Without a doubt, the cynicism and pessimism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (should) go hand-in-hand. The degree of influence the former had on the latter is immense; even in the years where Nietzsche consistently slammed Schopenhauer for his conclusions, he commended him for his premises. Their conceptions of existence as Will, and life as being an attrition between the dead and the dying are some of many ideas they shared. In truth, the only thing they really disagreed on was what was good and what was bad. For Schopenhauer, pain and suffering was something to be avoided; for Nietzsche pain and suffering was something to revel in as it is a reminder that you are alive and finite in a void of death and infinity.
I, for one, agree with both. It may seem contradictory, but I agree with the two depending on the circumstances. If you were to ask me how I conduct my life, I would simply answer, “Nietzsche.” I live my personal life with the thought of impending eternal recurrence hanging over my head. I live my personal life happily, satisfactorily, like an epic narrative in which my corporeal body is but an aggregate of my projected self (i.e., the will-to-power).
Politically and societally, however, I am in staunch agreement with Schopenhauer. While I don’t advocate individual suicide, I do advocate species suicide. That is, I support anti-procreationism. For me, the subjective will of the individual is redeemable and justifiable because death is an inevitability. Death for humanity, however is not so certain. Suffering for individuals is what defines us as individuals. Humanity’s suffering, however, is not so easily vindicated. The finite subjectivity of the individual allows for a degree of transcendental intuition that the larger, more all-encompassing societies of mankind will never have. I simply don’t agree with Nietzsche’s master/slave duality, nor his concepts of the Ubermensch. Instead, I advocate the complete sterilization of humanity, the reconciliation of man with nature and the eventual dying off of our species into the quiet abyss. I just don’t think anything beyond the individual framework, be it religion, patriotism, or humanism, is worth fighting for.
Does anyone think these two philosophers can find reconciliation under the context I put forth?
There is much that needs to be rooted out in your post.
First, consider the relation, or presumed similarities, between the will to life and the will to power. All they share is a namesake. The will to life is the veil of maya, the transcendent Noumea in the form of of a single will to life manifested in man as suffering. It is the thing-in-itself beyond the phenomenal; Schopenhauer’s “ontology” is transcendent idealism. It is the ultimate pessimism, the idea that man is doomed to suffer by the very nature of things, and the only escape is exclusion, denial, and eventually death. Life must be denied.
On the other hand you have Nietzsche’s will-to-power, which is, if nothing else, meant to be empirically based. It is essentially in flux, it is the relation of ever changing and ever struggling forces. The will-to-power is not transcendent or Noumea, but is the manifestation of forces that with no independent existence. These are two very different ontologies at the level of assumption.
What Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s “will’s” have in common is that they are both essentially chaotic and full of suffering, but a comparison is tough because of the fundamental difference in their other basic assumptions. Nietzsche is saying that life is chaotic and full of suffering because there is a lack of order. Schopenhauer is saying that life is chaotic and full of suffering because of an underlying “order”. I use the term order loosely, perhaps determination would be better. It seems that they are not using the same definition for chaos and suffering. The commonality is again only in namesake.
I can’t make heads or tails of your second and third paragraphs, perhaps you could explain what you mean by “humanities suffering” as opposed to the suffering of individuals. I don’t see how the conclusion that humanity ought to die off follows from the idea that only the individual matters rather than the collective.
In truth, for me, it’s simply a matter of me disagreeing with Nietzsche on a political scale. On an individual strata, that is, how he defined ontology and teleology within the context of a single person’s life, I agree with him. The will-to-power is something to be fostered and catered to in order to achieve any happiness, authenticity, or satisfaction. However, I feel that, after making such a conclusion, he projected it outward into all ontological magnitudes, like society. He upheld the belief that only the strong and healthy should rule over the weak; since they disregarded their own innate suffering, why should they acknowledge the suffering of others?
Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer agreed that all of existence is marred by suffering, and that ultimately there is no objective means by which such pain may be redeemed or justified. However, Nietzsche simply proposed that throwing oneself into the proverbial fire instead of receding away from it was a more nobler feat. I agree purely on an individual basis. Why? Because we as humans are finite in thought, awareness, and strength and are equally finite in life expectancy; we all inevitably die. So we will imminently return to the nothingness we came from anyways, thus, there is no real reason to simply waste what time we have on life-denying pursuits; one should expand outwards as far as one’s resources permit, and die.
The point of contention comes in when one thinks of this on a larger scale. Governments, religious institutions, patriotism, and even humanism are manifestations of the will-to-power in the political arena (think of Nicholo Machiavelli). As such, one could apply the same philosophy, as promulgated above, to them, right? Wrong. We are a self-perpetuating species; that isn’t to say we’re self-perpetuating creatures. On an individual basis, our mortality is absolute. However, the propagation of our species and the continuation of governments, zeitgeists, epochs, and religions possess no such guarantee of inevitable demise. I’m sure you’ll agree, Nietzsche’s philosophy doesn’t quite work without the concept of impending death, of guaranteed mortality. The point of enacting the will-to-power is knowing full well that it will be destined to die. Without this death, the will-to-power is somewhat pointless.
Thus, I feel that since human procreation and the continuum of political agencies and entities don’t portray to us any sign or indication that they are on the path to consummation or singularity, they no longer exude the will-to-power. Instead, they’re very ontological persistence changes from the verb-oriented will-to-power to the noun-oriented will-to-live (i.e., self-perpetuation and sustenance). The best allegory I can think of is that the will-to-live is like sex without the orgasm (the will-to-power is like sex with the orgasm). What’s the use of persisting if there is no end in sight? Therefore, when it comes to society and humanity, yes, like Schopenhauer, I am life-denying; I acknowledge the futility of humanity’s existence. However, I refute the futility of our existence (yes, there is a key difference between us and humanity; after all, are we so pretentious to allow ourselves to be defined by species, a mere biological categorization?).
