The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (92 page)

As we shall see, and as with so many of our protagonists, Nietzsche’s meta-metaphysical views are deeply informed by his metaphysical views. In sketching his metaphysical vision I shall at the same time try to cast retrospective light on the material in the last three sections, and in particular on
why Nietzsche thinks that the restrictions to which metaphysics is subject are felt as restrictions; that is, why he thinks there is an urge to transgress them. I also hope to say some more about the notion of (perspectival) truth to which I have claimed he is hospitable, and about how he is able to view his own attempts to make sense of things as attempts to do so truthfully.
⁵³

There is a famous section at the end of
The Will to Power
which serves as a wonderfully evocative summary of the core of his metaphysical vision. We can do no better than start there.

And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? … This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; … enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary; … something … set in a definite space as a definite force, and … as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back …, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years …, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this my
Dionysian
⁵⁴
world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, … my ‘beyond good and evil,’ without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; … – do you want a
name
for this world? A
solution
for all its riddles? … –
This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!
And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides! (
Will
, §1067, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., §639)

Thus Nietzsche’s vision. The world consists of a mass of interacting forces subject to continual change. There is no unity within the world, no identity, no stasis, save what is imposed on it by interpretation.
⁵⁵
The will to power is not itself a force. It is a cosmological principle that produces and is manifest
in the ever-changing relations between forces. The will to power is what ultimately interprets or makes sense of things. It does this by literally making the differences between forces and evaluating them in relation to one another.
⁵⁶
Thus suppose there is a struggle between two forces which eventually results in the triumph of one over the other together with the celebration of this by some individual subject. Then both the struggle and its celebration are manifestations of the will to power. Not that the will to power
is
the will of any individual subject (cf.
Will
, §692).
⁵⁷
It is manifest in the wills of individual subjects, in what they feel as triumphs and disasters as they make their own sense of things. Individual subjects are themselves nothing more than creatures of the will-to-power’s own ultimate sense-making (cf. §3 above). And they make sense of things only insofar as that is how sense is made of
them
. They interpret only insofar as they are interpreted as interpreting. (See
Will
, §§490, 556, 635, 643, 676, and 688.)

Now asceticism, the commitment to the ascetic ideal, is an act of sense-making. It is a denigration of all that is bodily and unclean, all that is fragmented, fractured, transitory, and unstable, in favour of that which is abstract, fixed, and abiding. But all that we experience is of the former kind. Therefore, by the lights of asceticism, it counts as inferior. But inferior to what? To an atemporal reality that is posited beyond it, a reality relative to which it is itself mere appearance. It is in this transcendent reality that true value, true meaning, and true goodness are to be found (
Twilight
, IV.1–4).

But
why
this denigration of all that we experience in favour of something beyond?

Because all that we experience is replete with horror, affliction, and misery. It is replete with suffering. The thought that there is something beyond, and that this is what really matters, provides solace. To believe in a transcendent, atemporal reality is one way of coping with life (
Will
, §§576, 579, and 585(A)).
⁵⁸

The
rejection
of any such reality, the killing of (a transcendent) God, is a further act of sense-making. It is Nietzsche’s act of sense-making. And by usurping asceticism in the way in which it does, it leads to what Nietzsche himself describes as ‘the radical repudiation of value, meaning,
and desirability’ (
Will
, §1.1). It is not just that it removes the one place where, according to asceticism, (true) value, (true) meaning, and (true) desirability are to be found. It also shares with asceticism its conviction that these are
not
to be found in what we experience. Thus Nietzsche is hostile both to Leibniz’ cost-benefit analysis
⁵⁹
and to Hegel’s belief in a
telos
towards which what we experience has been striving,
⁶⁰
each of which as it were concretizes the transcendent reality by whose means asceticism enables us to endure the suffering and purports to show that the suffering is, even in its own terms, ultimately worth it. Nietzsche’s act of sense-making abnegates
all
of that. It leads to the conviction that there is nothing, nothing at all, but grievous pointless ceaseless change. In a word – in Nietzsche’s word – it leads to
nihilism
(
Will
, §1.1; cf. ibid., Bk One, §I, passim, and §617).

Nihilism, however, is unbearable. Or at least, it is unbearable provided that we do not simply shut our eyes to the suffering, but rather confront it, with due honesty and with due courage, as Nietzsche exhorts us to do. If the suffering had a purpose, we might be able to bear it. But nihilism entails that it has no purpose. It is meaningless suffering.
That
is what is unbearable. (See
Genealogy
, II.7 and III.28.)
⁶¹

The crucial question for Nietzsche is therefore how nihilism is to be overcome. How are we to face God’s death and not be broken by it? How are we to confront the suffering in the world and not be crushed by it? This is at once a fundamental question about how we are to live and a fundamental metaphysical question. Perhaps it is the most fundamental question of either kind.

