1

This is a previous version of the paper sent to the editor.

For quotations please refer to the published version:

Paolo Stellino, “Nietzsche on Suicide”, Nietzsche-Studien, 42 (2013), pp. 151-177.

PAOLO STELLINO

NIETZSCHE ON SUICIDE

Abstract: Nietzsche’s view of suicide is a topic which in the last years has been the focus of works such

as Julian Young’s and Paul S. Loeb’s. Within this context, this paper seeks to add new elements to the

discussion. To this purpose, Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be explored from two different points of

view. The first part of the paper focuses on the distinction between voluntary (free) and involuntary

(natural) death. Nietzsche’s appraisal of both will be scrutinized. In particular, through the comparison

with the Classical and, especially, Stoic philosophy and through the critique of the religious (particularly

Christian) conception of death, it will be shown, among other things, that Nietzsche defends the

rationality of suicide, presents a view of voluntary death as emptied of morality and fights against the

Christian denaturalization of suicide. In the second part of the paper, suicide will be considered from a

philosophical-existentialist viewpoint, that is, as a possible consequence of the meaninglessness of human

existence. The problem is to judge whether life is or is not worth living in a world devoid of meaning and

purpose. Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be analyzed in a chronological way (early, middle and late

Nietzsche). Special attention will be given to the role played by art. The relevant conclusion is that,

although in different ways, Nietzsche gives an affirmative answer to the question whether life is worth

living in a world devoid of meaning and purpose.

Keywords: Suicide, free death, quick death, emptied of morality, denaturalization, meaninglessness, art.

Zusammenfassung: Nietzsches Sicht des Suizids ist ein Thema, das in den letzten Jahren im Focus von

Forschern wie Julian Young und Paul S. Loeb stand. In diesem Kontext will die Abhandlung neue Punkte

zur Diskussion stellen. Zu diesem Zweck wird Nietzsches Haltung zum Suizid unter zwei

unterschiedlichen Gesichtspunkten betrachtet: Im ersten Teil wird die Unterscheidung zwischen

freiwilligem (freiem) und unfreiwilligem (natürlichem) Tod ins Auge gefasst und Nietzsches Bewertung

beider untersucht. In einem Vergleich mit der klassischen und vor allem stoischen Philosophie und

anhand der Kritik der religiösen (vor allem christlichen) Auffassung des Tods wird insbesondere (u.a.)

gezeigt, dass Nietzsche die Rationalität des Suizids verteidigt, eine Sicht des freiwilligen Tods als

entmoralisierte präsentiert und sich gegen die christliche Entnatürlichung des Suizids wendet. Im zweiten

Teil wird der Suizid aus einem philosophisch-existentialistischen Gesichtspunkt betrachtet und zwar als

mögliche Konsequenz der Sinnlosigkeit des menschlichen Daseins. Das Problem dabei ist zu beurteilen,

2

ob das Leben in einer sinn- und zwecklosen Welt zu leben wert ist oder nicht. Nietzsches Haltung zum

Suizid wird chronologisch (beim frühen, mittleren und späten Nietzsche) untersucht. Besondere

Aufmerksamkeit wird der Rolle der Kunst geschenkt. Das Ergebnis ist, dass Nietzsche – obwohl in

verschiedener Weise – die genannte Frage, ob es sich lohnt, das Leben in einer sinn- und zwecklosen

Welt zu leben, bejaht.

Schlagwörter: Suizid, freier Tod, schneller Tod, entmoralisiert, Entnatürlichung, Sinnlosigkeit, Kunst.1

Perché mi scerpi? non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi

(Dante, Inferno, XIII, 35-37)2

One of the several and heterogeneous epigrams and interludes, of which the fourth part

of Beyond Good and Evil is made, reads as follows: “The thought of suicide is a strong

means of comfort: it helps get us through many an evil night.” (BGE 157)3 Some

readers might find this epigram somewhat enigmatic and take it as an isolated thought

on this topic. There is little doubt that they would be mistaken. As a matter of fact,

Nietzsche dealt with the issue of suicide (more or less directly) in several occasions. As

tends to be the case with Nietzsche, in his works we cannot find a methodical approach

to the question at hand, only some remarks and observations which, for the most part,

are not connected to each other. Nevertheless, it is possible to piece together

Nietzsche’s position on suicide and approach this topic from two different viewpoints.

On the one hand, Nietzsche considers suicide in specific situations as a fully rational

1 This paper is the result of a long-lasting interest for Nietzsche’s notion of free death. This

interest dates back to my PhD years and was aroused in me by one of my supervisors, Juan Carlos

Siurana Aparisi (director of the Bioethics Research Group of the University of Valencia), to whom I

express my gratitude. At that time my approach focused on the analysis of Nietzsche’s possible

contribution to the actual debate on euthanasia. The result of my work was presented in two papers: Paolo

Stellino, Eutanasia y autonomía del paciente: la muerte libre nietzscheana, in: Enric Casaban Moya (ed.),

XVI Congrés Valencià de Filosofia, Valencia 2006, pp. 493-506; Paolo Stellino, Nuevas tecnologías y

suicidio asistido. Una perspectiva nietzscheana, in: Joaquín Valdivieso et al. (ed.), Actas del 43 Congreso

de Filósofos Jóvenes. Filosofía y Tecnología(s), Palma de Mallorca 2006 [published in CD-ROM format].

Both papers develop Nietzsche’s notion of free death, although in a less detailed way than I have done in

the present paper. Some years afterwards I took part to the International Conference “Kant & Nietzsche”,

held on April 21, 2012, in Lisbon. That conference gave me an opportunity to revisit the work I had done

on Nietzsche’s free death. The present paper develops the second part of the talk “Kant and Nietzsche on

Suicide and Autonomy” which I gave on that occasion. I wish to thank all the participants, especially

Mattia Riccardi, for their questions, remarks and suggestions. I am also grateful to the anonymous

reviewers and to Pietro Gori, Maria João Branco and João Constâncio for their helpful comments on the

final draft of this paper. Finally, I wish to thank particularly Andreas Rupschus for his remarks and

advices. 2 “Why do you tear me? Do you have no spirit of pity at all? We were men once and have now

become brush.” (Dante, Inferno, XIII, 35-37, transl. by Stanley Lombardo) 3 Most of the translations used in this paper are from the Cambridge Edition of Nietzsche’s works.

However, BT and GM are quoted from Kaufmann’s translation, TI from Large’s translation. For the

Nachlass, I have used – when available – either the Cambridge Edition (Writings from the Late

Notebooks) or Kaufmann’s and Hollingdale’s translation of The Will to Power. Posthumous fragments

are however identified with reference to the Colli and Montinari standard edition.

3

and natural act in which the suicide (re)affirms his freedom and will. Accordingly,

Nietzsche criticizes the religious (especially Christian) conception of death and

compares it unfavourably with the attitudes of the ancient Greeks and Romans. On the

other hand, his position on suicide is rather philosophical and – if I may say so –

existentialist. The background is now the meaninglessness of human existence and the

problem is to judge whether life is or is not worth living in a world devoid of meaning

and purpose. In what follows I will take both these aspects into consideration.4

1. Voluntary and Involuntary Death

In section 80 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche poses the following question: “Why

should it be more laudable for an old man who senses the decline of his powers to await

his slow exhaustion and dissolution than in full consciousness to set himself a limit?”

(HH I 80). A similar question is asked in section 185 of The Wanderer and His Shadow,

whose title is Of Rational Death: “What is more rational, to stop the machine when the

work one demands of it has been completed – or to let it run on until it stops of its own

accord, that is to say until it is ruined?” (HH II, WS 185). As these two questions clearly

show, Nietzsche tackles the problem of suicide from a highly specific point of view:

4 Nietzsche’s view of suicide is a topic which in the last years has been the focus of works such as

Julian Young’s and Paul S. Loeb’s (see Julian Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life,

London / New York 2003, and Paul S. Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, in: Manuel Dries (ed.),

Nietzsche on Time and History, Berlin / New York 2008, pp. 163-190). Both these works have been very

helpful in writing this paper. Young’s book examines the way in which various philosophers (among

others, Schopenhauer and Camus) approached the problem of the meaning of life before and after the

death of God. Three chapters are dedicated to Nietzsche (the early, the later and the posthumous

Nietzsche). Loeb’s paper develops an analysis of Nietzsche’s theory of suicide and explores the

connections with Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. My discussion of the

eternal recurrence and the comparison with the myth of Sisyphus is particularly indebted to his

examination of these topics. Also the framework of the second part of my paper is partially indebted to

his, but the methodology I have employed is quite different: indeed – as already pointed out in the

abstract – in the second part of my paper I approach Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide in a chronological way

(early, middle and late Nietzsche), giving special attention to the role played by art. In the main, however,

I am not sympathetic to Loeb’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s theory of suicide. Indeed, as it will be shown

(see footnote 64), his paper and mine reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Particularly, Loeb’s

interpretation of the counter-ideal as giving humankind “a legitimate reason to die” and as offering “a

meaning and justification for its suicide” (p. 171) seems to me difficult to reconcile with the late

Nietzsche’s conception of art as the great seduction to life, the great stimulant to life, which opposes

every kind of life-negating will. Loeb has also investigated in detail the topic of Zarathustra’s free death

in his recent book Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Cambridge 2010. The approach of

this book is undoubtedly original: rather than focusing on Zarathustra’s doctrinal aspects, Loeb

emphasizes its narratives aspects which Nietzsche construed so that they would embody and enact his

thought of eternal recurrence. Accordingly, the narrative of Zarathustra’s life is so conceived as to

“display the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of Zarathustra’s life” (p. 2). Within this

picture, a particular relevance is given to the doctrine of free death which, according to Loeb, Zarathustra

would himself enact at the end of Part III of Z.

