it is legitimate to see it that way.
However, that knowledge has limits and that knowledge of being is unattainable, it is a known Nietzschean position. So, if this extends, a fortiori, to judgements of value, Nietzsche cannot be accused of being inconsistent. But one needs not to use this argument. Instead it is sufficiently clear Nietzsche maintains that the very idea of rational assessments establishing values is not only illusory, it is deeply mistaken. Of all claims of knowledge these specific ones are just (epistemologically) absurd and (psychologically) stupid. It is not a judgement that cannot be made, rather it is a judgement that should not be attempted at all.
Yet these judgements have been made and this is the problem under scrutiny. It’s the starting point of Nietzsche’s enquiry, it is not the conclusion – so I can’t agree with «free and loving it», we are just getting started.
If this endeavour is futile and doomed to failure, as Nietzsche thinks, the problem becomes why so many people think that these judgements are the core business of philosophy. Which leads to an analysis that nowadays one would maybe define structuralist.
However, it has to be clear that Nietzsche is not here denying that philosophy has a question about the value of life at its center, the focus here is on why this judgements have been believed to be an answer, which Nietzsche translates into an analysis of when (the idol) dialectic has been deemed to be the key tool of knowledge. And Nietzsche’s conclusion is that such a paradigm (which, borrowing from Hegel, can be subsumed by «What is real is rational and What is rational is real») is the intellectual epiphenomenon of a physiological degeneracy, of which Socrates was the archetype.
The sages, who «adopted the same negative attitude to life », are cast by Nietzsche into «types of decline». That is not an incident, it’s a widespread condition (else they would not be characterized by the term type). So much so that Nietzsche «recognized Socrates and Plato to be symptoms of degeneration, tools of the Greek dissolution, pseudo-Greek» (see also aphorism 9).
There is no freedom implied by the fact that judgements about the value of life cannot be true.
These judgements are functional of specific (sick) physiological outfits, and only in that respect they become knowledge, as objects worth of (scientific) knowledge. So, in this respect, there is a vacuum: their vacuum. Their lack of vital force substituted by dialectics. Their decadence is the root of their need to find out a knowledge of the real to which they can conform - because they can but conform - and that pretended knowledge is again responding only to their inner weakness (on this I guess that the Preface to the second edition of the Gay Science provides some other valuable elements).
If I’m not mistaken, I think I basically agree with attano. But his post is kind of dense and he probably knows Nietzsche better than I do. And I’m very tired and why am I still at work?!
I should stop feeling guilty about dropping the ball for lack of time!
A living being is part of the phenomenon called “life”. As such, it cannot make a true value judgment of that phenomenon, for that would be like an eye’s beholding itself. An eye can never behold itself, but at most an image of itself. A philosopher’s seeing a problem in the value of life means his making a judgment of value against life: if life has a negative value, it is a problem. But his attaching a negative value to life says nothing about life as such but only something about himself: namely, that he is a decadent.
Thank you for your fine synopsis. It seems Nietzsche was clearing the ground for a philosophy of life. [Or clearing the ground of philosophy for life.] Unfortunately, he stopped short with determinism. IMO, he should have admitted that while the matter is uncertain, freedom of will best accounts for our expereince at his time and ours still. That being the case, we may be free to choose our own value given that the value of life is indeterminate. Affirming life is a choice in itself.
If life can’t be evaluated, how does he know the negative judgments are wrong? He was psychologizing. He should have stuck with his original title for the book.
I may be just showing my ignorance here, but the fact that someone tries to evaluate an experience which is ongoing seems to be ridiculous. And whether life can be given a value begs to ask, why ask the question? The answer seems to be in discriminating life of value (lebenswert) and life which is ascribed no value (lebensunwert) after which one either allows or disallows that life to continue.
At the end of life we may be able to evaluate our experiences, but to evaluate life itself with all of its potential is hardly within one human beings range of competency. So much from a non-knower.
[size=95]“[E]ither no will—the hypothesis of science—or free will. The latter assumption the dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose, even if the scientific hypothesis were proved true.” (The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 667.)[/size]
No will—the replacement of the concept “will” by the concept “force”—is the hypothesis of science because free will is a logical absurdity: it would be a self-cause, like Baron von Munchausen’s pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair. The doctrine of the will to power is a form of the hypothesis of science that takes account of said “dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose”: see http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2391222#p2391222 ff.
We are not free to choose our own value. The value we attach to life—i.e., not to mere survival but to the whole phenomenon of life, including death—betrays our own actual value. “[T]he doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact[.]” (Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)
A negative judgment on life, a rejection of life as a whole, also rejects itself; a positive judgment on life, an embracing of life as a whole, also embraces itself.
Okay, I could bring this down to specifics, like fixin’ my broken chainsaw, but I’ll say this. as I understand it, or in my terms:
The awareness reading these words right now is “life.” Digging into all the philosophers/philosophy, and even Nietzsche, gains only knowledge about life, at best.
Then, what the hell am I doing? I should be living life … and fixin’ me chainsaw; so I can cut parts of the world into small pieces, to put in my stove, to heat my house, and poison the air with greenhouse CO[size=50]2[/size]. Live now die later.
But can Nietzsche or Socrates, or any of 'em, or any body, tell me why I’m here … not just here on this forum, nor at this keybd, but why the awareness writing and reading these words right now is here???
Maybe I should live life and not worry about it. Any answer would be decadent.
Knowledge is not about life, far from it. Nietzsche views knowledge as a problem for life. The life of the man of knowledge is in constant peril.
If truth is the outcome of knowledge, Nietzsche finds that truth is deadly – and we do know “facts” somehow: science. (GS 344, BGE 230,…).
People may stress that science is interpretation, yet one cannot interpret freely, according to his wishes – and definitely not the philosopher, definitely not Nietzsche.
No, Nietzsche can’t. This world is not about yourself – and there’s no other world.
You have your part in the play, you are your part in the play - and nothing else.
Is the play a comedy or a tragedy? It is what it is and all that is. Yet – paradoxically – what it is depends on you (BGE 150) - but what you are does not depend on you… nor you depend on circumstances, you are just part of circumstances, you are just one of them. You shall perform as you have to.
You can believe you can change it, you can believe in possibility - «Even the thought of a possibility can shake us and transform us; it is not merely sensations or particular expectations that can do that! Note how effective the possibility of eternal damnation was!» - but knowledge would never support such a belief. And if belief is “taking something for true”, knowledge says that such a belief is unfounded.
Maybe I can contribute here.
I can understand this perception of a predicament here, I share it too to some extent (but I am not going to discuss that).
There is however one short analysis that may help to understand why Nietzsche qualifies these judgements as “stupid”.
There’s a fragment, quoted in Heidegger’s Nietzsche (I could not retrieve it and I am just using my memory – my apologies if I happen to recall it wrongly), where Nietzsche states that error begins with the living. Most probably Nietzsche hadn’t this in mind, but I guess that it is possible to portray the living condition with a sort of relativistic image: in the knowledge space the living is a mass bending the world around it. There’s no intention, the living is structurally determined to form its own world, to bend everything in order to form the conditions sustaining and favoring it. This may be also rendered by saying that the living is structurally determined to form knowledge according to the knowledge’s value, which is – according to Nietzsche - how much that knowledge fosters living.
So the judgements about the value of life are not wrong because they are false, but there is a logical problem in predicating the value of life, it means assessing the value of life for life itself, it means assessing if life fosters life.
Thus a man cannot judge life, rather, if one’s to engage in this kind of judgements, one should judge his value for life, how much he is valuable to life, how much he sustains and promote it.
