Abstract
This paper identifies and offers commentary upon a previously un-remarked consonance between Nietzsche and Weil when it comes to the idea of a universal love of the world (‘affirmation’ in Nietzsche’s terms, or ‘consent to necessity’ in Weil’s). The discussion focuses on five features of the Nietzschean account of affirmation, which are as follows: (1) that the possibility of affirmation has the form of a fundamental question at the heart of human life, which (2) has an all-or-nothing character (it is universal in scope and pervasive in influence); that (3) genuine affirmation is rare, difficult or traumatic in an existentially revealing way, primarily because (4) affirmation means facing up to the lack of finality in the world, and in particular the problem of meaningless suffering, which means that (5) affirmation is tied up with a fundamental revaluation. The first half of the paper outlines the parallels between Nietzschean affirmation and Weilian ‘consent to necessity’ in relation to the first three of these, which are also the most general. The second half of the paper explores the fourth and fifth, so as to suggest a way of reading the underlying similarity between these two projects: both are attempts to rediscover the possibility of an all-embracing affirmation of reality in the absence of any existential teleology, and when eschatology has been presumed to be impossible. In other words, both Nietzsche and Weil are compelled to find a way of achieving a transfigured perspective on ‘the whole’ in the absence of any transformation of ‘the whole’.
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Notes
Weil (2014, p. 293).
Weil (2015b, p. 219).
Goodchild (2017) puts Weil into sustained dialogue with Nietzsche, in a discussion that reads Weil’s philosophy of time in relation to Nietzsche’s critique of the Platonic elevation of being over becoming; McCullough (2014) includes some useful comments on Nietzsche in passing; Hamilton (2000) briefly utilises a quotation from Weil in his critique of Nietzsche’s conception of nobility. Broc-Lapeyre (1980) offers a sustained reflection on the significance of Weil’s brief comments on Nietzsche in a letter to her brother, and goes on to analyse the similarities and differences in Nietzsche and Weil’s account of power, especially in relation to their attitudes to ancient Greek thought. In an unpublished paper delivered at the American Weil Society in 1999, Martin Andic explores the roots of Weil’s conception of amor fati in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but only briefly notes the differences between Weil’s use of the term and Nietzsche’s. Finally, one of the first significant discussions of Weil’s thought to be published in English, by Taubes situates Weil in relation to Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’.
There are signs of Nietzsche’s influence, at least, in Weil’s use of the phrase amor fati to describe Marcus Aurelius’ stoicism; in fact the Latin phrase is Nietzsche’s own, and does not appear in any Roman stoic writer. See Hadot (1998, pp. 143–145).
See Pétrement (1988, p. 69).
See Reginster 2008.
The following abbreviations will be used when citing the works of Nietzsche, in accordance with convention: A (The Anti-Christ); BGE (Beyond Good and Evil); BT (The Birth of Tragedy); D (Daybreak); EH (Ecce Homo); GM (On the Genealogy of Morals); GS (The Gay Science); HH (Human, All Too Human)TI (The Twilight of the Idols); WP (The Will to Power); Z (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Note that numbers are to the original numbered sections/paragraphs in the original texts, not to page numbers. Where these are not numbered sequentially through the whole work, chapter/section numbers or names are used in addition (e.g. GS 276 is to the 276th section of The gay science, but GM II: 16 is to paragraph 16 of the second essay of the Genealogy and TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’: 5 is to paragraph 5 of the section entitled ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ in Twilight of the Idols).
TI ‘The Four Great Errors’: 8. See also Z III: ‘Before Sunrise’ for an earlier expression of the same thought. Zarathustra also teaches ‘redemption’, from revenge (Z II ‘Of the Tarantulas’), from suffering (Z II: ‘On the Blessed Isles’), from the past (Z II: ‘On Redemption’) and from the redeemer himself (Z II: ‘Of Priests’).
TI ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable”. See Clark (1990, pp. 109–117) for a detailed discussion of this passage in relation to Nietzsche’s developing ideas about truth.
Z III: ‘Before Sunrise’.
Weil (1977, p. 94). See also pp. 45–47 for similar comments.
Weil (1977, p. 107–108).
Genesis 1: 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 28 and 31.
Nietzsche (2008, pp. 238–241); TI ‘The Four Great Errors’: 8.
Weil (1968, pp. 153–159).
Weil (2014, p. 12).
See Janaway (2017) for a discussion of the appropriateness of the terms ‘theodicy’ and ‘cosmodicy’ as descriptors of Nietzsche’s project.
GS 276. See Han-Pile (2011) for a helpful discussion of ‘amor fati’ in Nietzsche’s thinking.
EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’: 9.
Reginster (2008, pp. 1–4).
TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’: 6.
GM II: 7.
TI ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’: 34; ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’: 5.
A 43.
