"Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger"

Today i'm going to analyze this infamous Nietzsche quote, another of the 'Maxims and Barbs' from Twlight of the Idols. I chose to leave this out of the previous post because there is such a great deal more to say about it than the other maxims we looked at and it also serves as a kind of fulcrum for the rest of Nietzsche's thought; in short, it stands alone. The quote is thus:

"8. From the Military School of Life. - Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger." (Nietzsche, 'Twilight of the Idols' in The Nietzsche Reader, Ed. Pearson & Large p.456)


In order to make some proper sense of this, firstly let's address the glaringly obvious. Nietzsche most certainly cannot refer exclusively to physical strength; to become crippled with an illness like motor neurone disease or another illness which gradually destroys the body's physical functions, or at least wastes the muscles, bone and nervous system. Obviously, in this circumstance, we would not be becoming physically stronger in virtue of that which hasn't [immediately] killed us.

In a different case, however, we can consider that things which pose a threat to our physical well-being do indeed, in a sense, make us stronger: when we contract certain illnesses, we develop immunity to them; chickenpox, for example. We are at first incapacitated, but once we are well again we then have a new strength; there is something we have conquered, and shan't be confronted with again.

This second sense is the kind of making stronger to which Nietzsche refers, but it extends well beyond merely the physical. Every emotional downfall is an experience from which we take injury; our heart can scar. We have a choice between learning our lesson, or dooming ourselves to repeat it, and in more than one way; by way of recurrence of similar events, and by the eternal return of the same¹. But to learn from an emotional scar is not merely to become cold and nonreactive in the face of a similar emotional challenge, rather it is to analyze and reach understanding over why we were affected in this particular way, what our weakness was, and how the emotion served as an obstacle. If, to use the cliche of jumping hurdles, we crash through a hurdle, the lesson is not to ignore the pain and fault in our technique, crashing through each further hurdle; rather we must learn that it was indeed a fault in our technique, an correct it. Of course, conditioning our shins against future errors is also beneficial, since we will receive lesser injury the next time - but primarily we are interested in successfully clearing the hurdle, and not just being able to tolerate failure.

Another consideration would be through the metaphor of deadly combat. Every strike which would have, but fortunately did not kill us, allows us to learn precisely how to avoid, counter or parry such a strike in future combat. We learn our opponents' moves without falling to them. Not only do we increase our capacity for defense, but also have a new offensive move in our own arsenal. Our challenge and our obstacle thus becomes our tool and our strength.

There is one last consideration I want to make here today, and that is of suicide. For the fortunate, life may pass by entirely without a single moment of doubt as to the will to survive and persist. But for the many, great obstacles at least once appear which can bring self-doubt regarding one's capacities to proceed. As Alan Watts once said "the game has to be worth the candle". So the last application to think about regarding Nietzsche's aphorism is that perhaps we can force the game to be worth the candle; that, to a certain mindset - which can be cultivated as a great crop should the seed exist within us to begin with - the obstacles which offer less hope than the sweet release of death and oblivion can be conquered through a certain blind belligerence and stubbornness; a great deal of screaming "no" in the face of death and uncertainty; a summoning of a will to power regardless of perhaps unconquerable odds; to climb a mountain to which there is no peak.

Perhaps I am merely stating the obvious regarding this aphorism, and that it is really a reiteration of the old adage 'everything is a lesson to be learnt'. But hopefully I have offered a slightly more holistic account of what this entails, since it is easy to limit ourselves to just one of the above understandings.

I'll close today with a pseudo-dithyramb inspired by the views expressed here:




A poem with a self-referencing title by the author


With loving humility Hephaestus calls out:

"Sisyphus!
You must take action!
let not the boulder reach the top;
Become inspired and push, so that it may thunder down
And crash through the gates
of the underworld!"

What then for Sisyphus?
The gods that bound him
had not anticipated this sudden turn of events.

