The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  We would not expect Nietzsche to believe in divine grace as the healing power for the Will's duality. What is unexpected in the above description is that he detected in the "consciousness" of the struggle a kind of trick of the "I" that enables it to escape die conflict by identifying itself with the commanding part and to overlook, as it were, the unpleasant, paralyzing sentiments of being coerced and hence always on the point of resisting. Nietzsche often denounces this feeling of superiority as an illusion, albeit a wholesome one. In other passages, he accounts for the "strangeness" of the whole phenomenon by calling it an "oscillation [of the will] between yes and no," but he sticks to the feeling of the "I" 's superiority by identifying the oscillation with a kind of swinging from pleasure to pain. The pleasure, different in this as in other respects from Scotus' delectatio, is clearly the anticipated joy of the I-can inherent in the willing act itself, independent of performance, of the triumphal feeling we all know when we perform well, regardless of praise or audience. In Nietzsche, the point is that he numbers the negative slave-feelings of being coerced and of resisting or resenting among the necessary obstacles without which the Will would not even know its own power. Only by surmounting an inner resistance does the Will become aware of its genesis: it did not spring up to obtain power; power is its very source. Again in Beyond Good and Evil: "'Freedom of the will' is the word for that manifold pleasurable condition of the wilier who is in command and at the same time considers himself as one with the executor of the command—as such enjoying the triumph over the resistance, but possessed of the judgment that it is his will itself that is overcoming the resistance. In this fashion the wilier adds the pleasurable feelings of executing ... to his pleasurable feeling as Commander."27

  This description, which takes the two-in-one of the Will, the resisting "I" and the triumphant "I," to be the source of the Will's power, owes its plausibility to the unexpected introduction of the pain-pleasure principle into the discussion: "to posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts."28 Just as the mere absence of pain can never cause pleasure, so the Will, if it did not have to overcome resistance, could never achieve power. Here, unwittingly following the ancient hedonist philosophies rather than the contemporary pleasure-pain calculus, Nietzsche relies in his description on the experience of release from pain—not on the mere absence of pain or the mere presence of pleasure. The intensity of the sensation of release is only matched by the intensity of the sensation of pain and is always greater than any pleasure unrelated to pain. The pleasure of drinking the most exquisite wine cannot be compared in intensity with the pleasure felt by a desperately thirsty mail who obtains his first drink of water. In this sense there is a clear distinction between joy, independent of and unrelated to needs and desires, and pleasure, the sensuous lust of a creature whose body is alive to the extent that it is in need of something it does not have.

  Joy, it seems, can only be experienced if one is wholly free of pain and desire; that is, it stands outside the pain-pleasure calculus, which Nietzsche despised because of its inbred utilitarianism. Joy—what Nietzsche called the Dionysian principle—comes from abundance, and it is true that all joy is a kind of luxury; it overcomes us, and we can indulge in it only after the needs of life have been satisfied. But this is not to deny the sensuous element in joy as well; abundance is still life's abundance, and the Dionysian principle in its sensuous lust turns to destruction precisely because abundance can afford destruction. In this respect is not the Will in the closest possible affinity with the life-principle, which constantly produces and destroys? Hence Nietzsche defines the Dionysian as "temporary identification with the principle of life (including the voluptuousness of the martyr)," as "Joy in the destruction ... and at the sight of its progressive ruin ... Joy in what is coming and lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things, however good."29

  The Nietzschean shift from the I-will to the anticipated I-can, which negates the Paulinian I-will-and-I-cannof and thereby all Christian ethics, is based on an unqualified Yes to Life, that is, on an elevation of Life as experienced outside all mental activities to the rank of supreme value by which everything else is to be evaluated. This is possible and plausible because there is indeed an I-can inherent in every I-will, as we saw in our discussion of Duns Scotus: "Voluntas est potentia quia ipsa alquid potest" ("The Will is a power because it can achieve something").30 The Nietzschean Will, however, is not limited by its own inherent I-can; for instance, it can will eternity, and Nietzsche looks forward to a future that will produce the "superman," that is, a new human species strong enough to live in the thought of an "eternal recurrence." "We produced the weightiest thought—now let us produce the being to whom it will be easy and blessed! . . . To celebrate the future, not the past. To sing [dichten] the myth of the future."31

  Life as the highest value cannot, of course, be demonstrated; it is a mere hypothesis, the assumption made by common sense that the will is free because without that assumption—as has been said over and over—no precept of a moral, religious, or juridical nature could possibly make sense. It is contradicted by the "scientific hypothesis" according to which—as Kant, notably, pointed out—every act, the moment it enters the world, falls into a network of causes, and thus appears in a sequence of occurrences explicable only in the context of causality. For Nietzsche, it is decisive that the common-sense hypothesis constitutes a "dominant sentiment from which we cannot liberate ourselves even if the scientific hypothesis were demonstrated."32 But the identification of willing with living, the notion that our urge to live and our will to will are ultimately the same, has other and perhaps more serious consequences for Nietzsche's concept of power.