Lawrence Hatab’s careful discussion of the differences between ‘life-enhancement’ and ‘life-affirmation’ is helpful here. See Hatab (2005, pp. 44–47). This point is often missed in discussions of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, in particular, because it is easy for readers to take the exposure of hidden power dynamics as a condemnation. But Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot support such a condemnation; after all, what is to distinguish the disavowed will-to-power at work, say, in an ethic of patience, humility and compassion from the overt will-to-power expressed in a warrior ethic? Only if the former are somehow ‘life-denying’ in a distinct way can they be distinguished, and downgraded.
Nietzsche (2006, p. 239).
EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: 1.
GS 341.
See Nehamas (1985), Clark (1990), Heidegger (1991) and Klossowski (2005) for a good sample of some important (and very different) interventions; then more recently Hatab (2005) and Loeb (2013) for critical overviews and original responses to the literature. See Reginster (2008) for an influential discussion of how eternal recurrence coheres with affirmation, and Gemes (forthcoming) for a response.
BGE 2.
D 119.
GM II: 12.
GM III: 1.
See Richardson (2015, pp. 116–117) for comment on this foundational dualism.
See, e.g. TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’: 1, 6.
Richardson 2015, pp. 91–95.
Z IV: 19, 10. See WP 1032 for a more direct expression of the same point: ‘The first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.’.
GM I: 10, 11.
See, e.g. HH I: 107; D 113; GM III: 13. We can note here a point of disagreement amongst Nietzsche scholars concerning the extent to which affirmation implies judgement; that is, the extent to which it has an intentional content. John Richardson argues that Nietzsche’s writing on affirmation should be understood in terms of the conviction that everything is good, so that affirmation is implicitly tied to a judgement about the nature of things (2015, p. 93). In contrast, Simon May suggests that one of Nietzsche’s underlying convictions is that the request for justifying reasons is itself a sign of nihilism, so that the truly Nietzschean affirmer would not need or desire a corresponding judgement.
WP 1067.
There is a significant question about whether Nietzsche conceived of affirmation as primarily affective or reflective—or rather, which of these should be thought of as more fundamental. See Gemes (forthcoming) for a discussion of this distinction. As Gemes points out, the idea of eternal recurrence seems to imply a reflective affirmation, but Nietzsche often talks as though learning to ‘feel differently’, rather than simply to ‘think differently’ (D 103) is the ultimate aim of affirmation. This issue, in term, relates to the nature of nihilism. Gemes suggests that the nihilism of disorientation and the nihilism of despair, as analysed by Reginster, both proceed from an affective nihilism, which Nietzsche outlines in GM II.
Z III: ‘The Vision and the Riddle’. In his fascinating account of the doctrine of eternal recurrence and the idea of ‘backward willing’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Paul Loeb suggests that the young shepherd is in fact Zarathustra himself. See Loeb (2010, pp. 179–185).
EH ‘The Birth of Tragedy’: 2.
See TI ‘The Four Great Errors’ for one of Nietzsche’s accounts of these errors.
EH ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: 6.
This can be seen, for instance, in his insistence, throughout the Genealogy, that atheism and scientific naturalism have not freed themselves from the nihilism of the ascetic ideal, as one might suppose. See GM III: 23-26.
Commentators disagree about the extent to which Nietzsche’s early convictions about the irredeemably tragic nature of reality persist in his mature thought, and this issue has a bearing on the question of what is the primary cause of the difficulty of affirmation. The stance I take in this paper is influenced by Lawrence Hatab’s persuasive argument about the importance of tragedy in Nietzsche’s late thought. See Hatab (2005, ch. 2; 2008, ch. 6).
Weil (2014, p. 293).
Pétrement (1988, pp. 468-9).
Weil (1998, p. 177).
Weil (1998, p. 178).
Weil (1998, p. 181).
Weil (1998, p. 180).
Weil (1998, p. 182).
Weil (1998, p. 183).
Weil (1977, p. 70).
Weil (1977, p. 73).
Weil (1998, p. 185).
Weil (2014, p. 26).
Weil (2014, p. 433).
Weil (1998, p. 104).
Weil (2014, p. 266).
Weil (1998, p. 184).
See Goodchild (2017, pp. 17-19) for some helpful comments on Weil’s implied critique of Nietzsche: the difference between the interaction between and natural forces and that between human social forces is that the latter lack a principle of limitation, which allows equilibrium; the dynamics of social prestige, thirst for domination, etc. are dangerous because they are structured by an infinite desire for good, displaced to a lower level: ‘What they want is no less than all. All the riches of Troy as booty, all the palaces, the temples and the houses as ashes, all the women and all the children as slaves, all the men as corpses.’ (1998, p. 36).
Weil (2014, p. 340).
On this point, I am influenced by Maudemarie Clark’s discussion of Zarathustra’s nausea. On Clark’s account, Zarathustra’s most severe challenge, which the thought of eternal recurrence expresses, is to affirm life in non-instrumental way, which also means to affirm the recurrence of the ‘small man’ who causes his nausea at existence. See Clark (1990, pp. 270-77).