Footnote

¹compare to the analysis of the aphorism "Do not be cowardly towards your actions!..." in the previous post'

"Maxims and Barbs"

In this post I'm going to explore three of the aphorisms most heavily weighted with psychological and existential implications from the chapter "Maxims and Barbs" in Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1888). I'll quote them one at a time, and try and make sense of each of them within Nietzsche's thought. All quotes are taken from chapters 10 & 23 of The Nietzsche Reader ed. Ansell Pearson and Large, Blackwell (pp.  456-468).

Let us begin then:


"2. Even the bravest of us only rarely has the courage for what he actually knows..." (p. 456)

Obviously there are many meanings we can project onto this in light of the rest of Nietzsche's thought, so I'm going to try and tackle it in the most direct and literal sense here. Nietzsche is reminding us that the truth is often dangerous and challenging to our established worldview; we often know things or discover certain facts which force us to leave our comfort zone in a way we are genuinely unprepared for.

I think perhaps this is best explained with a hypothetical:

You are trapped in a room. An enemy army is working their way up the stairs to arrest, trial and execute you. You know, in virtue of the layout of the building, that your only hope for survival is to jump out the window, but you are on the seventh floor, and will most likely break your legs if you don't manage to fall properly, or grasp the building in order to climb down. The question Nietzsche is asking you, then, is "Do you jump, or do you hope you don't get executed?".

Let us consider another truth which we know Nietzsche holds dear, from his introductory fable in the essay Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) (ch 10 of the reader, p. 114):

   "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. - One might invent such a fable, and yet still he would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature."

Perhaps seen as a sign of Nihilism on Nietzsche's part (though on no account would I personally level that term as accurate here...), this fable tells us that Nietzsche holds the human race in no high status - on no pedestal - with regards to the content of the universe. We didn't matter before we were here, perhaps - and we will not matter once we are gone. This is a truth we all have access to in one form or another, but it would require a great deal of courage to embrace such a thing wholeheartedly, unashamedly and without regret. It is truths like these to which he refers in this aphorism.


Moving on...


"3. To live alone you must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. He left out the third case: you must be both - a philosopher..."(p. 456)

First let's consider the Aristotle quote, and then Nietzsche's expansion. To live alone requires a certain strength; an ability firstly of non-dependence on others for your well-being. You don't require someone else to feed you, to shelter you, and to nurse you through illness. You also must be independent of social interaction; your psychological well-being must not depend on the reassurance, validation or education of another.  Lastly, you must have no fear of death. For solitary animals, we might take it that all of these are the case. For Gods, independence is almost a necessary quality. So what is Nietzsche's addition, this third case?

Humans are a social animal. Again, referring to On Truth and Lies, we know that Nietzsche believes that "the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals" (p. 115), just like animals. But, unlike gods,           the human "from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all]" (p. 115). How can this second condition of man be reconciled with the necessity  for solitude of independence attributed to gods and animals? The answer: philosophy. Only those who can think in a particular way, define their own meanings and standards and derive their own conclusions regarding their position can ever expect to maintain a practical sanity in these conditions. Philosophy for Nietzsche, then, must simultaneously lower the status of man to beast, but raise it to the status of gods; to be below man's civilized attitude, but above his need to be a part of a herd; a cow that is wise enough to live in solitude.

Finally...


"10. Do not be cowardly towards your actions! Do not abandon them after the event - remorse is indecent."


What immediately strikes me about this aphorism is its congruence with the principle of the eternal return: if we were to repeat every action, every mistake over and over for all eternity, surely it would be better to not have to repeatedly suffer the feelings of regret and remorse in each instance; we would want to take it in our stride, so that a greater quantity of our eternal actions are pleasant and resembling growth, progress. However, I don't want to get too tied up in this, since there are more practical and accessible applications for this aphorism.

let's try and understand what the negative of this statement would be, so that we might come to understand why it's worth avoiding. What would it mean to be cowardly towards ones' actions? What would it be to abandon one's actions after the event? We have to consider two different time frames here. Once we have done this, it should be clear as to why regret and remorse concerning our actions is in poor taste.