4

that of the old man or, to use the metaphor of the machine, the man who has completed

his task and reached his goal.5 From this viewpoint, a voluntary (freiwillig) death, a

suicide,6 appears to Nietzsche to be a rational choice, “a wholly natural and obvious

action”, “a victory for reason” (HH I 80), while an involuntary (natural) death is

considered on the contrary an irrational one, for in this case the annihilation of the

rational being depends on the irrational entity (the body) to which it is tied.7 In this way,

Nietzsche criticizes the boundless and pusillanimous attachment to life shown by those

who lack “the strength to get any closer to the actual goal of one’s life” (HH I 80).

Nietzsche was aware that such a conception of death would sound immoral to

his contemporary audience and could only belong to a future morality. Nonetheless, this

conception was not far removed from that of the Classical World. In Human, All Too

Human Nietzsche himself refers to the reverence that a suicide accomplished by an old

man who senses the decline of his powers would have aroused among “the heads of

Greek philosophy and the most upright Roman patriots” (HH I 80).8 Then why did

Nietzsche’s contemporaries consider voluntary death to be unnatural? Nietzsche held

5 We must keep this clarification in mind if we aim to understand Nietzsche’s view of suicide.

Indeed, as Héctor Wittwer pointed out, there are different kinds of suicide; they have to be distinguished

depending on the way they are performed, their primary and secondary purposes, the cultural milieu, and

so on (see Héctor Wittwer, Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem. Über die Rationalität und Moralität

des Suizids, Paderborn 2003, p. 40). It would therefore be a mistake to ignore the differences in

Nietzsche’s approach and evaluation of the suicide of, e.g., an old man, a young nihilist, a sick person or a

Christian decadent. 6 In the passage quoted from Human, All Too Human Nietzsche uses the word “Selbsttödtung”.

However he uses the word “Selbstmord” much more often, very seldom the word “Selbstvernichtung”.

The form “freier Tod” is introduced in the homonymous speech in Zarathustra. For a terminological

analysis of these words, see Wittwer, Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem, pp. 27-29. 7 Nietzsche uses two images to illustrate the irrationality of natural death: the wretched substance

of the husk which determines how long the kernel shall continue to exist, and the stunted sick prison

warder who decides the moment at which the noble prisoner shall die. 8 It is highly plausible that Nietzsche is referring here to the Stoic view of suicide to which his

own position was in fact very similar. Indeed he knew the Stoic philosophy through primary – Seneca,

Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero – and secondary sources – Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, among

others (see Martha C. Nussbaum, Pity and Mercy. Nietzsche’s Stoicism, in: Richard Schacht (ed.),

Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley 1994, pp.

139-167, p. 149: “Nietzsche’s classical education focused intensively on Stoicism. Among his first

scholarly publications were three studies — still valuable — of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the

Philosophers, one of our major sources for Stoic thought. And the works of Seneca and Epictetus are

among the most heavily read and annotated in his library.”). However, it should be remembered that

among ancient philosophers Epicureans, Cynics and Cyrenaics also generally admitted the possibility of

suicide. On Nietzsche’s confrontation and reception of Stoic philosophy, see, in addition to the study by

Nussbaum, Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Reading of Epictetus, in: Nietzsche-Studien 32 (2003), pp.

429-434; R. O. Elveton, Nietzsche’s Stoicism: The Depths Are Inside, in: Paul Bishop (ed.), Nietzsche

and Antiquity. His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, Rochester, NY 2004, pp. 192-203;

Andrea Christian Bertino, Nietzsche und die hellenistische Philosophie. Der Übermensch und der Weise,

in: Nietzsche-Studien 36 (2007), pp. 108-143; Barbara Neymeyr, „Selbst-Tyrannei“ und

„Bildsäulenkälte“. Nietzsches kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der stoischen Moral, in: Nietzsche-

Studien 38 (2009), pp. 65-92. However, none of these studies tackles the theme of suicide.

5

religions responsible for this view: in fact, as he explains in the section from The

Wanderer and His Shadow mentioned above, in the religious way of thinking it is God

(the higher reason) who gives humans (the lower reason) the command to depart, and

humans have no other choice than to submit to it.9 However, outside a religious

worldview, in Nietzsche’s opinion men had no reason to glorify natural death or despise

a voluntary one.

Zarathustra’s speech “On Free Death” follows the same line of thought as the

one presented in the two sections mentioned, with the difference that this time

Nietzsche explains his own conception of suicide more carefully. As the speech’s title

suggests, Nietzsche conceives of voluntary death as a supreme affirmation of freedom

and will – in other words, as the occasion to reaffirm them yet again, now for the last

time.10

The formula “free for death [zum Tode] and free in death” clearly indicates that

suicide represents not only the freedom to die, but that in dying by suicide we assert our

freedom. Indeed, it is by freely choosing the moment of our death – free death comes to

me “because I want”, Zarathustra says – that we have the opportunity to affirm the

freedom of our will, a freedom that has nothing to do with that concept of free will

dismissed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (§ 21) as pure mythology, but one that

is more akin to the freedom of the sovereign individual from the Genealogy, who is

9 Wittwer explains that the oldest argument against suicide, which the history of philosophy has

handed down to us, is based on the assumption that only God or the Gods can dispose about our life and

death (see Wittwer, Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem, pp. 312-320). One of the most famous

expositions of this argument, which dates back to the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, can be found in

Plato’s Phaedo where Socrates argues that “the gods are our guardians and that we men are one of their

possessions” (Phaedo 62 b). A similar argument can be found also in Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: “Men are

stationed here like sentries, and so we must not leave our posts until relieved by the beneficent hand of

another. He [God] is our proprietor, and we His property, and His providence ensures what is best for us”

(Collins, AA vol. 27.1: p. 375; the translations used in this paper are from the Cambridge Edition of

Kant’s works). Regarding the command from higher reason, to which Nietzsche refers in The Wanderer

and His Shadow, Michael Seidler says the following: “to answer the general question of legitimation

facing the potential suicide, some Stoics turned occasionally to the idea of a divine calling which Socrates

had already used as a justification in the Phaedo (62C): it is wrong to leave life, to forsake our post in the

world, unless God calls us” (Michael Seidler, Kant and the Stoics on Suicide, in: Journal of the History of

Ideas 44 (1983), pp. 429-453, p. 432). A clear reference to the divine calling can be found in the

following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses: “And I on my part would say, ‘Friends, wait for God;

when He shall give the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him; but for the present

endure to dwell in this place where He has put you. [...] Wait then, do not depart without reason’”

(Epictetus, Disc., I, 9, 16). 10

As Georgia Noon has pointed out: “Suicide is an intensely private act, yet its social impact is

profound”, Georgia Noon, On Suicide, in: Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), pp. 371-386, p. 371.

Nietzsche basically focuses his attention on the private dimension of suicide which he considers as an

individual act involving a personal decision (hence the stress on one’s freedom and will). The same

approach will be taken up later by Camus and the existentialist philosophers. However, as will be shown,

Nietzsche also partially takes into consideration the social dimension of suicide, in both its positive aspect

(the free death consecrated as a festival) and negative aspect (the quick death preached to the superfluous

ones).

6

“liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral” (GM II 2).11

For Nietzsche the freedom we gain by a voluntary death is multiple. First of all,

it is a freedom over our body – “the stunted, often sick and thick-witted prison warder”

of The Wanderer and His Shadow.12

It is also a freedom over death, or to use a better

expression, over the human, all too human fear of death which is “maybe older than

pleasure and pain” (Nachlass 1884, 25[399], KSA 11.116) and a “European disease”

(Nachlass 1884, 25[159], KSA 11.55).13

Moreover, suicide symbolizes liberation from

Christian morality which has traditionally condemned the choice of a voluntary death.14

In this sense, Nietzsche made a double effort: on the one hand, he sought to present a

view of suicide that we may define as emptied of morality (entmoralisiert);15

on the

other hand, he fought against the denaturalization (Entnatürlichung) of voluntary death

11

On the relation between freedom, autonomy and sovereignty in Nietzsche, see Ken Gemes,

Simon May (ed.), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, Oxford 2009. 12

A clarification has to be made: Nietzsche’s approval of suicide in the case of old and sick men is

not in contradiction with the high value for life he attached to sickness. The fight against sickness simply

loses its meaning when it becomes a mere “desire to carry on existing from day to day” (HH I 80).

