Nietzsche on suffering

Abstract

Suffering is a persistent theme throughout Nietzsche’s works. In The Birth of Tragedy he was partly under the influence of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which held that the ubiquitous presence of suffering in human life made non-existence preferable. Here Nietzsche begins a project of reconstruing suffering as something that can be lived with and even celebrated. At this stage he aestheticizes suffering by considering our response to it in tragic drama. The book will address the further interpretive question whether Nietzsche continues to aestheticize suffering later in his career, as some commentators have maintained. A distinct and important argumentative strand in his works of the 1880s addresses the value of suffering as such, as part of Nietzsche’s critique of morality and in particular its central notion of compassion towards the suffering of others. Nietzsche has many objections to compassion, one of which is to reject the claim that suffering is normatively bad in itself. The book will give a critical analysis of this claim, linking it to Nietzsche’s notion of growth in power, and will show how revaluing suffering is a vital part of his mature project of promoting life-affirmation. If life is essentially characterized by growth and the overcoming of obstacles, then suffering is an essential part of life and must be affirmed if life is to be affirmed. Suffering also preoccupies Nietzsche in his thinking about cruelty and the self-cruelty that constitutes asceticism. Nietzsche diagnoses a human need to give meaning to suffering. The book will explore why it is that the ascetic ideal (thematized in On the Genealogy of Morals) culminates in the will to truth, the assignment of unconditional value to the discovery of truth. A less well recognized aspect of Nietzsche’s thought is his idea, expressed in Beyond Good and Evil, that intellectual inquiry is a form of mental self-cruelty, to which we give meaning by conceptualizing truth and ourselves as something ‘higher’ than nature. Traditional metaphysics has given false pictures of humanity in the process of finding meaning for suffering. Nietzsche’s later work suggests that we should affirm suffering as a valuable element of life in its own right. The book will conclude with an assessment of the cogency of Nietzsche’s treatment of suffering.

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ORCID for Christopher Janaway: orcid.org/0000-0002-9600-8837

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