We must somehow overturn the sense-making that constituted asceticism without succumbing to the awful power of nihilism. Rather than condemn the world, we must affirm the world. But what is it to affirm the world? It cannot be to give the world some sort of favourable assessment. Nihilism itself already precludes our doing that. (To overcome nihilism is not to refute it.) Nihilism entails that there is no assessing the world, as a whole, without condemning it. This is precisely because of the suffering, which, given that it is not atoned in a superior transcendent reality, is not atoned at all. But there is in fact an even more basic reason why there is no assessing the
world, as a whole, without condemning it. There is no assessing the world, as a whole, in the first place. There is no suitable point of view from which any such assessment can be made: there is no point of view outside the world (
Twilight
, III.2). It is in this vein that Nietzsche talks of ‘the innocence of becoming’ (
Twilight
, VII.8, and
Will
, §552) where ‘becoming’ is his word for the ever-changing relations between forces that constitute the world.
⁶²

Affirming the world does not involve assessing it then. But it cannot simply consist in resignedly accepting everything either. Nietzsche is adamant that such passive and indiscriminate acquiescence would itself be a concession to the meaninglessness of everything and would leave nihilism entirely undefeated (
Zarathustra
, IV.xvii).

So what
is
it to affirm the world?

It is, in spite of all the suffering, to remain committed to life. It is to
create
the meaning and value that are otherwise lacking, by suitably making sense of things. It is to make sense of things in such a way as to accentuate all three components of that phrase, that is:

• proactively to
make
sense of things – not to interpret and evaluate things simply by reacting to events as they occur, but to do so by acting out a particular life in its own terms

• to make discriminating
sense
of things – not to say ‘yes’ to everything, as though the world were some inert homogeneous plenum, but to say ‘yes’ to some things and ‘no’ to others, in accord with differences between them

and

• to make sense of
things
, in their singularity – not to interpret, evaluate, and say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the world as a whole, but to do so to specific episodes, occurrences, and relations between forces within the world.

(See
Gay Science
, §301;
Beyond Good and Evil
, §211;
Twilight
, II.12 and XI.5; and
Will
, §§12, 13, 567, 616, and 708.)

Nietzsche’s most general attempt to make sense of things therefore assigns importance to more particular, local attempts to make sense of things; local attempts to make things bearable. A paradigm would be a subject’s attempt to redeem his or her own past. The kind of redemption that is characteristic of asceticism is that which is born of guilt-ridden penitence. It involves a
renunciation
of the past, in favour of the subject’s new-found commitment to what is higher. The kind of redemption that Nietzsche advocates is completely different. It occurs when ‘It was,’ which Nietzsche describes as ‘the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction,’ is transformed into ‘Thus I willed it’ (
Zarathustra
, II.xx). And this in turn occurs when the
subject, drawing on the power of his or her own past, appropriates it in the continuing saga of his or her life, acting out a life of which that past can come to be (interpreted as) an integral (if abhorrent) part; tracing out a line of which that line can come to be (seen as) an earlier (if crooked) segment.
⁶³
This is a creation of value and meaning.

It follows that we must distinguish between two kinds of value and meaning: that which Nietzsche repudiates and that which he champions. This is entirely of a piece with the fact that we must distinguish between two kinds of truth: absolute truth, which he repudiates, and perspectival truth, which he champions (§§2 and 3). Absolute truth is for Nietzsche a perversion of perspectival truth.
⁶⁴
It is an idealized version of the real thing, seen through the distorting lens of asceticism. Likewise in this case. The value and meaning that Nietzsche repudiates are such as to be:

• discovered

• located in the world as a whole

• viewed from somewhere outside the world.

The value and meaning that he champions are such as to be:

• created

• located in parts of the world

• viewed from somewhere within the world. (See
Will
, §556.)

Nor is this parallel between the case of truth and the case of value and meaning merely a parallel. Truth is itself a value. And it depends on meaning. The case of truth is in effect an instance of the case of value and meaning, as indeed sense-making of the kind that involves arriving at a conception of something is an instance of sense-making more generally. To make
true
sense of things, I suggest, is to arrive at a conception of things that will enable one, from one’s point of immersion in them, with due honesty and with due courage, to say, ‘Thus I will it’ (
Will
, §§495, 534, and 568).
⁶⁵

This is not a definition, though. Or at any rate, it is not a non-circular definition. ‘Due’, ‘honesty’, and even ‘courage’ can all be said to presuppose the notion of truth. Indeed, I might just as well have written, in place of ‘with due honesty and with due courage’, ‘truthfully’. (Nietzsche at one point defines truthfulness as ‘the opposite of the cowardice of the “idealist” who flees from reality’ (
Ecce Homo
, IV.3).
⁶⁶
) But although it is not a
(non-circular) definition, it does, I believe, help to signal some important features of the notion of truth that Nietzsche embraces. There are three features in particular to which I wish to draw attention.

First, the attainment of truth is
not easy
.
⁶⁷
If it were, other ways of contending with suffering, including asceticism, would not have held sway in the way in which they have done. Nor would metaphysicians have felt the urge that they have done to transgress the restrictions that I described in §§3–5.

Second, the pursuit of truth is more of an art than a science. Not only does it involve inventiveness and imagination (which science involves as well). Lacking science’s truth fetish, it allows for
the inventive and imaginative appropriation of falsehood
(
Human
, I.146 and
Genealogy
, III.25).
⁶⁸
Thus it is possible for someone who has arrived at a false conception of something, from a given point of view, to remedy that – or better, to move on from there – by adopting, not a new conception of this thing, but a new point of view, a point of view from which the conception is true.
⁶⁹
And insofar as the new point of view is itself engendered in the process, this will constitute a kind of creative transformation of the false into the true.