However, at the same time suicide cannot be a coward’s escape from suffering. A passage from Seneca’s

Letters synthesizes this concept well: “I shall not avoid illness by seeking death, as long as the illness is

curable and does not impede my soul. I shall not lay violent hands upon myself just because I am in pain;

for death under such circumstances is defeat” (Seneca, Ep. 59, 36). 13

See Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical

Activity, Baltimore, MA 1997, p. 324: “In Nietzsche’s view, ascendency over death is properly actualized

above all in suicide”. 14

Georges Minois explicates that it is Saint Augustine who established the Christian doctrine on

suicide in The City of God, basing himself on the fifth commandment “You shall not murder”. However,

Minois quotes several cases of suicide described in the Old Testament and notes that: “aucun argument

péremptoire ne peut être tiré des textes bibliques pour ou contre le suicide. La loi mosaïque interdit certes

par le cinquième commandement de tuer, mais rien ne spécifie que cela s’applique à sa propre vie, et […]

les suicides mentionnés dans la Bible ne sont jamais accompagnés d’une réprobation explicite à l’égal des

meurtres d’autrui” (Georges Minois, Histoire du suicide. La société occidentale face à la mort volontaire,

Paris 1995, p. 33). For its part, the New Testament does not deal with the argument directly. The

Church’s position on suicide nonetheless became consolidated and hardened throughout the Middle Ages. 15

One of the reasons why, despite all similarities, Nietzsche’s view of suicide differs from that of

the Stoics is the profound moral dimension that the Stoics conferred on it. Indeed, for them, suicide

guaranteed the possibility of moral autonomy. As Seidler puts it: “It is important to realize [...] that

suicide in Stoicism is not only a freedom from but also (even primarily) a freedom for. The man for

whom suicide is a genuine option, in William James’s terminology, is at liberty to be what he wants to be

(or what he believes he ought to be), and this precisely because he is free from any sort of external

compulsion or manipulation. He can always choose to die rather than to compromise the integrity of his

character and the consistency of his principles” (Seidler, Kant and the Stoics on Suicide, p. 436). It was

precisely for this reason that even if Kant did not permit suicide, he nonetheless recognized that there was

“something moral” in the Stoic freedom to dispose of one’s life, “for anyone who has the power to depart

from the world when he pleases need be subject to nobody” (Collins, AA vol. 27.1: p. 374). With regard

to Nietzsche’s Entmoralisierung of suicide, a clarification is in order: on the one hand, it is true that

Nietzsche conceives of the voluntary death as a courageous and laudable choice which should inspire

reverence, but, on the other hand, for him suicide does not pose a moral dilemma. This means that

Nietzsche does not enquire whether this action entails a violation of morality or a debasement of

humanity, as Kant believed. He simply thinks of this action as something rational and natural, at least in

the case of old men.

7

orchestrated by Christianity over the centuries.16

It is important to recall that even if Nietzsche defended the idea of free death,

this should not be understood as a more or less extended invitation to suicide. Indeed,

there is little doubt that Nietzsche considered not only natural death at old age, but also

premature death to be unnatural. It is precisely for this reason that one of the most

important features of Zarathustra’s free death is that suicide has to be accomplished “at

the right time”: “Many die too late, and some die too early. The doctrine still sounds

strange: ‘Die at the right time!’” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.93). How is this call for a

death at the right time to be understood? First of all, it is interesting to note that

Nietzsche establishes a parallelism between the way one lives and the way one dies:

“Die at the right time: thus Zarathustra teaches it. To be sure, how could the person who

never lives at the right time ever die at the right time?” (ibid.) Death becomes the mirror

of one’s life: only he, who has fully and courageously lived his life, is able to desire to

take leave at the right time. Thus conceived, death represents not the opposite of life,

but its coronation: “For love of life—” writes Nietzsche in the Twilight of the Idols,

“one ought to want death to be different, free, conscious, no accident, no ambush...” (TI,

Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36).

Zarathustra himself recognizes that to leave at the right moment is a difficult art.

The question, then, is: how does one know that the time has come? Nietzsche gives us

some indications, the most important of which is without doubt the reference to the goal

and the heir: “Whoever has a goal and an heir wants death at the right time for his goal

and heir. And out of reverence for his goal and heir he will no longer hang withered

wreaths in the sanctuary of life” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.94). In this conception,

free death is seen as the peaceful and respectable completion of a meaningful life which

has achieved its goal and now finds its ideal continuation in an heir.17

He who has

become too old for his “truths and victories” says “no” when it is no longer time to say

“yes” and takes leave of life like a ripe apple falling from the tree when it is time. Only

in this way is a true leave-taking “among children and witnesses” still possible, “when

the one who is taking his leave is still there” (TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely

16

See the following previous version (Vorstufe) of the section 80 of Human, All Too Human: “das

Christenthum hat das Gefühl der Menschen hierin verfälscht: wir müssen lernen natürlich zu fühlen”

(KSA 14.29). 17

This conception in which a goal and an heir are linked together is typical of the whole of

Zarathustra and reappears at the end of the speech On Free Death: “Truly, Zarathustra has a goal, he

threw his ball. Now you my friends are the heirs of my goal, to you I throw the golden ball. More than

anything I like to see you, my friends, throwing the golden ball!” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.95 f.).

8

Man 36).18

A peculiar feature of the way Nietzsche presents his own view of suicide is his

use of strict antitheses in describing the opposition between voluntary and involuntary

death. Voluntary death is rational, free and truly natural while involuntary death is

irrational, not free and a “suicide of nature” (HH II, WS 185). The former is a

“consummating [vollbringend] death”, in which the one who is dying “dies his death,

victorious, surrounded by those who hope and promise” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA

4.93)19

; the latter is a “grinning death”, which “creeps up like a thief and yet comes as

master” (ibid.). One of the main differences between these opposite conceptions of

death is therefore that voluntary death is conscious and makes possible not only a leave-

taking from one’s family and friends, but also “a true assessment of achievements and

aspirations, a summation of life” (TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36). In

contrast, involuntary death happens “under the most contemptible conditions” (ibid.).20

For Nietzsche dying should be bright and joyful, and consecrated as a festival,

that is, exactly the opposite of that “pitiful and ghastly comedy which Christianity has

made of the hour of death” (ibid.). Generally speaking, in Nietzsche’s opinion

Christianity has falsified the natural perception of death: it is precisely for this reason

that Zarathustra – rejecting the immortality of the soul – represents death as a natural

phenomenon: “I want to become earth again, so that I may have peace in the one who

18

See also the definition of “right time” given by Loeb: “the right time for someone like himself

[Zarathustra], who has a goal and heirs, is the time when he has become sweetly ripe and when his spirit

and virtue still glow (glühn) like a sunset around the earth. Such a time is best if he wants to be loved

longest and if he does not want to become too old for his truths and his victories” (Loeb, The Death of

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, p. 134). As mentioned above, according to Loeb’s interpretation, Zarathustra

himself enacts a free death at the end of Part III of the Zarathustra. He thus fulfils, Loeb argues, his

promise to show his disciples his own free death (the reference here is particularly to the following

passage from the speech On Free Death: “Thus I myself want to die, so that you my friends love the earth

more for my sake”). In Loeb’s view, Zarathustra’s death is consistent with his preaching: it is freely

chosen, timely and victorious. It is freely chosen because “as the greatest of all humans who is able to

command humanity’s self-overcoming, Zarathustra also commands his own self-overcoming”; it is timely

because “it takes place in that seventh-day evening when Zarathustra has completed his creative work and

become ripe and perfect” (p. 77); it is victorious because “the intended coincidence of peak moment and

last moment redeems or “makes good” (macht gut) all of the fragments, riddles, and accidents in his life

up to that point” (p. 80). 19

Voluntary death could be therefore defined as mors triumphans. See Paolo Stellino, Eutanasia y

autonomía del paciente: la muerte libre nietzscheana, p. 494. 20

More differences can be seen: voluntary death happens at the right time and is courageous;

involuntary death – also defined by Nietzsche as “slow death” – happens at the wrong time and is

cowardly. A similar conception of suicide as a courageous act can be found in Seneca’s Letters: “For life,

if courage to die [moriendi virtus] be lacking, is slavery” (Seneca, Ep. 77, 15); “A man who sluggishly

awaits his fate is almost a coward [Prope est a timente qui fatum segnis expectat]” (Seneca, Ep. 58, 32).

9

bore me” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.95).21

However, Nietzsche makes an even stronger charge against religions and,

particularly, against Christianity: they have created “excuses for evading the demand of

suicide” (HH I 80). Indeed, as Nietzsche writes in a posthumous fragment of 1884, this

is precisely the meaning of religion – that is, to keep the failures and the miserable ones

alive through hope and fear and to prevent them from committing suicide (see Nachlass

1884, 25[300], KSA 11.88). In the case of Christianity, Nietzsche gives a specific

explanation for this social-historical phenomenon: “When Christianity came into

existence the inclination to suicide was very strong – Christianity turned it into a lever

of its power” (GS 131). According to Nietzsche’s interpretation, what Christianity did

was to redirect the nihilistic tendencies lurking within the ill-constituted and sick.

Through the idea of “the immortal private person” and the hope of resurrection,

Christianity deterred them from “the deed of nihilism, which is suicide – it substituted

slow suicide: gradually a petty, poor, but durable life; gradually a quite ordinary,

bourgeois, mediocre life, etc.” (Nachlass 1888, 14[9], KSA 13.222). By so doing,

however, Christianity perverted the work of selective nature (see ibid.).