  This may become clear when we turn to two leading metaphors in The Gay Science, one having to do with life and the other introducing the theme of "Eternal Recurrence"—the "basic idea of Zarathustra," as he called it in Ecce Homo, and the basic idea also of the posthumous aphorisms collected under the misleading, non-Nietzschean title The Will to Power. The first appears under the title "Will and Wave" (Wille und Welle):

  How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this labyrinthine cliff!...it seems that something of value, high value, must be hidden there.—And now it comes back, a little more slowly but still quite white with excitement; is it disappointed? Has it found what it looked for? Does it pretend to be disappointed?—But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and savagely than the first, and its soul, too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live waves—thus live we who will.... Carry on as you like, roaring with overweening pleasure and malice—or dive again ... and throw your infinite white mane of foam and spray over them: Everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well disposed toward you for everything.... For ... I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I—are we not of one kind?—You and I—do we not have one secret? [Italics added.]33

  Here at first it seems as though we were dealing with a perfect metaphor, a "perfect resemblance of two relations between totally dissimilar things."34 The relation of the waves to the sea from which they erupt without intent or aim, creating a tremendous purposeless excitement, resembles and therefore illuminates the turmoil the Will excites in the household of the soul—always seemingly in quest of something till it quiets down, yet never extinguished, always ready for a new assault. The Will enjoys willing as the sea enjoys waves, for "rather than not will, man even wills nothingness "35 Upon closer examination, however, it appears that something quite decisive has happened here to what was originally a typically Homeric metaphor. Those metaphors, we saw, were always irreversible: Looking upon the storms of the sea, you were reminded of your inward emotions; but those emotions did not tell you anything about the sea. In the Nietzschean metaphor, the two dissimilar things the metaphor is bringing together not only resemble each other, for Nietzsche they are identical; and-the "secret"
of which he is so proud is precisely his knowledge of this identity. Will and Wave are the same, and one is even tempted to assume that the experiences of the willing ego had made Nietzsche discover the turmoil of the sea.

  In other words, the appearances of the world have become a mere symbol for inward experiences, with the consequence that the metaphor, originally designed to bridge the rift between the thinking or willing ego and the world of appearances, collapses. The collapse has come about not because of a superior weight given to the "objects" that confront human life but, rather, because of a partisanship for man's soul apparatus, whosxe experiences are understood to have absolute primacy. There are many passages in Nietzsche that point to this fundamental anthropomorphism. To cite only one example: "All the presuppositions of mechanistic theory [in Nietzsche identical with the "scientific hypothesis"]—matter, atom, gravity, pressure and stress—are not 'facts-in-themselves' but interpretations with the aid of psychical fictions."36 Modern science has come to strangely similar suspicions in its speculative reflections on its own results: today's "astrophysicists ... must reckon with ... the possibility that their outer world is only our inner world turned inside out" (Lewis Mumford).

  We now turn to our second story, which is actually not a metaphor or a symbol but a parable, the story of a thought-experiment that Nietzsche entitled "Das grosste Schwerge-wicht," the thought that would weigh most heavily on you.

  What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? [Italics added.]37

  No later version of the eternal-recurrence notion displays so unequivocally its main characteristic, namely, that it is not a theory, not a doctrine, not even a hypothesis, but a mere thought-experiment. As such, since it implies an experimental return to the ancient cyclical time concept, it seems to be in flagrant contradiction with any possible notion of the Will, whose projects always assume rectilinear time and a future that is unknown and therefore open to change. In the context of Nietzsche's own statements on the Will, and the shift he postulated from the I-will to an anticipated I-can, the only affinity between the two stories would seem to lie in the "tremendous moment" of overflowing "benevolence"—the being "well disposed to" Life—that obviously gave birth in each case to the thought.

  If we see it in terms of his notion of the Will, this would be the moment when the I-can feeling is at its peak and spreads a general "feeling of strength" (Kraftgefühl). That emotion, as Nietzsche observes, often arises in us "even before the deed, occasioned by the idea of what is to be done (as at the sight of an enemy or an obstacle to which we feel ourselves equal)." To the operating will this emotion is of little consequence; it is "always an accompanying feeling," to which we wrongly ascribe the "force of action," the quality of a causative agent. "Our belief in causality is belief in force and effect; a transference from our experience [in which] we identify force and the feeling of force."38 Hume's famous discovery that the relation between cause and effect rests on belief engendered by custom and association, and not on knowledge, was made afresh, and in many variations, by Nietzsche, who was unaware of having had a predecessor.