 Firstly, we might be cowardly towards our actions before them: we might be afraid to do either what we want, or what we feel we ought to do; we might observe obstacles and challenges, consequences and results which pose a threat - a serious danger - to some aspect of our lives. As a result, we might act overly-timidly; acting with too greater caution to actually bring about the desired effect. Let us call this being cowardly towards our actions.

Being cowardly towards our actions

 An example might be something like hitting a nail into a very soft piece of wood; we are afraid that if we strike the nail with the hammer all too hard, we will shatter the piece of wood, not only failing to achieve our goal but also destroying a valuable resource for our ends. To be cowardly towards this action then would be to either avoid hitting the nail in the first place, and thus guarantee we don't achieve our goal, or it might be the case that, in our timidness we strike the nail so softly that it completely fails to penetrate the wood at all. Should we continue striking in this manner, we will never get the nail into the wood, and our goal will be forever at a distance which we will never even begin to close.

Both of these outcomes are bad, but perhaps there is something worse about the latter: rather than shying away from the act entirely, we expend energy and time trying to achieve a goal, all the while never having the courage to properly take the first step - like committing to trying to climb a mountain, but forever leaving one foot firmly on the ground. In short, wasting our time in an absurd and pitiful way, never overcoming an obstacle, never improving, and most certainly never edging even the slightest bit closer to our goal. At least with the former we might find ourselves free to act toward some different goal, with greater effect.

Now let us consider this from the other temporal direction: abandoning the act after the event. Let's assume we weren't cowardly to start with, but were over-zealous, striking the nail so hard as to shatter the wood. We have made a fool of ourselves, and also destroyed our precious resource. Now we are ashamed of ourselves; we regret our actions; we feel remorse; we wish we hadn't acted in the first place. Let's call this being cowardly away from our actions.

Being cowardly away from our actions


To be able to truly escape our mistake would require one of two things: either that we could change the past and undo the mistake, or that we might erase it from history entirely, and start again. Both of these are impossible. The next best thing then is to forget the mistake; to pretend that it didn't happen - to run away from it. I think it's obvious as to why this would be to our detriment; if we were to forget, we would not remember how hard of a strike is too hard; we might repeat our mistake, once again submitting ourselves to shame, once again feeling remorse, and once again forgetting, locking ourselves in a vicious cycle of failure and regret.

Perhaps then this is precisely why Nietzsche's alternative title for Twilight of the Idols is: "How to Philosophize with a Hammer".

Resentment, Forgiveness, and evil

Today I'm going to do a little unpacking of a couple of Nietzsche passages from his essay "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad" from the polemic 'On The Genealogy of Morality'. He talks a lot about resentment, using the french term "ressentiment", and I want to get a little more to grips with this concept before we move on to the close reading of the whole essay.

"The beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of thoe beings who, being denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying 'yes' to itself, slave morality says 'no' on principle to everything that is 'outside', 'other', 'non-self': and this 'no' is its creative deed."

(Nietzsche, 1887, First Essay, '10')


"The 'well-born' felt they were 'the happy'; they did not need first of all to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, or in some cases by talking themselves into it, lying themselves into it (as all men of ressentiment are wont to do); and also, as complete men bursting with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew they must not separate happiness from action - being active is by necessity counted as part of happiness (this is the etymological derivation of [Greek: gennaios, noble, high-minded]) - all very much the opposite of 'happiness' at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, and those rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it manifests itself as essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, 'sabbath', relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive." 

(Nietzsche, 1887, First Essay, '10')

Both these quotes are taken from "The Nietzsche Reader", ed. Ansell Pearson & Large (pp. 400-401).




The noble-minded are triumphantly saying yes to themselves.

The slave-minded are harming themselves, rather than saying "yes" to themselves they say "No" to everything that isn't them!


The title of the essay is key: "Good and Evil,"Good and Bad". For the noble minded, the good - bad distinction is like that of skill; good at being alive, or bad at being alive. For the slave-minded, those who are better at being alive than they are become considered "evil", to grant themselves an imaginary status as 'good'!