Only within this context can we understand Nietzsche’s claim that a

“thoroughgoing practical nihilism” should be encouraged, “a severe form of really

contagious nihilism: such as teaches and practices voluntary death with scientific

conscientiousness” (ibid.).22

Here we face the most delicate and troubling part of

Nietzsche’s view of suicide: the concept of quick death, that is, that kind of death which

should be preached to the superfluous ones. As Zarathustra puts it: “Far too many live

and far too long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this

rot and worm-food from the tree! / Would that preachers of the quick death came! They

would be the right storms and shakers of the trees of life for me!” (Z I, On Free Death,

KSA 4.94)23

Thus, Nietzsche becomes the spokesman of a new fearsome philanthropy –

21

See also HH II, WS 322: “The certain prospect of death could introduce into every life a

precious, sweet-smelling drop of levity – and yet you marvellous apothecary souls have made of it an ill-

tasting drop of poison through which all life is made repulsive!” 22

In the quoted posthumous fragment there is a fine pun between “practical nihilism [Nihilismus

der That]” and “the deed of nihilism [That des Nihilismus]” which Kaufmann’s translation does not

reproduce. Practical nihilism is the kind of nihilism which leads to action, that is, either to annihilate

one’s self or another’s life. For Nietzsche, suicide is therefore the true deed of nihilism: it is nihilism

translated into practice and brought to completion (self-annihilation). 23

See also Z I, On the Preachers of Death: “There are preachers of death, and the earth is full of

people to whom departure from life must be preached. / The earth is full of the superfluous, life is spoiled

by the all too many. May they be lured from this life with the ‘eternal life!’”; “Everywhere sounds the

voice of those who preach death: and the earth is full of people to whom departure from life must be

10

“The weak and the failures should perish [...]”, he writes in The Antichrist (A 2), “And

they should be helped to do this” – and of a ruthless morality for physicians:

A sick person is a parasite on society. Once one has reached a certain state it is indecent to live any

longer. Vegetating on in cowardly dependence on physicians and their methods, once the meaning of life,

the right to life has been lost, should be greeted with society’s profound contempt. The physicians, for

their part, ought to convey this contempt — not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of disgust at their

patient... Create a new kind of responsibility, the physicians’, to apply in all cases where the highest

interest of life, of ascending life, demands that degenerating life be ruthlessly pushed down and aside —

for example in the case of the right to procreate, the right to be born, the right to live... (TI,

Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36)

At the end of this section Nietzsche refers to pessimists and “other décadents”

and suggests a voluntary death for them. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, “we have no

power to prevent our being born: but we can make up for this mistake” (ibid.).24

In this

case the most admirable thing a pessimist can do is to do away with himself: in

Nietzsche’s opinion, this almost earns him the right to live. Nietzsche’s idea is basically

that pessimists should take the logic of their pessimism a step further (that is, to commit

suicide) and “not simply deny life with ‘will and representation’, as Schopenhauer did”

(ibid.). The ironical reference is here to Schopenhauer’s repeated refusal in The World

as Will and Representation to consider suicide as a possible way out of man’s absurd

existence.25

In what follows, Schopenhauer’s position will be briefly clarified; we will

then be in a position to examine Nietzsche’s philosophical-existentialist approach to

suicide. However, before we consider Schopenhauer’s position, it might be helpful to

remind the reader of the aim of the following section.

A characteristic feature of Nietzsche’s worldview is that existence is in itself

meaningless and valueless. Given this premise, the question of whether life is or is not

preached. / Or ‘the eternal life.’ It’s all the same to me – if only they pass away quickly!”. The concept of

“quick death” also appears in relation with the pale criminal who – having committed a crime – has

condemned himself: “There is no redemption for one who suffers so from himself, unless it were the

quick death” (Za I, On the Pale Criminal). 24

According to Calderón, quoted by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (§

51), “the greatest offence of man, / Is that he was born [Pues el delito mayor / Del hombre es haber

nacido]” (Life is a Dream, I, 2). 25

According to Loeb’s reading of TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36, Nietzsche

would take the decadent or the pessimist’s suicide as a life-affirming and life-enhancing act. He would

thus agree with the logic of Schopenhauer (and Camus; see Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, p.

168). In my view, Nietzsche’s attitude towards Schopenhauer is quite ironical and the focus of his interest

is the denial of the latter’s pessimism (“one must deny Schopenhauer first of all”, TI, Reconnaissance

Raids of an Untimely Man 36) rather than the agreement with his logic.

11

worth living is of pivotal importance. Within this context, suicide is taken into

consideration as a possible (though not a necessary) consequence of the awareness that

life is meaningless and, therefore, not worth living. This attitude, which Robert Wicks

defines as defeatism,26

is typically expressed by the pessimist soothsayer of the

Zarathustra:

“– and I saw a great sadness descend over humanity. The best became weary of their works. / A doctrine

circulated, a belief accompanied it: ‘Everything is empty, everything is the same, everything was!’ / And

from every hilltop it rang out: ‘Everything is empty, everything is the same, everything was!’ / We

harvested well, but why did all our fruits turn foul and brown? What fell down from the evil moon last

night? / All work was for naught, our wine has become poison, the evil eye seared yellow our fields and

hearts. […] ‘Oh where is there still a sea in which one could drown?’ – thus rings our lament – out across

the shallow swamps. / Indeed, we have already become too weary to die; now we continue to wake and

we live on – in burial chambers!” – (Z II, The Soothsayer, KSA 4.172)

In what follows, attention will be focused on the answer Nietzsche gave, in the

different periods of his life, to the question of whether life is or is not worth living. As

in the case of the particular attitude to suicide considered in the first part of the present

study, Nietzsche’s philosophical-existentialist attitude is also unmethodical. Sometimes

he raises the question directly – as, for instance, in the section 34 of Human, All Too

Human; at other times he is concerned with topics (such as the eternal recurrence,

nihilism or the Dionysian affirmation of life) that are either directly or indirectly related

to the question. In my opinion, even in this second case, it is possible to derive an

answer to the dilemma of whether, according to Nietzsche, suicide may or may not be a

possible solution to a meaningless existence.

Finally, the reader has to bear in mind that the following section does not

attempt to provide an exhaustive analysis of a theme which has several related aspects

of primary importance in Nietzsche’s philosophy (art, the death of God, eternal

recurrence, nihilism, truth, among others).27

The aim is rather to show that throughout

his philosophical life Nietzsche was concerned either directly or indirectly with the

question of whether life is or is not worth living, and that this question is of vital

26

Robert Wicks, Nietzsche’s ‘Yes’ to Life and the Apollonian Neutrality of Existence, in:

Nietzsche-Studien 34 (2005), pp. 100-123, p. 107. 27

A thorough analysis of Nietzsche’s affirmative attitude towards life can be found in Bernard

Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA 2006). Although

Reginster does not directly tackle the theme of suicide he considers many related aspects, to which I can

only briefly allude here.

12

importance in the context of his philosophy.28

2. Meaninglessness and Suicide

Section 69 of The World as Will and Representation contains a complete presentation of

Schopenhauer’s argument against suicide. Schopenhauer describes suicide as “the

voluntary abolition of the individual appearance of the will” (W I, 471)29

, but he by no

means considers it as the negation of the will to life. On the contrary, self-annihilation is

precisely a symptom of a strong affirmation of the will. Indeed, according to

Schopenhauer, “the person who commits suicide wills life, and is only unsatisfied with

the conditions under which life has been given to him” (ibid.). Together with self-

preservation and procreation, self-killing therefore expresses the will to life in its

highest degree. Within this view, suicide appears as “the most glaring contradiction of

the will to life with itself”, for “the violence with which he [the single individual] wills

life and fights against the restrictions on life, against suffering, brings him to destroy

himself” (W I, 472). The reason why Schopenhauer considers suicide as “a futile and

foolish act” (ibid.) is, however, of a different nature: by annihilating oneself, the

individual destroys not the will to life, but only its appearance in a particular place and

at a particular time. In this sense, suicide “leaves the thing in itself untouched” (ibid.).30

Schopenhauer’s worldview, as is well known, constitutes the background of the

artists’ metaphysics in The Birth of Tragedy. The young Nietzsche also conceived of

human existence as meaningless and absurd, full of pointless suffering and pain. So

what, if anything, made life worth living? Nietzsche answers this question by reference

to the solution the ancient Greeks had provided to the same dilemma, a solution which

28

For a different reading, see Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, p. 163: “Camus’ problem

[the allusion is to the well-known opening of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly

serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts

to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” – P. S.] is thus absolutely worthy of consideration

for Nietzsche: not as a question to be answered, but as a symptom of the profound and ineradicable drive

to suicide built into the human animal.” 29

The translation is from the Cambridge Edition of Schopenhauer’s works. 30

See also § 54: “[...] someone who is oppressed by the burdens of life, who certainly desires life

and affirms it, but detests its sufferings and in particular does not want to put up with the difficult lot that

has fallen to him any longer: a person like this cannot hope for liberation in death, and cannot save

himself through suicide [...]. The earth turns from day into night; the individual dies: but the sun itself

burns its eternal noontime without pause. For the will to life, life is a certainty: the form of life is the

endless present; it does not matter how individuals, appearance of the Idea, come into existence in time

and pass away like fleeting dreams” (W I, 331). On Schopenhauer’s view of suicide, see Dale Jacquette,

Schopenhauer on Death, in: Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer,

Cambridge 1999, pp. 293-317; id., Schopenhauer on the Ethics of Suicide, in: Continental Philosophy

Review 33 (2000), pp. 43-58.

13

aimed to counteract the pessimistic view expressed in the myth of Silenus:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the

companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked

what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a

word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched

ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most

expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to

be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon” (BT 3, KSA 1.35).

According to Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks reversed Silenus’s wisdom through

art, specifically through an instinct of transfiguration that gave birth to the creation of

the Olympian gods and, ultimately, of tragedy as form of art. The Olympian gods, who

stood at the pinnacle of Apollinian culture, were produced by the need to endure the

terror and horror of existence. The ancient Greeks made use of the Olympian world as a

transfiguring mirror: they saw themselves in the higher sphere of beauty and glory of

the Olympians. Existence had therefore become desirable through a theodicy: the gods

themselves lived the life of men, and thus justified it. The will now longed vehemently

for existence, for it appeared transfigured in the “exuberant, triumphant life” of the

Olympian gods, in which “all things, whether good or evil, are deified” (ibid.).