We are not humanity. We are not defined by the organizations we allegedly belong to. We are reciprocals to nothing more than the value of infinity. We are bound to our deaths.
I’m finding Gilles Deleuze far more fascinating. He’s unnecessarily underrated. Though, I think others are finally beginning to pick up his books after he’s been long dead and rotting in a grave; he’s like the Emily Dickinson of philosophy.
Life is not chaotic, or full of suffering, and there is no underlying order, nor is life disordered. Order is something we discover, and something we bring. The temperature in my house is relatively the same regardless of the heat or cold outside. It is because I have discovered some of the order of life, and have used it to order my life. For the most part, the physical world seems to have some order that can be discovered, but our understanding is not such that we can say exactly that there is an underlying order to all in the physical world, but only that it appears so. Yet, the bulk of our lives are lived in the moral world which is more like negotiating a complex game with few rules, and not much prize, but with a terrible penalty for losing. We seek order, but in some respects, we would be better off learning to adapt and enjoy disorder, because the variables and complexity of social living will always seem chaotic, and however much we formulate laws to govern behavior, the more rigid the form, the sooner relationships will break free.
I would liken life to a rollercoaster ride. I like to sit in the front so I can follow the track and brace myself for the forces I know will pull and push me about. If you haven’t got a free for all dynamic personality to bear against the free for all dynamic of life it will always seem like suffering: Too much, too often, too hard, too sudden and then its gone. How can anyone call it suffering? Suffering compared to what? Expectations? What do you put in to get your life that gives you some expectations? Its all for free. I can piss it away or spend it like gold. In the end it does not matter, so I would not call it suffering. I think it is great.
I’m not sure what is meant by fostering the will-to-power. Immediately, without letting you clarify, It doesn’t seem that the will to power is something that can be fostered or not fostered, as Nietzsche will claim that everything is the will to power. The Christian acts via the will to power just as the overman would. I may be nitpicking here, but the wording is off. If everything is the expression of the will to power, then it doesn’t make sense to foster it. Yet, there is a real sense in which Nietzsche would claim that the the overman is a truer embodiment of the essential nature of the will to power than the christian. A nobler life precisely because it is more authentic in an ontological sense as well as an existentialist sense. One must keep in mind that Nietzsche does not intend his philosophy to be for everyone, but for a particular type, with all other types playing their role. The ontological authenticity can only be existentially authentic for a certain type of person.
As far as the existentialist definition of authenticity, I see no reason why, for Nietzsche, the Christian cannot be just as authentic as his higher man or overman. In fact, it seems that much of Nietzsche pessimism comes precisely from the existential authenticity of the Christian, the herd instinct as an organic human attribute. The will to nothingness as being true to oneself, and giving one satisfaction and happiness.
How do these statements reconcile with the eternal return?
Life has meaning because it has an ending(death), yet Nietzsche’s eternal return has no end.
Who said anything about order? Or even sensational suffering? I’m talking about existential suffering here; even lavishly wealthy people with exorbitant accommodations and comforts suffer. It’s an attitude. It’s the idea that happiness cannot be achieved through external pleasures. That every action, moment, whether of suffering, whether of ecstasy is in its own right worthy of existence, ontologically sound, teleologically reinforced.
I think all of you are missing the point; I’m trying to propose why I’m an anti-procreationist; I want to argue with someone on that Schopenhaueran basis, not on more trite Nietzschean ideals. I’m finding Nietzsche-arguments mind-numbingly banal anymore.
Well, I’m no Nietzsche scholar; I’d just like to know where Nietzsche proposed those notions; I don’t necessarily disagree with you. It’s just, are there any aphorisms or even entire chapters of his books I have yet to read that point to such conceptions, or is it just your interpretation? If the latter, that’s totally cool; all writing, particular of his degree of ambiguity, are subjects to interpretation.
I like your promulgation that the Ubermensch isn’t to be idealized by everyone, isn’t to be sought after by everybody; i.e., the overman is not everyman. However, I need to ponder on it a bit more before making any gestures of adherence or refutation.
Eternal recurrence, of which I interpret as a concept that is not to be taken literally or as an empirically existing phenomena, allows one to see one’s life as being wholly redeemed, even in the face of eternal meaninglessness. If I am to reenact every instant of my life continuously, for eternity, then it is entirely justifiable by virtue of its very existence, its very will-to-power. It’s an idea, not an afterlife myth. It provokes notions on endless repetition like Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Procreationism (and other similar paradigms) presumes that humanity will morph and evolve forever; no implications of never-ending repetition. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence has no end, yes, but it also has no memory either, so the “end” is always perceptively absolute.
Sorry, I guess I should have quoted the lines I began with about order, and suffering. Look, I know rich people suffer. Never enough however to just ify the suffering they inflict. And since they choose their suffering, and suffering for others they probably enjoy it because it makes them feel alive even though they are dead tot he world. Ya, I haven’t got much use for Nietzche; but I am all for procreation. And I would inseminate the world if I had enough wine.
[quote=“Juggernaut”]
Triple post. Geez. I hit a grand slam with this one. Really though, Existential suffering? Does that leave a mark, or take band aids?