Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T14:07:26.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is Nietzsche a Life-Affirmer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

Simon May
Simon May*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
simon.may@kcl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The question of how to affirm one's life in view of suffering and loss is central to Nietzsche's philosophy. He shows, I claim, that one can affirm – take joy or find beauty in – one's life as a whole, conceived as necessary in all its elements, while also despising parts of it. Yet he mostly pictures such life-affirmation as achievable only via an atheistic theodicy that relies on a key ambition of the very system of morality that he famously attacks: namely to explain or justify suffering in terms of a higher end to which it is essential. I argue that affirmation of one's life is more powerful without the crutch of any theodicy, and point to Job as a paragon of one who can affirm his life without seeking an answer to the question of the meaning or value of suffering – indeed who can dispense altogether with that question.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 78: The History of Philosophy , July 2016 , pp. 211 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This article is a reworking of, and contains extracts from, Simon May, ‘Why Nietzsche is still in the morality game’, in S. May (ed.), Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 78–100, © Cambridge University Press 2011, reproduced with permission. I am grateful to Bernard Reginster and to Ken Gemes for their penetrating comments on an earlier draft.

2 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), 107.

3 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 1975), 11.

4 Following standard convention, I refer to the English translations of Nietzsche's works using the following abbreviations (references are to section numbers): Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1966 [1886]); The Birth of Tragedy (BT), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1966 [1872]); Ecce Homo (EH), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967 [1888]); On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1887]); The Gay Science (GS), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1974 [1882; Part 5: 1887]); Twilight of the Idols (TI) (1889), trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954); The Will to Power (WP), trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) (1883–1885), trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954).

5 GM, Preface, 5; GM, III, 11.

6 Just as evil became ‘the problem of evil’.

7 Op. cit. 1.

8 Augustine, Of True Religion (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959).

9 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966), 211–215, 253–255.

10 Cf. II Corinthians 12:7–10. Cited in Hick, op. cit., 357.

11 Job 2:9, where Job's wife asks: ‘Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.’