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After diagnosing the disease of nihilism, there is one question left: what is the cure? This closing lecture from Academy of Ideas turns to Friedrich Nietzsche’s answer — the call to ‘become who you are.’ It is a summons to leave the herd, choose a hard goal, and stop running from suffering. Nietzsche saw pain not as evil to be avoided, but as the very engine of becoming: the deepest depths give rise to the greatest heights. For anyone ready to turn a season of confusion into a life built on purpose, this is a bracing and hopeful finish.
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The Ideas of Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Nihilism, Lecture 6, Overcoming Nihilism.
We have reached the final lecture in this series on nihilism.
In the last lecture, we learned that while Nietzsche saw nihilism as a disease, for those he characterized as active nihilists, nihilism presents an opportunity to greatly improve one’s life.
In this lecture, we will investigate some of the ideas Nietzsche thought could assist those afflicted with nihilistic doubt.
Specifically, we will discuss Nietzsche’s formula,
Become Who You Are, and look into his attempt to revalue suffering.
Nietzsche was very critical of mankind.
To him, most human beings were pitiful creatures,
and he often characterized the masses as herd animals.
He reached such views because he saw the overwhelming majority of human beings
as depressingly mediocre and weak.
Every person has the potential to become great,
to realize their dreams,
To become what Nietzsche called a higher man
Yet most people conform and follow the well-trodden path to mediocrity
Even those individuals considered great by the masses
Nietzsche saw as nothing but individuals on the higher end of the spectrum of mediocrity
I saw them both naked, Nietzsche tells us in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The greatest people and the smallest people
All too similar to one another
Even the greatest was all too human
The greatest was all too small
Nietzsche longed for the emergence of truly great individuals, and in fact devoted his philosophical writings to such potential individuals.
He thought that his ideas could motivate people to remove themselves from the herd and actualize their potential.
In his autobiography, Echo Homo, Nietzsche amusingly conveyed this idea.
there were no fish. In order to realize one’s potential, Nietzsche thought it necessary
not to find a much-needed purpose to life by clinging to a religious creed or mass movement,
but instead by looking within. Located in every single person is a seed of unrealized potential,
and one’s purpose in life should be to see that such a potential is actualized. In his biography
on Nietzsche, Rudiger Safransky elucidates, using a passage from Nietzsche’s journals,
exactly what Nietzsche thought to be the meaning of life.
We are not humans from the start. We need to become human. Toward this end, we need
the insight that only we are responsible for ourselves, that accusations that we have missed
our life’s calling can be directed only at us, not some higher powers. We are in no need
of the delusion of a supernatural world, because the very task of becoming human is the truly
colossal achievement. Nietzsche sometimes referred to such a purpose as the journey towards becoming
who you are. In his book, The Gay Science, he wrote, we, however, want to become those we are,
human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.
While everyone has an inner desire to become the best person they can, and to realize their dreams,
for most life is filled with disappointment, regret, and often guilt at missed opportunities.
In one of his early essays titled Untimely Meditations,
Nietzsche pinpointed fear and laziness as two universal human characteristics,
which prevent most people from realizing their potential.
In his heart, every man knows quite well that, being unique,
he will be in the world only once in that there will be no second chance he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience why from fear of his neighbor who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it but what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor
to think and act like a member of a herd and to have no joy in himself modesty perhaps in a few rare cases for the majority it is idleness inertia in short that propensity for laziness
Men are even lazier than they are fearful.
The task of becoming who you are, Nietzsche thought to be the most difficult task there is.
Everyone has an inner voice that urges them to accomplish something great and to chase after their dream.
But most people repress this inner voice because they lack the courage and strength to listen to it.
They fear their higher self, Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human.
Because when it speaks, it speaks demandingly.
Nietzsche had some ideas for how one could find their purpose and work towards it.
Firstly, he thought an individual required an organizing idea,
some ultimate goal they desired to accomplish.
Such a goal could be to construct a great philosophical system,
to become a top-class athlete,
make the next medical breakthrough,
or to summit the most dangerous mountain peaks in the world.
The specifics of the goal are not important.
What is important is the difficulty of the task.
The more difficult it is, the greater one will have to become in order to accomplish it.
How does one find such a goal?
There are some people who have an explicit dream in life
and know exactly what their heart desires above anything else.
But most people, even if they had the freedom and means to chase after a dream,
wouldn’t know what to do.
