147. Beyond nihilism: Nietzsche
According
to Nietzsche the despair of nihilism should not produce a flight into
triviality, hedonism, or indifference, which would constitute another form of
decadence. Despair can be positive, producing a novel perspective, in a
‘revaluation of all values’. Nietzsche preached truth relativism but not value
relativism.
Reginster[1]
proposed that a revaluation of all values is contradictory, self-defeating,
because it negates also the value, the perspective from which the revaluation
is done. However, if one rejects absolute values of the true and the good,
then, to avoid a search without end, an infinite regress, one must stop
somewhere, and take some value for granted. But to be consistent one must allow
for the need to arise to change that principle. That is the idea of imperfection
on the move.
Now the
most fundamental value in Nietzsche’s revaluation is change, a perspective of
‘being’ not as a noun but as a verb, as an ongoing process of transformation,
Dionysian creative destruction. And change would include the change of change,
perhaps a negation of change, which again would be temporary.
As I have argued at several places in this blog, stability and change alternate, in processes of transformation.
The central
principle producing change that Nietzsche arrives at is the ‘will to power’.
Reginster proposed that the crux of it is an appreciation of overcoming
resistance, not just the acceptance of it as the price to paid for
transformation, but the lust, the delight, the relish of it.
As the will
to power is turned to the change of ideas, some of the old values of the
Enlightenment re-appear: the virtues of intellectual honesty, integrity,
open-mindedness, and autonomy. Inspired by classical Greek thought Nietzsche
added values of contest, courage, excellence, creative self-determination, and
self-overcoming. The highest manifestation of the will to power is artistic
creation.
The ultimate
goal to which the will to power is the instrument is the flourishing, the
vitality of life, and the ‘elevation and strengthening’, ‘the advancement and
prosperity of man’.[2]
Here is the transcendent in Nietzsche’s revaluation. However, it is not the transcendent
of God or an afterlife, but the transcendent of a future of human
flourishing.
The crucial
question for me now is whether and how this can avoid relativism. Why adopt
this perspective rather than any other? Did Nietzsche raise the will to power
to a new absolute, or is it also subject to change?
Reginster
argued that Nietzsche’s stance was ‘fictionalist’. Values are to be taken
seriously, not ironically, as if they were absolute, in a suspension of
disbelief, demanding commitment, without, however, falling back on any claim of
absolute validity.
This
seriousness is found in how children play (‘and then you were the princess, and
I the slayer of dragons …’), and how rules of games are observed. They are
taken seriously, with full commitment, and with indignation when the rules are
not observed, even while one is aware that they are not ‘really true’ or even
relevant outside the game.
This
make-belief and self-delusion would have been quite a step for someone as
committed to the courage of ever seeking and facing the truth as Nietzsche was,
and therefore I find it difficult to accept.
My view on
the matter is as follows. As I indicated, the underlying, more fundamental
value of Nietzschean philosophy lies in ongoing change. I think this must imply
that the will to power is subject to revision. Indeed, I think that Nietzsche
himself would not have wanted it otherwise.
What would
he have thought if he could have witnessed the atrocities, in the holocaust,
for which Nazism had usurped passages from Nietzsche’s texts (e.g. on the
‘blond beast’)? I suggest that he would have revised his views, not on the
fundamental value of Dionysian creative destruction, but on the principle of
the will to power.
So, what
might a revised endorsement of creative destruction, with a successor to will
to power look like? That is the subject for the next item.