BGE 230. Brian Leiter is the most influential proponent of the naturalistic reading of Nietzsche. See Leiter (2013).
GM I: 13.
See Richardson (2015) for a detailed examination of this problem in Nietzsche’s thought.
Weil (1998, p. 187).
Weil (1977, p. 46).
GM III:25.
GM III: 27.
GM III: 24; GS 344.
GM III: 28.
Something similar is suggested in WP 12a. As Gemes (forthcoming) points out, there is a paradox for Nietzsche here: at times it seems as though the most instinctively affirming life would never feel the need to ask the question ‘why?’ in the first place, nor reflect on the value of things. This means that any reflective affirmation (such as is expressed in the thought of eternal recurrence) is already implicitly non-affirming.
As is suggested earlier on in the same essay: GM III: 13, 14.
For example, within WP 55 we see signs of both interpretations: on the one hand, it seems that the collapse of belief in God provokes meaninglessness precisely because belief in God was predicated on taking the world as meaningless in itself in the first place; on the other hand, we are also told that the thought of ‘existence as it is, without meaning of aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness’ is ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’ – in other words, there is a kind of meaninglessness in reality, that one must confront.
GM III: 28; see also WP 4.
Nietzsche’s critique of compassion is instructive here: the compassionate lament suffering, and so ultimately condemn existence insofar as to lament suffering is also to hold in view a true world from which all suffering and resistance is removed See, e.g. BGE 225; A 30. But this ‘instinct of hatred for reality’ (A 30) is itself a consequence of the capacity for suffering, as the final section of the Genealogy above indicates.
See WP 12a. See also Bittner (1994, esp. pp. 133–134; 136) for a careful analysis of this issue in the first essay of the Genealogy. Bittner argues that Nietzsche backtracks on his claims about the relationship between suffering and illusion, so that he can make the ‘slave revolt’ the product of a conscious intention, and therefore find someone to blame for it; in other words, Nietzsche himself succumbs to the tendencies he describes in the essay itself.
Weil (1977, pp. 98, 132).
Weil (2015c, p. 139).
Weil (2003, p. 246).
This point is subsequently developed in Nietzsche’s later reflections on the will to truth, where the belief that life necessitates deception then raises the question of how an unconditional ‘will to truth’ arises. See, for example, BGE 4 and GS 344.
Weil (1968, p. 149).
Weil (1968, p. 148). Weil is very close to Schopenhauer here: the will gives rise to ‘imagination’, which means that we are able to avoid acknowledging the basic futility involved in all willing. See Broc-Lapeyre (1980) for discussion of the similarity between Schopenhauer and Weil on the question of will.
Weil (1977, p. 98).
Weil (2014, p. 546).
It is interesting to note the similarity between Weil’s understanding of desire, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. See de Kesel (2013) for a persuasive argument that Lacan’s thought was influenced by a number of comments in Gravity and Grace.
Weil (2014, pp. 147–150; 491).
Weil (1970, p. 316.
Weil (1968, p. 159).
Weil (2015b, p. 26–27).
Weil (1977, p. 107).
It should be noted that Weil’s thought is very ambiguous at times on this point. Sometimes she writes as the real trial is to love the world, even though the world is ‘necessary, but not good’; at other times she writes as though the real trial is to love God, who is absent. It seems, however, that the ambiguity points to the fact that they are seen as two facets of the same trial.
I have discussed these tensions elsewhere, see Jesson 2014.
Weil (2014, p. 484).
Weil (2014, p. 491).
Weil (2014, p. 299).
Weil (2014, p. 360).
And in fact, Weil herself, in a letter to Father Perrin, seems to admit as much, when she writes that the most serious barrier to her own ability to love God/world in the way that she described was the affliction of others. See Weil (1977, p. 42).
See Taubes (1955, pp. 13–15). Taubes’ critique does not seem to do justice to complex ways in which Weil was wrestling with the question of how to reconcile her commitments to compassion, social critique and organised movements for change with her emergent religious metaphysics as she wrote the material that would end up in Gravity and Grace. Nevertheless, the basic point that she makes in this early article helpfully points out a basic problem with Weil’s strategy.
I am grateful to Linn Tonstad for helping to clarify this point during informal discussions at the Suffering, Diminishment and the Christian Life conference, at Ushaw College, Durham, 10th January 2018.
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I am grateful to participants of the 2018 meeting of the American Weil Society and to staff and students in the School of Humanities at York St John University for thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Lissa McCullough for her helpful correspondence on the relationship between Nietzsche and Weil.
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Jesson, S. ‘The question in each and every thing’: Nietzsche and Weil on affirmation. Int J Philos Relig 86, 131–155 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09703-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09703-4