The noble-minded know when to forgive; when it is appropriate. It is a true power. There is no real discussion of a duality between "good and evil", rather, "good and bad", where "bad" simply means "inappropriate", is already known - it is what grants them their status of nobility. They know themselves as 'the happy', because they know how to behave appropriately in order to attain the greatest results.

The slave-minded resent, because it gives them a sense of power, which is entirely illusory. They need to deny that their social superiors are 'good' in any way, so they attribute a false notion of 'evil' to them; "we suffer, but we are good... they thrive, but they are evil!", thus there is a further necessity of some kind of arbiter of justice, supernatural (God, Karma) or otherwise (revolt). 


For Nietzsche, the noble-minded accept enemies and opponents. In a way, they love their opponents more than their friends, because their opponents challenge them, they allow the game to take place.

Without opposition, there's no challenge, no game, no fun. You can't play chess on your own! Forgiveness, then, is born out of respect for the challenge the opposition presents.

But for the slave-minded, the opponents are oppressors, unconquerable purveyors of unfair / unjustified suffering unto them. The game isn't fun; it's not even a game. To the slave-minded, life is all too serious; they have forgotten how to dance.

Zarathustra's first descent from the mountain [Youtube clip]

So far in this blog, I've sketched out some preliminary thoughts about the übermensch (http://tinyurl.com/bluslzd), and also reviewed the only Nietzsche movie of which I'm aware (http://tinyurl.com/bldrw42). Now, I'm going to give you a clip from youtube, from the film, which combines these two together!

Enjoy.

Appropriate Requital

Nietzsche's understanding and reference to the concept of requital in the essay "Good and Evil", "Good and Bad" In On the Genealogy of Morality is key to understanding his notion of slave morality; the manner, style and ethic behind one's requital of the behaviour of others is what distinguishes the noble-minded from those in resentment-mentality.

This poem is a little attempt to capture this notion.


Appropriate Requital
---------------------

So yeah some guy did some thing to you and you're telling me now
I'm totally happy to listen, i'd do the same
But really, do you think you remain in the right? How?
Do you think he's complaining in the same inane way?
Or perhaps do you feel you should have - or still ought to - act?
The means by which you ask me to measure or condone your intentionally
Are far from exact.

Is it not then perhaps the case,
that given your position now, and its rather neglible effect on time and space,
That even such action as your current complaining is the very thing you sought?
And there is quite an interesting thought;
Did you want to complain about that thing
before or after its happening?
I await your retort.

Do you envy cows?

A poem inspired by Nietzsche's obsessive contrasting between humans and cows...


The heiffer in field lacks no resource,
as food comes round as part of course;
Since flood and drought bring drink and thirst,
neither's blessing, neither's curse.

All promise broken, as is made;
All light and dark, so only shade;
All challenge welcome, all rest enjoyed;
All din as peace, all silence noise.

We think the cat sleeps at its leisure;
we see birds fly as though they're free;
But is the cat's dream based in pleasure?
Does wind not stunt flight's liberty?

Suppose that cows knew only bliss
Without death seen as some abyss;
at first you'd think your life unfair;
That you alone can feel despair;

"Why should i not be so free
to share bovine simplicity?"

But have you seen cows laugh or cry?
Or is their humour all too dry?
For cows do nought but eat and fart
While we turn trials into art!

The cow does nothing whilst it's free;
Such is our tragic comedy.


Feel free to comment, I'll reply. Always willing to talk to Nietzsche enthusiasts!

Eternal Return Poems

A pair of poems concerning the eternal return.


The Eternal Return



... What if i told you you've read this before?
Pretend for a while that it's not absurd
That for now and ever more
You'll eternally return to read these words?

Holster reserve, for this new learning curve
Has a peculiar force on the nerve;
It has as much puzzle as it has resolve;
But given enough time your mind will evolve

To ask

What is the distance between nows and agains?
         (this thought causes such strain on our brains)

If you don't know the answer then to you it I give:
It's equal to the number of years that you live ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The eternal return part II: Haiku


...Welcome back to now.
Once is as good as always;
off you go again!...