Nietzsche And Nihilism
By: Lizzie Bestow
Tags: Philosophy, Life, Love, Life Lessons, Nietzsche

Nietzsche And Nihilism

5 things we can learn from Nietzsche

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

Nietzsche is a controversial figure, to say the least.

He fell into serious disrepute when his ideas were used by the Nazis — particularly his beliefs about the “Ubermensch” or overman, an ideal person who was able to stand strong in the face of existential despair.

His overman was positioned as the foil to a weak person, who was unable to stand strong and would instead fall under the terror of existential despair.

Nihilism

Nietzsche is most commonly associated with a kind of nihilism, a response to existential despair following The Enlightenment. The IEP describes nihilism as such:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

The etymology of the theory comes from the Latin word for nothingness, which hints at the true meaning of nihilism. Although it’s been associated with pessimism, it’s more to do with “not-anything”, a negation.

Nietzsche’s beliefs on the issues of his time — decline in religion, The Enlightenment, increasing social mobility — led to him predicting a climate of existential crisis, hampered by value destruction, epistemological failure and cosmic purposelessness. Nietzsche did believe that all values were ultimately baseless; ‘every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world’ (Will to Power). But Nietzsche also wrote extensively on how we could progress beyond nihilism; how nihilism prompted societal challenges, and how we could overcome those challenges.

Friendship

Friendship, for Nietzsche, was at the heart of marriages. It was the key to having a successful, flourishing romantic relationship. You have to like your partner; not just love them, or be attracted to them:

‘It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.’

If you’re not a friend to your partner, then you’re in lust, not love. Love involves — and evokes — a kind of friendship for the loved one that is what is at the heart of a partnership. Admittedly, Nietzsche did have a few not-so-great things to say about women’s role in friendships and relationships.

He’s known for saying that a woman’s love ‘involves injustice and blindness against everything that she does not love.’ This, apparently, rendered them ‘not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best cows…’ I’m not too sure on that one.

The relativity of madness

Nietzsche wrote on the relativity of madness. What would have been considered prayers to a deity — or religious fervour — would now be seen as schizophrenic delusions.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Nietzsche himself, in January 1889, suffered some kind of a mental breakdown. What happened, we’re unsure, but the story goes that Nietzsche saw a horse being flogged and ran to it, putting his arms around its neck. This caused a public disturbance, and Nietzsche sent strange letters to his friends in the following days — they became known as the “Madness letters” — which concerned his friends. They travelled to Turin to pick him up, and brought him to a psychiatric clinic in Basel.

He was originally diagnosed with tertiary syphilis, although this has since been challenged. Some have proposed a manic-depressive disorder, periodic psychosis and vascular dementia. Others, like Leonard Sax have concurred but suggested the growth of a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma as an explanation of Nietzsche’s dementia. Others have suggested a hereditary stroke disorder called CADASIL could be to blame.

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

Nietzsche’s words, here, fight against that all too common trope that people who suffer from mental illnesses are mad. Susannah Kaysen writes of this in her book Girl, Interrupted, writing about how — after she had left the psychiatric unit — everyone wanted to know precisely how she had been locked up, because they didn’t want to be alike her. How had she gone mad? They wanted to know, so they wouldn’t be like her. But the division between sane and insane is not an iron curtain. Granted, this is something that has been a little more accepted by society than it was in Nietzsche’s time. But that does mean that Nietzsche was something of a revolutionary. He realized (sadly, from personal experience) that the “madhouse” wasn’t filled with people entirely different from him altogether.

Bastardization by relation

We can become who we associate with. We might realize, all too late, that we have begun to challenge our friends less and less, and slipped into a hazy recalcitrance in providing opposition to their views.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Think of that annoying thing everyone does where they adopt certain habits of a loved one when they start spending a lot of time with them. Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love mentions the moment that the protagonist realizes his loved one has started to become a little like him. She uses similar phrases to his, while he adopts certain ticks of hers. We absorb the feelings and thoughts of others through a weird sort of osmosis.

Anti-foundationalism

Nietzsche, with his nihilism and thoughts on existentialism, paved the way for a school of thought named anti-foundationalism.

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

For the anti-foundationalist, the basic tenets that were supposed to lie in concepts like knowledge simply don’t exist. No knowledge is absolutely certain, and this leads us to a sort of cosmic skepticism and a feeling of uncertainty. For moral anti-foundationalists, for example, morality does not have — and doesn’t need to have — any foundation to it that is universal, existing across all cultures and peoples.

‘First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely in account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences…’

Nietzsche’s criticisms towards established moral theories has garnered solicitations of relativism and the criticism that comes with the theory. But it’s an important doctrine for what it questioned; it sought to examine what had previously been taken for granted — that there was a right way, that the right way existed.

Truth

Many philosophers, before Nietzsche, wrote on the value of truth. They wrote about what we could epistemologically be certain of, and the value of that truth in our lives. But not so many questioned whether people really wanted to know the truth.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

Some people are afraid to have their illusions — or delusions — taken away from them. Pretending takes the place of reality. It’s the sort of feeling the film Requiem for a Dream depicts. Addiction is portrayed as a way to avoid reality, a way to deal with a traumatic incident or a serious misfortune without really addressing the root of the problem.