Silenus’s wisdom was also counteracted by the effect that Nietzsche attributed to

tragedy, an effect which differs from the one described by Schopenhauer. For

Schopenhauer, the goal of tragedy is to portray the terrible aspects of life and the will’s

conflict with itself that is visible in human suffering, partly brought about through fate,

partly through the clashes between the strivings of individual wills. Thus, the spectator

reaches a complete cognition of the essence of the world, which “acts as a tranquillizer

of the will and leads to resignation, the abandonment not only of life, but of the whole

will to life” (W I, 299). Even for Nietzsche, tragedy allowed the spectator to cast a

glance into the true essence of things. The Greeks, having looked “right into the terrible

destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature”, were “in

danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will” (BT 7, KSA 1.56). What makes

Nietzsche’s view diverge from that of Schopenhauer, however, is the different effect of

every true tragedy: if for Schopenhauer tragedy led to resignation and to the

abandonment of the whole will to life, for Nietzsche tragedy left the spectator with the

awareness that “life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances,

14

indestructibly powerful and pleasurable” (ibid.). In this way, the profound Hellene was

saved: art had saved him.31

Here Nietzsche emancipates himself from Schopenhauer. Whereas for

Schopenhauer the only way to suppress the will to life was cognition, which led to the

negation of will,32

for Nietzsche “knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of

illusion” (BT 7, KSA 1.57). Art precisely provides man with these veils. In this regard,

its function is not merely to offer a temporary respite from suffering or to be a

palliative, as Schopenhauer had thought,33

but to save and heal: “She alone knows how

to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions

with which one can live” (ibid.). So what distinguishes Nietzsche’s early philosophy

from Schopenhauer’s is the fact that, despite the absurdity and meaninglessness of

existence, Nietzsche does not deny life, which he still considers “possible and worthy”,

through art (BT 1, KSA 1.27 f.).34

Thus, the young Nietzsche gives an affirmative

31

According to the young Nietzsche, not just art but science as well seeks a justification of

existence. The mission of science is in fact “to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified”

(BT 15, KSA 1.99), and the theoretical man is protected against the “practical ethics of pessimism” by the

satisfaction and delight he finds in uncovering and unmasking the truth. With their faith that the nature of

things can be fathomed, knowledge and insight become a panacea, a violent stimulus towards existence.

However, despite his will to honesty, the life of the theoretical man is based on a profound metaphysical

illusion: “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest

abysses of being” (ibid.). Here we find a new form of “Greek cheerfulness [Heiterkeit]” and blessedness

of existence, but the faith of the theoretical man is nonetheless doomed to crumble: “Science, spurred by

its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of

logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and

while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men

nevertheless reach, e’er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which

one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these

boundaries and finally bites its own tail — suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic

insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as protection and remedy” (ibid., KSA 1.101). In this way,

the “hunger for insatiable and optimistic knowledge” – the enemy of art on its lower level – turns

paradoxically into “tragic resignation and destitute need for art”: the function of art is once again to make

existence endurable to us despite its whole meaninglessness and absurdity. For a general overview of the

relation between art and science in Nietzsche, see Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science.

Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life, Albany, NY 1994. 32

See W I, 474: “The will to life itself cannot be suppressed by anything except cognition. That is

why the only path to salvation is for the will to appear without restraints, so that it can recognize its own

essence in this appearance. Only as a result of this recognition can the will abolish itself and in so doing

put an end to suffering too, since suffering is inseparable from the will’s appearance. But this is not

possible by way of physical violence, such as the destruction of the seed, or by killing infants, or

committing suicide”. 33

See Ivan Soll, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Redemption of Life through Art, in: Christopher

Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness. Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, New York 1998, pp. 79-

115, p. 88. According to Schopenhauer, the role of the subjective component of aesthetic pleasure is: “the

liberation of cognition from service to the will, forgetting oneself as an individual, and the elevation of

consciousness to the pure, will-less, timeless subject of cognition, independent of all relations” (W I,

234). 34

See Volker Gerhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, München 1992, p. 87: “An sich betrachtet hat das

menschliche Dasein keinen Reiz und keinen Wert, doch durch die Kunst wird es ‘möglich und

lebenswerth’”. In the later Attempt at a Self-Criticism Nietzsche asks whether there exists a “pessimism of

15

answer to the question whether life is or is not worth living and does not embrace

suicide as a remedy for a meaningless existence, albeit for different reasons than those

given by Schopenhauer.35

Nietzsche’s view of existence as meaningless does not change in his middle

period; in fact, we could say that with the madman’s announcement of the death of God

in The Gay Science the awareness of this meaninglessness increases even more.

Nietzsche continues to ask how and why one should go on living in a world devoid of

meaning: the last two sections of the first part of Human, All Too Human directly tackle

this issue.

In the first of these two sections, Nietzsche claims that every belief in the value

and dignity of life rests on illusion and false thinking. Men can believe in the value of

existence only because they do not empathize “with the universal life and suffering of

mankind” (HH I 33), they exist for themselves alone. Those who can participate in other

beings’ misfortunes and suffering would despair of this value; for “mankind has as a

whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive

from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair” (ibid.). But who could

bear the awareness that life is aimless? In Nietzsche’s opinion, only a poet can do so, for

poets “always know how to console themselves” (ibid.).36

strength”, establishing a clear dividing line between Schopenhauer’s resigned pessimism and his

Dionysian valuation of life. An open question is to what extent Nietzsche is here reinterpreting The Birth

of Tragedy through the lens of his later philosophy of art. However, I would personally reject Julian

Young’s reading, according to which “The Birth is a life-denying work”, “life is not worth living” and

that, like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche “denies (human) life” (see Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of

Art, Cambridge 1992, p. 48 and p. 54). Such a pessimistic picture sits uneasily with Nietzsche’s hopes

that “beneath this restlessly palpitating cultural life and convulsion there is concealed a glorious,

intrinsically healthy, primordial power that, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous

moments, and then continues to dream of a future awakening” (BT 23, KSA 1.146 f.). 35

For a wider analysis of the similarities and differences between Schopenhauer’s and the young

Nietzsche’s view of art, life and tragedy, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and

Dionysus, in: Christopher Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, pp. 344-374. One

of Nussbaum’s conclusions is that: “Nietzsche’s view is, then, not the simple inversion of

Schopenhauer’s. For he agrees with Schopenhauer that what an honest gaze discovers in the world is

arbitrariness and the absence of any intrinsic meaning. But he disagrees about the consequences of this

discovery for humanity’s view of itself. Schopenhauer’s human being, noticing that his positing of an

order in things is negated by the experience of life, becomes nauseated with life and with himself for

having lived a delusion. Nietzsche’s human being, noticing these same things about the world, is filled

with Dionysian joy and pride in his own artistry. For if there is no intrinsic order in things, how

wonderful, then – and indeed, how much more wonderful – that one should have managed to invent so

many beautiful stories, to forge so many daring conceptual schemes, to dance so many daring and

improbable dances. The absence of a designing god leads to a heightened joy in the artistic possibilities of

humanity” (pp. 364-365). 36

Here Nietzsche alludes again to the veils of illusion which art provides to man (in this case, the

poet). The relation between poets and illusion/lie is a recurrent theme in Nietzsche. Well-known is

Zarathustra’s claim that “poets lie too much” (Z II, On Poets, KSA 4.163). In section 148 (titled “Poets as

Alleviators of Life”) of the first part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche claims that there are several

16

In the following section Nietzsche asks whether his philosophy thus becomes a

tragedy and truth inimical to life.37

He then poses two more questions which reveal that

he was genuinely aware of the possible nihilistic consequences of a worldview like his:

“whether one could consciously reside in untruth? or, if one were obliged to, whether

death would not be preferable?” (HH I 34). Here Nietzsche directly considers the

possibility of suicide as an escape from a valueless, aimless existence. This possibility

becomes even more concrete if we consider that Nietzsche had annihilated morality as

well as religion and, therefore, there was no longer a moral obligation on man to keep

on living. “The whole of human life is sunk deeply in untruth”, Nietzsche writes, “the

individual cannot draw it up out of this well without thereby growing profoundly

disillusioned” (ibid.). Is all that remains despair and, on a theoretical level, a

“philosophy of destruction”, that is to say, a practical nihilism? Nietzsche’s answer to

this question will basically remain unchanged over the years: “the nature of the after-

effect of knowledge is determined by a man’s temperament” (ibid.). In other words, it is

simply a question of spiritual strength.38

Despair and resignation in the face of the

meaninglessness of existence are but one possibility: one could easily conceive of a

completely different after-effect “by virtue of which a life could arise much simpler and

emotionally cleaner than our present life is” (ibid.).

The emphasis that Nietzsche places on one’s spiritual strength highlights an

important difference between The Birth of Tragedy and Human, All Too Human. In the

things to be said against the poets’ means of alleviating life: “They soothe and heal only provisionally,

only for a moment; they even hinder men from working for a real improvement in their conditions by

suspending and discharging in a palliative way the very passion which impels the discontented to action”

(HH I 148). On this subject, see Gerhard Kaiser, Wie die Dichter lügen. Dichten und Leben in Nietzsches

ersten beiden Dionysos-Dithyramben, in: Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986), pp. 184-224. 37

Lev Shestov defines Nietzsche’s philosophy precisely as “philosophy of tragedy”. According to

Shestov, Nietzsche – like Dostoevsky and unlike systematic philosophers – does not avoid confronting

and acknowledging life’s horror and chaos, recognizing that philosophy cannot help being but tragic

philosophy (see Shestov’s Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy). On the tragic

consequences of knowing and acknowledging the truth, see in particular section 109 of the first part of

Human, All Too Human: “The tragedy [...] lies in the fact that one cannot believe these dogmas of religion

and metaphysics if one has in one’s heart and head the rigorous methods of acquiring truth, while on the

other hand one has, through the development of humanity, grown so tender, sensitive and afflicted one

has need of means of cure and comfort of the most potent description; from which there thus arises the

danger that man may bleed to death from knowledge of truth”. 38

The relation between knowledge, truth and strength of a spirit is clearly highlighted by the

following passage from Beyond Good and Evil: “the strength [Stärke] of a spirit would be proportionate

to how much of the ‘truth’ he could withstand – or, to put it more clearly, to what extent he needs it to be

thinned out, veiled over, sweetened up, dumbed down, and lied about” (BGE 39). See also MA II, Preface

7: “there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism that is as much a sign of severity and strength of intellect

(taste, feeling, conscience). With this will in one’s heart one has no fear of the fearful and questionable

that characterizes all existence; one even seeks it out. Behind such a will there stands courage, pride, the

longing for a great enemy”.