  His own examination is more searching and more critical because, in the place of Hume's utility calculus and his "moral sentiment," he puts the experience of an I-will which is followed by an effect, that is, he uses the fact that man is conscious of himself as a causative agent even before he has done anything. But Nietzsche does not believe that this renders the Will less irrelevant; for Nietzsche as well as for Hume, free will is an illusion inherent in human nature, an illusion which philosophy, a critical examination of our faculties, will cure us of. Except that for Nietzsche the moral consequences of the cure are decidedly more serious.

  If we can no longer ascribe "the value of an action ... to the intention, the purpose for the sake of which one has acted or lived...[if] the absence of intention and purpose in events comes more and more to the foreground of consciousness," the conclusion seems inevitable that "Nothing has any meaning," for "this melancholy sentence means 'All meaning lies in intention, and if intention is altogether lacking, then meaning is altogether lacking too."' Hence: "Why could 'a purpose' not be an epiphenomenon in the series of changes of effective forces that bring forth purposive action—a pale image in our consciousness ... a symptom of occurrences, not their cause?—But with this we have criticized the will itself: is it not an illusion to take for a cause that which rises to consciousness as an act of will?" (Italics added.)39

  The fact that this passage is contemporaneous with the passages about "Eternal Recurrence" justifies us in asking whether and how these two thoughts can be, if not reconciled, at any rate conceived in such a way that they will not clash head on with each other. Let us first comment very briefly on the few important non-speculative but, rather, descriptive statements made by Nietzsche on the Will.

  There is, first—what seems obvious but had never been pointed out before—that "the Will cannot will backward"; it cannot stop the wheel of time. This is Nietzsche's version of the I-will-and-I-cannof, for it is precisely this willing-backward that the Will wills and intends. From that impotence Nietzsche derives all human evil—resentment, the thirst for vengeance (we punish because we cannot undo what has been done), the thirst for the power to dominate others. To this "genealogy of morals," we could add that the Will's impotence persuades men to prefer looking backward, remembering and thinking, because, to the backward glance, everything that is appears to be necessary. The repudiation of willing liberates man from a responsibility that would be unbearable if nothing that was done could be undone. In any case, it was probably the Will's clash with the past that made Nietzsche experiment with Eternal Recurrence.

  Second, the concept "will-to-power" is redundant: the Will generates power by willing, hence the will whose objective is humility is no less powerful than the will to rule over others. The willing act itself is already an act of potency, an indication of strength (the "feeling of strength," Kraftgefühl) that goes beyond what is required to meet the needs and demands of everyday life. If there is a simple contradiction in Nietzsche's thought-experiments, it is the contradiction between the Will's factual impotence—it wills but cannot will backward—and this feeling of strength.

  Third, the Will—whether it wills backward and senses its impotence or wills forward and senses its strength—transcends the sheer givenness of the world. This transcendence is gratuitous and corresponds to the overwhelming superabundance of Life. Hence the Will's authentic goal is abundance: "By the words 'freedom of the Will' we signify this feeling of a surplus of strength," and the feeling is more than a mere illusion of consciousness because it does correspond with the superabundance of life itself. Hence one could understand all of Life as a Will-to-power. "Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but ... will to power."40 For one could very well explain "nourishment" as the "consequence of insatiable appropriation, of the will to power, [and] 'p
rocreation' [as] the crumbling that supervenes when the ruling cells are incapable of organizing that which has been appropriated."41

  This transcending, which is inherent in willing, Nietzsche calls "Overcoming." It is possible because of abundance: the activity itself is seen as creativity, and the "virtue" that corresponds to this whole complex of ideas is Generosity—the overcoming of the thirst for vengeance. It is the extravagance and "recklessness [Übermut] of an overflowing, spendthrift will" that opens up a future beyond all past and present. Surplus, according to Nietzsche as well as to Marx (the sheer fact of a surplus of labor force left over after the requirements for the preservation of individual life and of species survival have been met), constitutes the conditio-per-quam of all culture. The so-called superman is man insofar as he is able to transcend, "overcome," himself. But this overcoming, we should not forget, is a merely mental exercise: to "recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it'—that alone should I call redemption."42 For "Man seeks ... a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world...." Man, as he is now when he is honest, is a nihilist, namely, "a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.... [To overcome nihilism one needs] the strength to reverse values and to deify ... the apparent world as the only world, and to call them good."43

  Clearly, what is needful is not to change the world or men but to change their way of "evaluating" it, their way, in other words, of thinking and reflecting about it. In Nietzsche's words, what must be overcome are the philosophers, those whose "life is an experiment of cognition";44 they must be taught how to cope. Had Nietzsche developed these thoughts into a systematic philosophy, he would have fashioned a kind of greatly enriched Epictetian doctrine, teaching once more the "art of living one's own life," whose psychologically powerful trick consists in willing that to happen which happens anyhow.45