Philosophical Disquisitions: Nietzschean Nihilism and the Highest Values

"We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing. And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson."

(The Big Lebowski)

I have been spending my summer vacation reading about nihilism (why? what have you been doing?). Before this reading adventure, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what nihilism was all about, namely: the rejection of normative and evaluative facts. But through my reading, I have come to realise that ‘nihilism’ is a confusing term. I think this is partly Nietzsche’s fault. As the philosopher most responsible for introducing the term into modern thought, it doesn’t help that Nietzsche spoke about several different forms of nihilism, not all of them meaning quite the same thing (active, passive, radical, Christian, European etc).

In this post, I want to look at one interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism. This interpretation comes from an article by Paul Katsafanas entitled ‘Fugitive Pleasure and the Meaningful Life: Nietzsche on Nihilism and Higher Values’. In this article, Katsafanas readily concedes that Nietzsche endorsed different forms of nihilism but thinks there was, nevertheless, a central form of Nietzschean nihilism (call it ’N-nihilism’) that preoccupied his thinking.

It is this core form of N-nihilism that I want to learn more about. I will do this by writing up an exposition of Katsafanas’s interpretation. My hope is that this will not only help me to understand what N-nihilism is all about, but will also help others who are interested in the topic.

1. Schopenhauer versus Nietzsche
I’m not an authority on Nietzsche. In fact, I find it difficult to read Nietzsche. His aphoristic and esoteric style just doesn’t appeal to me. I'm just too literal and analytical. I do, however, like reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer’s views on pessimism. I’ve written about these at length before. To summarise, Schopenhauer argued that the will was the most prevalent feature of human psychology (indeed, Schopenhauer went further and argued that the will was a fundamental metaphysical principle). He claimed that the will was insatiable: people constantly desire and long for things to be different. They want food when they are hungry; they want comfort when they are sad; they want, they want, they want.

This is the cause of much suffering. The will is motivated by some occurrent experience of suffering (some lack or deprivation that needs to be addressed). When the will is satisfied there is momentary contentment, but this soon passes away. The will moves on to something else: some new experience of suffering that needs to be addressed. Schopenhauer concluded from this that all happiness is really only neutral in nature, and not genuinely positive: it is about filling a hole and not about ascending to new heights. This is what led him to believe that all life is suffering and this is why he is known as the philosopher of pessimism.

As Katsafanas points out, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is founded on a simple ethic of pleasure and pain. We want pleasure and we avoid pain. The tragedy of life is that we spend most of our time in pain and then take pleasure in the elimination of pain. This gives us a distorted view of how bad (how painful) our lives really are. Schopenhauer lifted the veil and revealed the pessimistic truth.

Nietzsche, though inspired by Schopenhauer, took quite a different view. He didn’t think the simple ethic of pleasure and pain accounted for human action. On the contrary, he argued that humans often seek out pain. Religious ascetics — people who fast and flagellate themselves as acts of Godly devotion — were one of his go-to examples of this. There are many others. Think about your own life. How many times have you endured pain and suffering in order to achieve a goal? Probably quite often. So why do you and other people do this? The answer, according to Nietzsche, is that you find the pain meaningful, i.e. you think it serves some higher purpose. It is only when the higher purpose seems to be absent that the pain is viewed as a major problem.

As he put it:

Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering, he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse thus far stretched over humanity.

(On the Genealogy of Morality, III: 28)

This led Nietzsche to the conclusion that it is the presence of meaning and purpose, and not the avoidance of pain, that is central to human life. Indeed, a life could be intensely pleasurable and yet be perceived as tragic because it lacked purpose. Katsafanas’s main claim is that N-nihilism is directly connected to this realisation.

2. N-Nihilism as the Absence of Higher Values
This is where things get a bit tricky. As noted in the introduction, Nietzsche says different things about nihilism and not all of them are consistent. Still, most interpreters (Katsafanas cites several) have taken Nietzsche’s central form of nihilism to be a type of basic evaluative nihilism. This involves the rejection or denial of the existence of values.

But Katsafanas doesn’t like this interpretation because it makes it difficult to understand other things that Nietzsche says. For example, Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism largely focuses on a particular historical moment (late 19th Century Europe where traditional ideologies were under threat) and not on some general metaphysical truth (which Nietzsche was sceptical of anyway). Furthermore, Nietzsche doesn’t seem to think it is possible to deny or reject values per se. He sees valuing as a basic psychological drive or fact: people value things and this is apparent in how they act. It would be practically impossible to reject or deny all values.

Instead, N-nihilism has to be associated with the denial or rejection of certain kinds of value. Quoting from Nietzsche’s work, Katsafanas argues that it is the denial or rejection of higher values (or the highest values) that is the root of N-nihilism:

[N]ihilism is the conviction of the absolute untenability [Unhaltbarkeit] of existence as far as the highest values one acknowledges are concerned.

(Kritische Studienausgabe, 12:10 - quoted in Katsafanas 2015)

This, of course, just raises the question: what is a higher value? One interpretation of the concept is that a higher value has two properties: (i) it is intrinsic and foundational to the justification of other values and (ii) it sits atop a hierarchy of value. So, for example, classical utilitarians would see pleasure as the highest value. It is foundational to how they justify other values. On utilitarianism, you can value ice-cream but only because of the pleasure it brings; if it doesn’t bring pleasure you cannot value it. It is also the chief value, i.e. the thing that is most important. All other putative values (freedom, justice etc) can be sacrificed for its attainment. Furthermore, it’s not just classical utilitarians who adopt this view of higher values; this understanding of highest values is common to many philosophical schools of thought.