17

latter work Nietzsche rejects his earlier artists’ metaphysics and the theme of suicide

inevitably acquires a personal dimension: whether or not we want to go on living –

whether we can or cannot go on living – depends exclusively on our spiritual strength,

that is, our ability to endure a meaningless life without the help of any metaphysical

comfort.39

The same logic is taken to extremes in the thought of the eternal recurrence. In

the same way as in Human, All Too Human knowledge is presented in a disjunctive

form and can lead either to despair or to the acceptance of the tragic character of life, in

The Gay Science (§ 341) the thought of the eternal recurrence can provoke two

opposing reactions: on the one hand, the idea that life will return unchanged

innumerable times, with “every pain and every joy”, can be perceived as the heaviest

weight – the thick black snake which in Zarathustra’s speech On the Vision and the

Riddle hangs from the mouth of the young shepherd and is about to choke him; on the

other hand, eternal recurrence can be seen as the most divine and sublime thought, in

which the extreme form of yes-saying to life and the unconditional love for one’s fate

are expressed.40

The effect of this thought is therefore determined by one’s spiritual

strength, in exactly the same way in which a man’s temperament – to use the expression

from Human, All Too Human – is the decisive factor in his reaction to the

announcement of the death of God: he can experience either anguish and fear (life has

now no meaning and purpose) or joy and enthusiasm (the horizon is again free and

infinite and “our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger” (GS 343)).

Interestingly, scholars have related the thought of eternal recurrence to the myth

39

Nietzsche’s change of attitude towards art in Human, All Too Human is already patent in the

section 3: “It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been

discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical and

artistic ages and men, which blind us and make us happy” (HH I 3). For an analysis of the relationship

between art and science in Human, All Too Human see Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche on Art, London / New

York 2007, pp. 41-46. 40

Amor fati is the keyword used by Nietzsche to express his new love towards a world which “is

for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form,

beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called” (FW 109). This new

love, however, is not merely a conforming of one’s will to fate, or a passive acceptance of “what is

necessary in things” (GS 276) – as Bernard Reginster has pointed out, we should not confuse amor fati

either with resignation (“the acceptance of aspects of life we deplore but recognize to be inevitable”) or

with concealment (“the effort to mask the necessity of those deplorable aspects”), see Reginster, The

Affirmation of Life, p. 229 – but a truly active disposition, an affirmation of both sublime and tragic

aspects of life. As Nietzsche puts it later in Ecce Homo: “My formula for greatness in a human being is

amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not

merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is

necessary — but love it” (EH, Why I Am So Clever 10).

18

of Sisyphus.41

Just as the gods condemned Sisyphus for all eternity to push a rock up to

the top of a mountain only to see it roll down again, similarly, Nietzsche “condemns”

man to live a meaningless existence that returns innumerable times and always

unchanged. In the “Lenzer Heide” fragment the thought of the eternal recurrence is

indeed defined as “the most extreme form of nihilism”: “existence as it is, without

meaning or goal, but inevitably recurring, without any finale into nothingness”

(Nachlass 1886/87, 5[71], KSA 12.213).42

The thought of an existence in which any

metaphysical teleology is rejected43

is paralyzing – all the more so if suicide provides

no way out: “everything becomes and recurs eternally — escape [entschlüpfen] is not

possible!” (Nachlass 1883/84, 24[7], KSA 10.646). But this is precisely the selective

function which Nietzsche assigns to this thought: it strengthens the strong and paralyzes

the world-weary.

Within this picture, the revaluation has an essential role as a means to endure the

thought of the eternal recurrence. As Nietzsche puts it in a note dated 1884:

Means of enduring it [the thought of the eternal recurrence]: the revaluation of all values. No longer joy

in certainty but in uncertainty; no longer “cause and effect” but the continually creative; no longer will to

preservation but to power; no longer the humble expression, “everything is merely subjective,” but “it is

also our work!” — let us be proud of it! (Nachlass 1884, 26[284], KSA 11.225)

41

See particularly Ivan Soll, Reflections on Recurrence: A Re-examination of Nietzsche’s

Doctrine, Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, in: Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of

Critical Essays, Garden City, NY 1973, pp. 322-342; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and

Philosophy, Cambridge 1990, p. 272; Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, pp. 186-189. As already

mentioned (see footnote 4), this part of my paper is indebted to the analysis of the eternal recurrence Loeb

develops in relation to Camus’ discussion of the myth of Sisyphus. Loeb’s interpretation of the eternal

recurrence is, however, very different – if not opposed – from the one I have given. See the following

passages from Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption: “When, therefore, Nietzsche describes eternal

recurrence as the highest formulation of life-affirmation that is at all attainable, his point is not that the

human animal should aim to will this eternal recurrence and thereby achieve the highest life-affirmation

possible. Instead, his point is that the human animal can never will this and that therefore the human

animal can never achieve such life-affirmation.” (p. 181) – “The interpretation I have just outlined stands

in stark contrast to the usual ‘existentialist’ reading according to which Nietzsche hopes that eternal

recurrence, a doctrine that intensifies this meaninglessness to the highest degree, will enable the human

animal to become strong and healthy enough to accept, affirm, and even thrive on this meaninglessness.”

(p. 183) The interpretation of the eternal recurrence I give is in line with the reading Loeb labels as

“existentialist”: as pointed out, it is a matter of spiritual strength whether one is able to accept the tragic

character of life, to love his fate and to endure the eternal recurrence of a meaningless existence without

the help of any metaphysical comfort. Within this context, the Umwertung plays a pivotal role in bearing

this thought (on this point, see what follows in the main text). 42

As Loeb has rightly emphasized: “It is not just the thought of meaninglessness, but the thought

of meaninglessness eternally”, Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, p. 181. 43

“We deny final goals”, Nietzsche writes in the same fragment, “if existence had one, it could not

fail to have been reached”.

19

Only through a revaluation of the old values which have been devaluated can man

endure the eternally returning vacuity of existence: in order to subsist, he needs to create

and give a new meaning to the world. It is at this point, I believe, that the comparison

between the myth of Sisyphus and the doctrine of the eternal recurrence falls down. In

fact, even if we concede that Sisyphus may scorn and transcend his fate at the moment

at which he becomes conscious of it, and that “the struggle itself toward the heights is

enough to fill a man’s heart”,44

still we have to recognize that there is no place for the

creative dimension in his existence. As Loeb puts it:

The task performed by Sisyphus is imposed on him by the gods and is not in any way his or created by

him. Nor, despite the providential reasoning Camus attributes to Sisyphus, is this task in any way

meaningful. The gods deliberately select an arbitrary stone, an arbitrary mountain, and the completely

meaningless task of pushing the stone up the mountain. That the stone always rolls back down after it has

been pushed up shows that there is nothing meaningful or successful in Sisyphus reaching the mountain

top, or in pushing the stone up there, or even less in achieving a moment of lucidity there. 45

To equate man’s eternally recurring life with that of Sisyphus is to repeat the

error of the defeatist for whom, since life has no meaning, nothing really matters.46

But

the aim of Nietzsche’s philosophy is precisely to break out of this dichotomy. A brief

analogy with Nietzsche’s late epistemological position may help to elucidate this point.

In the sixth point of the well-known section “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a

Fable” in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche claims that, together with the real world,

we have also done away with the apparent one. By continuing to refer to an apparent

world we remain prisoners of the same metaphysical dichotomy which has been refuted.

Similarly, once we have done away with the belief that existence has a meaning in

itself, to continue to ask the philosophical-existentialist question about suicide would

mean that we remain prisoners of the old metaphysical way of thinking which holds that

44

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, New York 1955, p. 91. 45

Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption, p. 188. In Young’s opinion (also quoted by Loeb),

Camus’ account is not convincing: “[...] toughness is not enough; not enough to constitute a worthwhile

life. Do we, in fact, ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’? Surely not. Surely our response to his predicament is not

admiration but rather pity. [...] Sisyphus is of course immortal. To make him relevant to the question of

suicide, however, he has to be given that option. And given the option it is far from clear that he should

not take it” (Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life, pp. 165-166). 46

A typical example of this defeatist attitude can be found in the speech “The Shadow” from the

fourth part of Zarathustra. Having smashed anything his earth ever honoured and unlearned his faith in

words and values, Zarathustra’s shadow feels disoriented and now has neither a harbor to sail towards,

nor a home in which to rest: “‘Where is – my home?’ I asked, and I search and searched for it, but I have

not found it. Oh eternal everywhere, oh eternal nowhere, oh eternal – in vain!” (Z IV, The Shadow, KSA

4.341).