Nietzsche had some advice for these dreamless individuals.
Look within yourself and find out what you love.
Or as he puts it in Untimely Meditations,
Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question,
What have you truly loved up till now?
What has elevated your soul?
What has mastered it and at the same time delighted it?
Place these venerated objects before you in a row,
and perhaps they will yield for you,
through their nature and their sequence, a law,
the fundamental law of your true self.
For your true nature lies not hidden deep within you,
but immeasurably high above you,
or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.
An individual who finds a goal and sets out on a path in life towards its realization
will soon find that such a path is fraught with setbacks, difficulties, and pain.
The pain and suffering that those who strive after mighty goals inevitably face
will in many cases cause them to flee back to the comforts of mediocrity.
Nietzsche thought such failed attempts occur largely
because most people only see a negative side to suffering, and are ignorant regarding its value.
If you have been following this lecture series, you will remember in lecture 2 we saw that the inescapability of suffering
has led many to assume very pessimistic views regarding human existence.
Suffering, it is almost universally believed, is evil.
When people suffer they automatically feel there is something wrong with them, something they need to fix,
and practically everybody, when they feel some sort of psychological pain arising,
at one point or another will search for any form of distraction.
Nietzsche, as we will see, was intimately familiar with suffering and pain.
His intimacy forced him to question the universal assumption that suffering is intrinsically bad.
He concluded that people think suffering is evil because it is unpleasant and painful.
Yet this is a false conclusion.
Just because something is unpleasant or brings us discomfort, he reasoned, doesn’t mean it lacks value.
In The Gay Science, he elucidated this idea.
There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure.
That it hurts is no argument against it, but its essence.
As we mentioned, Nietzsche was in a good position to philosophize on the nature of suffering.
He endured more suffering, pain, and hardship than most can imagine.
I am more of a battlefield than a man, wrote Nietzsche in his autobiography.
A large portion of his adult life was spent struggling with physical ailments,
specifically fits of vomiting and intense migraines which would sometimes last for weeks on end,
and which doctors could not localize to a specific cause.
He also isolated himself for much of his life,
and rejected any emotional or psychological support from those closest to him.
Instead, he strove to deal with all his problems with his own individual resources.
In addition to all this, despite being certain that his philosophy was of great value to mankind,
he was largely ignored and never saw any success or recognition before his descent into madness.
He was tormented with an extreme sense of loneliness and self-doubt,
afraid that his great works would sink unnoticed in the tumultuous river of human history.
However, over time Nietzsche began to realize that his bouts with sickness and suffering actually presented great opportunities, as they usually preceded great periods of growth.
He also noticed that his more powerful and deep philosophical insights had sprung spontaneously from his bouts with pain.
Suffering is not evil, he came to understand, but instead should be considered among the greatest of all goods.
It has long been assumed that the chief end which human beings strive for is happiness.
Nietzsche didn’t question this.
He himself longed for what he called the great happiness.
However, he thought that practically all individuals go about trying to arrive at happiness the wrong way.
Most do so by continually engaging in hedonistic activities,
or in other words, those which are performed solely for the pleasure they provide.
But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected, Nietzsche asked in his book The Gay Science,
that he who wants the greatest possible amount of one must also have the greatest possible amount
of the other. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his most poetic of works, he expressed this same idea.
rocks and in the walls of their peaks. It is out of the deepest depth that the highest
must come to its height. The key to suffering, Nietzsche thought, is to know how to utilize
it to one’s advantage. Everybody inevitably suffers, but it is only the great individual
who not only willingly faces and endures suffering, but invites it in with the knowledge that
it presents an opportunity for growth and an increase of wisdom. I assess the power
of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage,
Nietzsche wrote in a passage contained in The Will to Power.
We can see that Nietzsche thought it was essential for one to learn how to live with and utilize
the beneficial aspects of suffering.
Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and will
to inflict great suffering?
Asked Nietzsche.
A good way to conclude this lecture is with a shocking passage from The Will to Power
which effectively reveals the importance of suffering for Nietzsche.
In the passage, Nietzsche addresses the potential higher man,
the one who he dedicated all his philosophical writings to.
He wrote,
thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not, that one endures.
Source: Academy of Ideas
Remember the old Army propaganda slogan “Be All You Can Be”? You don’t have to join the military to make that a reality. You are an Army of One if you choose to be.