Although it might be tempting to equate Nietzsche’s understanding of highest values with this view, Katsafanas argues that it would be a mistake. This is because Nietzsche’s generally rejects the idea that values can be ordered into neat, logical hierarchies. His famous work on morality — On the Genealogy of Morality — looks at how different societies are organised around different clusters of values, some of which are perceived as more important than others — as axiological centres of gravity — but do not form a simple logical hierarchy. On the contrary, Nietzsche sees human cultural history as involving conflict between different clusters of values, and evolutions to new axiological centres of gravity. For example, Homeric Greece was organised around a cluster of heroic values: courage in battle, physical strength and dexterity, righteous anger and so forth. Christian Europe was organised around a different cluster of values, something Nietzsche called the ’slave’ morality. The loss of central values doesn’t lead to the collapse of some value hierarchy, but does create tension and difficulty as society has to shift to some new axiological equilibrium.

So what, then, was Nietzsche’s understanding of highest values? Rather than belabour the point, we can just give Katsafanas’s answer to that question. He claims, reading across Nietzsche’s work, that there are six properties associated with the highest values. They are:

Demandingness: The highest values are demanding in that they require strict compliance. You cannot weigh the highest values against other lower values. They cannot be traded in or compromised against lower values. They are, in a sense, non-negotiable.

Tragic Conflict: When the highest values come into conflict, this conflict is experienced as tragic. This is largely because it forces people to choose between values they otherwise perceive as being non-negotiable.

Strong Emotion: The highest values tend to elicit strong emotional reactions, e.g. feelings of reverence, love, awe when they are protected and feelings of resentment and hatred when they are not.

Importance: The highest values have a weight that lower values tend to lack. In particular, they tend to terminate inquiries into why you might be engaging in a particular action. For example, in Homeric Greece, if you said you were doing something in order to secure glory on the battlefield, nobody would question what you were doing.

Exclusionary: The highest values tend to crowd out other values. You use them to criticise or delegitimise other values.

Community-building: Because of their importance and weight, the highest values have the capacity to bind communities together around common projects and aims.

Now, I have to say I’m not sure how distinctive these six properties are — for example, I see a lot of similarity between the first, second, fourth and fifth properties — but they are nevertheless what Katsafanas thinks Nietzsche means when he refers to ‘highest values’. Consequently, N-nihilism is interpreted as the denial or rejection of values with these six properties.

3. The Tragedy of N-Nihilism
This clarifies what N-nihilism is, but you may also want to know why N-nihilism is problematic and why Nietzsche was concerned about it (if, in fact, he was). Here’s my rough take on it. Nietzsche thought that Europe was going through a nihilistic moment in the late 19th Century. The delegitimisation of old value systems and the questioning of old faiths was creating something of a crisis of meaning. No value system seemed secure or beyond criticism. Many seemed to rest on shaky epistemological and metaphysical foundations (something Nietzsche fully endorsed with his 'perspectivalism'). This was causing people to question their commitment to the highest values and thus to lapse into N-nihilism.

Nietzsche did not engage in obvious forms of moralising, but he did perceive something tragic in this lapse into N-nihilism (and, indeed, others have argued that his philosophy is largely geared towards solving the problem of nihilism). For example, he starts his most famous work (Thus Spake Zarathustra) with the parable of the ‘last man’ who was supposed to embody nihilism. The last man was idle and uncommitted. He had values and pursued goals, but they were mere forms of entertainment and leisure, not true higher values:

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. . . . Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. . . . One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd!

(Zarathustra, Prologue)

In other words, once the lapse into N-nihilism was complete people would still value things like pleasure, comfort, health and security, but there would be something missing in all this. Higher values would no longer have their animating power. Individuals would not live meaningful lives committed to higher values; communities built around higher values would cease to exist.

And why is this a problem? Katsafanas admits that it is not easy to answer that question. Because Nietzsche avoided overt moralising, some do not interpret him as criticising or rejecting the lifestyle of the last man. Still, there is some inconsistency between the lifestyle of the last man and other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in particular his ‘will to power’.

Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche thought the will was central to human psychology, but unlike Schopenhauer he thought the will was directed mainly at overcoming resistance and not at achieving goals per se. In other words, the will is driven to seek out worthy foes, obstacles to the achievement of goals, and it directs its energies to overcoming those obstacles. It is concerned with the means and not with the ends.

And it is not just that. The will doesn't just overcome adversaries and obstacles; it actually needs adversaries and needs obstacles: it is, after all, restless and insatiable. If it doesn’t have those worthy adversaries, it becomes listless and directed at whatever is available. This undermines the central motivating force in human life and leads to an unsatisfying form of life.

You can imagine, then, how the argument might go. Our highest values provide the will to power with a worthy adversary: they give it projects that involve struggle and resistance. What’s more, they provide projects that people give themselves to fully. They have to since the values at stake are non-negotiable and exclusionary. If we no longer have these highest values — if all values are perceived as contingent and questionable — then the will loses its worthy adversaries. This breaks down the sense of meaning in individual life and the sense of community. As Katsafanas puts it:

We’ve seen that nihilism is the loss of higher values. Higher values mandate strict compliance and recruit strong emotions, thus presenting struggle as meaningful. Loss of higher values gradually erodes commitment to struggle by presenting it as unjustifiable. So the last man has only fragile commitments to projects and can’t remain committed to difficult endeavors. This frustrates will to power. In short, there’s an essential tendency in our actions that favors adopting higher values and that is heightened and promoted by these higher values; moreover, absent these higher values its expression looks futile, and it lacks opportunity for expression.