20

if the world has no meaning in itself it cannot have any meaning at all, and therefore:

why not suicide? Nietzsche’s philosophy goes beyond this logic. A new human and

earthly meaning can be created through revaluation.47

In this way, existence becomes

meaningful once again (but this time immanently meaningful)48

and, as a result, the

question of suicide ceases to be so distressing.49

The revaluation thus becomes the key to overcome the nihilistic attitude towards

life and the resulting longing for suicide. Man cannot live in a world devoid of meaning,

nor can he act without a table of values. In order to fill the void of a meaningless and

absurd existence, he therefore needs to give life a new meaning and to create new values

or revaluate the old ones. This is one of the most important points in Zarathustra:

“Humans first placed values into things, in order to preserve themselves – they first

created meaning for things, a human meaning! [...] Only through esteeming is there

value, and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow” (Z I, On a

Thousand and One Goals).50

But what kind of values did humans place on things? What

kind of meaning did they give to existence?

The answer to these questions can be found in the third treatise of the Genealogy

of Morals. In the final section Nietzsche makes the following claim: “Apart from the

ascetic ideal, man [...] had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal”

(GM III 28). According to Nietzsche’s genealogical interpretation, man suffered from

the lack of meaning and purpose of his life, being initially unable to fill this void. Man

47

In this light, Zarathustra’s claim that “the overman is the meaning of the earth” becomes fully

meaningful. Indeed, the overman has the function of filling the void left by God’s death, giving to human

existence a new earthly meaning. 48

See Paolo Stellino, Eutanasia y autonomía del paciente, p. 499: “Siguiendo la perspectiva

nietzscheana, el valor de la vida no puede verse entonces como un valor incondicionado y apriorístico en

cada caso, sino sólo como un valor condicionado, un valor que el hombre mismo atribuye a la vida que él

vive a partir de su individualidad, su particularidad concreta e histórica, y su estar insertado en una

comunidad social.” 49

A similar reading has been proposed by Young who, however, focuses more on the individual

aspects of the creation of meaning than on the collective ones. See the following insightful passage: “For

traditional thinkers [...] the meaning of life is something we discover: we do not choose or make it to be

the case. These two features – universality and givenness – characterise every grand-narrative philosophy.

All true-world philosophers, of whatever shape or hue, presuppose that these two features must

characterise any genuine answer to the question of the meaning of life. Suppose, however, that we now

reject both of them. Suppose we acknowledge that there are no true worlds, that every grand narrative is a

fiction, that reality is, in Nietzsche’s sense, ‘chaos’. And suppose we further conclude (at least, for the

time being) that there is no such thing as the –universal – meaning of life, that no meaning is written into

the metaphysical structure of reality. Still, one might reflect, that doesn’t mean that my life can’t have

meaning. It doesn’t mean that I can’t create meaning in my life, my own individual meaning” (Young,

The Death of God and the Meaning of Life, p. 85). In few words: “even in the absence of a grand

narrative there seems no reason why one should not be able to construct a personal narrative” (p. 86). 50

See GS 301: “Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature

– nature is always values-less – but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and

granters! Only we have created the world that concerns human beings!”

21

also suffered in other ways; physiologically, he was a sick animal. The problem,

however, was not that he suffered, but that his suffering had no meaning. The pivotal

role played by the ascetic ideal in human history is precisely that it offered man a

meaning for his suffering: man was guilty, and suffered for his guilt! In this way, a

physiological condition was falsely interpreted from a moral-religious perspective, but

the goal was achieved: “the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was

closed to any kind of suicidal [selbstmörderischen] nihilism” (ibid.).

Unfortunately, this interpretation was hostile to life and brought a deeper and

more poisonous suffering:

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its

direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of

the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to

get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself — all this means —

let us dare to grasp it — a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most

fundamental presuppositions of life [...]. (ibid.)

The ascetic ideal provided man with a solution “to the riddle of his existence” (GM III

25, KSA 5.404). He was no longer like “a leaf in the wind” (GM III 28); but at what

price? Paradoxically, the preservation of life was obtained through disgust with it: the

will was saved, but now man longed for nothingness.51

The result of Nietzsche’s

genealogical analysis is that man has only been able to create nihilistic and life-

devaluing values in order to give his life a meaning. In this sense, one of the purposes of

Nietzsche’s late philosophy is to show that a way out from this situation is possible only

through a revaluation of all values, which aims towards a new healthy life-affirming

valuation of life.52

In this context, art plays a key role. Already in The Gay Science Nietzsche had

realized that science alone was not able to fulfil a basic condition of human existence:

“man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists; his race cannot thrive

without a periodic trust in life – without faith in the reason in life!” (GS 1) Art meets

this need by falsifying reality (albeit with good will) and making existence bearable to

51

For a deeper analysis of the third treatise of the Genealogy, see Werner Stegmaier, Nietzsches

‚Genealogie der Moral‘, Darmstadt 1994; Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, New York 2002. 52

See, instead, Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption: “Properly understood, then, Zarathustra’s

doctrine of eternal recurrence is the counter-ideal to the ascetic ideal that has so far helped humankind to

survive in the face of its longing for death. It is the means whereby Zarathustra compels humankind to

will its own downfall.” (p. 182)

22

us:

Our ultimate gratitude to art. – Had we not approved of the arts and invented this type of cult of the

untrue, the insight into general untruth and mendacity that is now given to us by science – the insight into

delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensate existence – would be utterly unbearable.

Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid

such consequences: art, as the good will to appearance. [...] As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still

bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to

make such a phenomenon of ourselves. (GS 107)53

It is, however, in the late period that art54

again plays a pivotal role in

Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially as countermovement of nihilism.55

In the third

treatise of the Genealogy Nietzsche searches for opponents – an opposing will or ideal –

of the ascetic ideal. In this context, the science-art pairing emerges again. Nietzsche

rejects the idea that science represents the enemy of this ideal; on the contrary, in his

opinion science is rather “the latest and noblest form of it” (GM III 23, KSA 5.396 f.),

for it is animated by the faith in a metaphysical and absolute value of truth. Conversely,

art “in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good

conscience, is much more opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science” (GM III 25, KSA

5.402).

How should we understand this claim? The posthumous fragment 11[415] of

November 1887-March 1888 – in which Nietzsche makes some comments on The Birth

of Tragedy – can help us.56

In order to live in a world which is false and meaningless,

53

This theme already plays a pivotal role in The Birth of Tragedy. However, as Gianni Vattimo

has pointed out, the meaning of the theme is quite different here: “It is not a question here of following

Schopenhauer, of fleeing from the chaos of the will into a world of forms, which is removed from the

struggle for life that dominates the world of appearances. It is instead a question of making bearable the

knowledge that those errors on which life and knowledge are founded are unavoidable, and of

acknowledging that this is the sole source of the beauty and richness of our existence” (Gianni Vattimo,

Nietzsche: An Introduction, Stanford 2002, p. 57). In his guidebook to Nietzsche on Art, Ridley draws

attention to a terminological distinction which reveals a conceptual difference between The Birth of

Tragedy (existence is justified [gerechtfertigt]) and The Gay Science (existence is bearable [erträglich]):

“Eternal justification requires, at the very least, that what does the justifying be true, and in The Birth of

Tragedy Nietzsche thought that he had a candidate for that. But in The Gay Science it is precisely the

truth that is the problem, and so art, which is enlisted in order to falsify, in order to evade the truth, can no

longer, even potentially, offer justifications of existence (eternal or otherwise). It can, at most, offer to

make it liveable” (Ridley, Nietzsche on Art, p. 80). 54

Not every kind of art, of course: Christian and Romantic art are rather expressions of decadence. 55

See Nachlass 1888, 14[35, 47, 117, 119, 169, 170], 16[51], KSA 13.235, 241, 293-295, 296-

299, 355-357, 503. 56

As Johann Figl pointed out, although this note refers to The Birth of Tragedy, it expresses

anyway concepts which belong to the late Nietzsche’s thought (see Johann Figl, Interpretation als

philosophisches Prinzip, Berlin / New York 1982, p. 194).

23

man has need of lies.57

This need is satisfied by metaphysics, morality, religion and

science: all of them are only products of his “will to art, to lie, to flight from ‘truth,’ to

negation of ‘truth’” (Nachlass 1887/88, 11[415], KSA 13.193). In this, they are all

similar to art. There are however two important differences that make art appear in a

different light. First, unlike metaphysics, morality, religion and science, art openly

sanctifies the lie and therefore is alone in having a good conscience.58

Second, like

metaphysics, morality, religion and science, art helps man to bear his life, but, unlike

them, does not devaluate it. On the contrary, art acts as a stimulant: “Art and nothing

but art!”, writes Nietzsche in his note, “It is the great means of making life possible, the

great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life” (ibid.).59

Nietzsche’s late conception of art as a stimulant of or to life appears not just in

the posthumous fragments, but is present also in the Twilight of the Idols. In section 24

of “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man” Nietzsche explicitly rejects the idea of

an aimless and purposeless art, that is, l’art pour l’art. On the contrary, in Nietzsche’s

view art cannot be conceived of as separate from life:

The struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against its

subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means: ‘the devil take morality!’ But even this enmity betrays

the overwhelming force of prejudice. Once you take away from art the purpose of preaching morality and

improving humanity, the result is still a far cry from art as completely purposeless, aimless, senseless, in

short l’art pour l’art — a worm biting its own tail. [...] Art is the great stimulant to life: how could one

conceive of it as purposeless, aimless, l’art pour l’art ?” (TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man

24).60

57

As Nietzsche puts it: “The antithesis of a real and an apparent world is lacking here: there is

only one world, and this is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, without meaning — A world thus

constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth,’ that is, in

order to live — That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable

character of existence” (Nachlass 1887/88, 11[415], KSA 13.193). 58

See Nadeem J. Z. Hussain, Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits, in: Brian

Leiter, Neil Sinhababu (ed.), Nietzsche and Morality, New York 2007, pp. 157-191, p. 168: “What is

special, for Nietzsche, about art is that it is honest about its use of illusion. Art is in the business of

generating honest illusions” (my emphasis). 59

Martha C. Nussbaum makes the following remark: “life is made worth living, made joyful and

made human, only by art – that is to say, in the largest sense, by the human being’s power to create an

order in the midst of disorder, to make up a meaning where nature itself does not supply one. In creative

activity (associated by Nietzsche not only with arts narrowly understood, but also with love, religion,

ethics, science – all seen as forms of creative story making), we find the source of what is in truth

wonderful and joyful in life. And if we can learn to value that activity and find our meaning in it, rather

than looking for an external meaning in God or in nature, we can love ourselves and love life. Art is thus

the great anti-pessimistic form of life, the great alternative to denial and resignation” (Nietzsche,

Schopenhauer, and Dionysus, p. 363). 60

See also Nachlass 1888, 15[10], KSA 13.409, where Nietzsche rejects Aristotle’s understanding

of tragedy and defines art as “the great stimulant of life, an intoxication with life, a will to life”.

24

It should therefore not surprise us that the late Nietzsche – who conceived of art “as the

only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian,

anti-Buddhist, anti-nihilist par excellence” (Nachlass 1888, 17[3], KSA 13.521) – saw

in art a countermovement of nihilism and a much stronger opposition to the ascetic ideal

than in science. As a great life-affirming force, art produced “perfection and plenitude”

and was “essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence” (Nachlass 1888,

14[47], KSA 13.241). Since “truth is ugly”, art transfigured the world and made

existence bearable – “We possess art lest we perish of the truth”, Nietzsche wrote in

1888 (Nachlass 1888, 16[40], KSA 13.500): by so doing, art acted against every kind of

suicidal nihilism.61

3. Conclusion

Nietzsche’s worldview was strongly characterized by the absolute meaninglessness and

purposelessness of human existence. This conception clearly influenced his view of

suicide. On the one hand, since life has no value in itself and there is no God, in

principle nothing compels us to await the natural death to come. In contrast to Kant, for

Nietzsche there is no moral argument against suicide.62

In this sense, we could say that

the relation between life and morality is here reversed: it is not life that has to follow the

rules of morality, but morality that has to be adapted to or created according to man’s

vital needs. What counts rather for Nietzsche is the rationality of an act that enables man

to avoid useless suffering and a debasing death; an act whose natural character and

correct appreciation we have to restore after two millennia of Christian tradition.

61

For a contrasting reading of Nietzsche’s late philosophy of art, see Young, Nietzsche’s

Philosophy of Art, pp. 117-147. According to Young, in the end, Nietzsche “returns to the inauthenticity,

the illusionism” of The Birth of Tragedy. Pessimism and the wisdom of Silenus are regarded as true:

“Real life, the life of human individuality, is something it would be better we had never been born into.

To the extent, therefore, that its main aim is to be the ‘antipode’ to Schopenhauerianism, to ‘affirm life,’

Nietzsche’s philosophy ends in failure” (p. 148). 62

As Héctor Wittwer pointed out, Kant provides several arguments against suicide (see Héctor

Wittwer, Über Kants Verbot der Selbsttötung, in: Kant-Studien 92 (2001), pp. 180-209, p. 182). An

exposition of what we might call the “Moral Argument” can be found in The Metaphysics of Morals (§ 6,

On Killing Oneself, AA, vol. 6: p. 422): “A human being cannot renounce his personality as long as he is

a subject of duty, hence as long as he lives; and it is a contradiction that he should be authorized to

withdraw from all obligation, that is, freely to act as if no authorization were needed for this action. To

annihilate the subject of morality in one’s own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from

the world, as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself

as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person (homo noumenon), to

which man (homo phaenomenon) was nevertheless entrusted for preservation”.

25

That life has no value in itself does not mean, however, that Nietzsche gave his

approval to every possible kind of suicide. As noted above, Nietzsche’s positive

evaluation of voluntary death mainly refers to the old man who, having lived his life

and reached his goal, refuses to hang like a coward on the branches of the tree of life. In

this sense, Nietzsche rejected those forms of nihilistic suicide – which were rather signs

of decadence – as a possible solution to the riddle of existence.63

He was also aware of

the genuine risk that the collapse of the Christian and moral interpretation of the world,

caused by the sense of truthfulness that it promoted, could culminate in the nihilistic

assertion ‘everything is meaningless’ and in a longing for nothingness, which are both

Buddhist traits. It was precisely for this reason that the late Nietzsche so strongly

advocated a revaluation of those old values which had proven to be life-negating and

devaluating. A new meaning – a life-affirming one – was needed; for men, as the third

treatise of the Genealogy of Morals shows, cannot live without a meaning.

Nietzsche’s constant effort to affirm life and to justify existence proves that he

did not succumb to the nihilistic temptation. Strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s

worldview, the young Nietzsche rejected his master’s pessimistic solution to the riddle

of existence and considered that, through art, life was still possible and worthy. He thus

indirectly gave an affirmative answer to the philosophical-existentialist question of

whether life is worth living. Nietzsche’s view of existence as meaningless and valueless

did not change in his middle period; on the contrary, with the announcement of the

death of God the awareness of this meaninglessness increased even more. The rejection

of the earlier artists’ metaphysics helped to give the theme of suicide a personal

dimension: in this sense, the capacity to endure a meaningless existence without the aid

of any metaphysical comfort basically depended on the strength of one’s spirit, which

thus became the decisive factor.

The same logic is taken to extremes in the thought of the eternal recurrence

63

Nietzsche’s reception of Kirillov – one of the characters from Dostoevsky’s The Devils – is in

this sense paradigmatic. Kirillov wants to deny God’s existence and affirm his self-will by committing

suicide, an act which, he thinks, would be the highest point of one’s self-will. His denial of God leads him

to formulate an argument which Nietzsche calls in his notebook The Logic of Atheism: “If there is God,

then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to

proclaim my self-will” (Nachlass 1887/88, 11[334], KSA 13.143). I think C. A. Miller is right in claiming

that although Nietzsche noted similarities between Kirillov’s “idea” of man’s absolute autonomy and his

experimental philosophy, he nevertheless perceived the character as “a study in the psychology of

décadence” (C. A. Miller, The Nihilist as Tempter-Redeemer: Dostoevsky’s “Man-God” in Nietzsche’s

Notebooks, in: Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975), pp. 165-226, p. 170). Miller also points out that Kirillov is

paradoxically defeated by an idea which might have emancipated him from the tyranny of the old God. In

this sense, he “succumbs to what Nietzsche called in the Antichrist the ‘slavery’ (Sklaverei) of the

Believer-fanatic to his ‘conviction’ (Überzeugung)” (Miller, The Nihilist as Tempter-Redeemer, p. 206).

26

which acts as a selective principle. Indeed, depending on one’s spiritual strength, the

thought that a meaningless existence will return innumerable times, always unchanged,

could be perceived either as a paralyzing idea that leads to despair and nausea, or

alternatively as a life-affirming one. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the revaluation of all

values – conceived of as a means to endure this thought – becomes the key to

overcoming the nihilistic attitude towards life and the resulting longing for suicide: for

it is only through a reassessment of the old values and the creation of a new human and

earthly meaning that nihilism, which derives from the awareness that the world we live

in has no meaning and no value in itself, can be overcome. It is precisely this creative

dimension that makes the comparison between the eternal recurring life of men and the

never-ending punishment of Sisyphus inadequate.

Nietzsche’s philosophy therefore breaks down the dichotomy typical of the

nihilist (or defeatist) for whom, since life has no intrinsic meaning, nothing really

matters, not even life. Nietzsche’s view is here analogous to his late epistemological

position. Indeed, if in The Twilight of the Idols the expression “apparent world” loses its

meaning once we have done away with the “true world”, similarly, the philosophical-

existentialist question of suicide ceases to be so distressingly urgent once we understand

that a new human and earthly meaning can be created through revaluation. Thus,

existence once again becomes meaningful, albeit this time immanently meaningful.

In Nietzsche’s late period the need for a revaluation of the old values and the

creation of new ones becomes even more pressing than before. In these years

Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the culture and society of his time clearly sheds light on the

nihilistic and decadent drift of modernity. A clear example of this is given in the third

treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, which shows how man had been unable to create

genuine opponents of the ascetic ideal and had closed the door on any kind of suicidal

nihilism only at the cost of introducing life-devaluing values and infecting himself with

disgust and aversion towards life. Within this context, art again plays a pivotal role: as

the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life, art opposes every kind of life-

negating will and persuades man that, despite its tragic and meaningless character, life

is still worth living and being affirmed.64

64

For a diametrically opposed conclusion, see Loeb, Suicide, Meaning and Redemption:

“Nietzsche’s recommendation of a life-affirming suicide, and his quest for a new counter-ideal that will

enforce this recommendation, is intended not just for the individual pessimists like Schopenhauer and

Camus [the allusion here is to TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36; P. S.], nor even just for

the weak and sick majority-herd of humankind that he everywhere deplores, but for humankind itself.

27

Whereas the hitherto reigning life-denying ideal gave suicidal humankind an illegitimate reason to live,

the new life-affirming counter-ideal must give it a legitimate reason to die. Whereas prior to the ascetic

ideal the void of meaning prompted humankind to suicide, the new counter-ideal will offer humankind a

meaning and justification for its suicide.” (p. 171; my italics); “I am simply going to assume that

Nietzsche does indeed envision his future philosopher as commanding the self-destruction of humankind.”

(p. 173; my italics) The italicized passages emphasize those points in which, I believe, Loeb’s reading

diverges the most from my interpretation.