Nietzsche and the Temptation of Aesthetic Nihilism

Given our contemporary situation there are, by and large, two reactions to the reality of the nihilism of modernity. Both, however, embrace nihilism as the abyss of nature and the fate of creatures: passive nihilism and active nihilism. Passive nihilism is Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” the catatonic materialistic hedonist (be it liberal, socialist, or communist) who lives for himself and wishes to die comfortably in a bed with three warm meals provided by the state through the taxpayers. It is the compassionate “church as hospital” approach to the decadence and inevitable death of persons. Passive nihilism accepts death and wishes to make it as painless as possible since the avoidance of pain and the maximalization of bodily pleasure is the highest good conceptualized in liberal philosophy. Active nihilism, by contrast, is the embodiment of the heroic struggler which characterizes Nietzsche’s Overman. Active nihilism accepts the reality of death but rather than curl up in a corner to indulge the passions of physical pleasure it embraces the call to adventure and conflict as the only meaning in a life, a meaning we ultimately choose, even if futile.

Nietzsche was an opponent to nihilism—at least, the passive nihilism that he saw as horrendous and terrifying. He was petrified and critical of the modern project to create a world of non-harm and no struggle, things he saw as antithetical to the very nature and meaning of life through evolutionary combat. But if you understand Nietzsche’s predicament you soon discover that his anti-nihilism exhausts itself into a nihilism too because nihilism is not just the absence of meaning in life, it is the recognition that there is no meaning and that we, therefore, must continuous create our own meaning in life. This is the actual philosophy of nihilism expounded by the German Nihilists and subsequently inherited and revised by the Russian nihilists made famous in Dostoevsky’s later novels. Nietzsche’s central metaphysic is self-overcoming, or Selbstüberwindung. That is, struggle; more specifically, perpetual struggle against the Abyss. This struggle against the Abyss is the meaning of life. But any rational person would know that this is no meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s attempt to salvage metaphysics from its obliteration in the movement from nominalism to blank slate empiricism to relativism, he posits an equally empty first principle to govern all principles. However, that is the point of Nietzsche’s irrationalism. The idea of the rational mind is itself irrational. Irrationalism does not refer to the downplaying of reason in favor of emotion.

Irrationalism, as a philosophical school, which has characterized Catholic philosophy to conservative philosophy to existentialism to strands of postmodernism, is that universal reason has deficiencies and is incapable of resolving all our problems. Nietzsche’s critique of the rational mind is a critique of a man, in Satrean terms, who lives in bad faith. In fact, the rational man is the foundational lie to liberalism—though this rational man is not the rational man made in the image of God to know the good and true and be united to that standard of nature, but the rational man of cosmopolitan and business compromise and negotiation. Let us rationally agree that we should struggle with each other even though the only law of nature is struggle. Nietzsche would have agreed with Joseph de Maistre who wrote, “In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.” In this vast domain of open violence, and he who embraces that open violence, not shunning or shrinking from it, experiences the generative excitement which moves the self beyond a life of enchained simplicity waiting for death that is necessary for self-overcoming.

But if one must perpetually struggle, that is, constantly overcome, the decree of violent struggle which is inscribed on the nature of life, whatever one achieves must also be overcome. You must destroy the beautiful work of art you devoted your past few months or years working on because if you fall into idolatry of it, you cease self-overcoming and fall into the state of the Last Man. To succeed in the struggle for life is to always be succeeding in the struggle for life and to never fully, or truly, succeed in a fixed sense as in reaching a goal. As Nietzsche so poetically stated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself.” This is the law of nature, the law of life, the law by which the entire ethos of self-overcoming depends. Man, for Nietzsche, is always in a state of self-overcoming and struggling for life which defines the true ethos of the Overman.

The Overman embraces the chaos of conflict for conflict’s sake, because conflict is that which defines life. There is no order apart from the temporary order you wrestle into being. After having done so you must destroy it and proceed to wrestle order from chaos yet again. This repeats ad infinitum until your death. Nietzsche’s active nihilism embraces the challenge of Chaos and meets it head on. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain only to have it fall and him repeat the process, Nietzsche advises us to embrace the reality of meaninglessness not by shriveling up in the corner to die alone in a warm bed with prepared meals, but “to have and to want to have more” as he says in The Will to Power.

The will to power, which moves the Overman into a life of self-overcoming, is the want to have more than what he presently has. However, one can never obtain more being. Simone de Beauvoir shows this in her Ethics of Ambiguity. Thus, having been denied by the fate of nature the ability to become more than we are, we endlessly struggle to have more by overcoming ourselves in the state of existence in the world. We meet the dragon though we know even if we slay the dragon we will still die. We take a torch into the cave not knowing if we will survive but the trials and tribulations that await us call us to that having more through self-overcoming. In a paradoxical sense, Nietzsche is a radically transcendent philosopher and prophet in that he is demanding, through the confrontation with nihilism, to become more than what we are even though we cannot become more than what we are. He wants us to proceed, to fight, to climb, into the heavenly abode and beyond even though we cannot, properly, achieve this. He is more Christian than the Christian, more iconoclastic than the Calvinist, and more heroic than the holy martyrs and the knights of faith. In the end, however, nihilism wins. The active nihilism promoted by Nietzsche is nothing more than a life-long wrestling match with the Abyss until we die. It is better to die having embrace the challenge than to die having “lived” a cloistered and sheltered life which is no life at all.

There are those on the Alt-Right who embrace this actively nihilistic mentality; though I wouldn’t suggest all in the Alt-Right embrace such an active nihilism nor all in the Alt-Right having good readings of Nietzsche who, first and foremost, embraced the vision of the heroic individualist because he himself was an heir of Enlightenment modernity despite his revulsion against what the end state of Enlightenment liberalism would bring. That said, what some on the Alt-Right take from Nietzsche is the thrill of the struggle for survival; the thrill in the struggle to self-overcome; the thrill in struggle against the forces of the Abyss which conspire against them. Their delight is in the law of confrontation much like how the sinner’s delight, according to Augustine, is in his being chased by the Law. When Nietzsche said that “God was dead” and that we would not be able to make up for this with any atonements, William Barrett explained that Nietzsche’s statement was the end of excitement of baseless man being chased by Divine Justice. Man could now do whatever he pleased without fear of retribution. Ironically, this made the delight of crime less delightfully because the pursuit of justice against the crime was not there. As such, the excitement of life offered by fixed systems disintegrated into the meaningful life of pleasurable consumerism which Nietzsche denies as what humans want. Humans “do not seek pleasure and avoid displeasure” Nietzsche says. The only excitement of life now offered in the reality of the Abyss was the struggle with Nothingness itself.

Nietzsche’s call to self-overcoming is heroic if you accept Nietzsche’s metaphysic and starting premises. It is heroic because we are called to fight and fighting is the only law of life. The precious few, the true aristocrats of the soul, are the Overmen who are the constant strivers and self-overcomers no matter what stands before them. The heroic self-overcomer is an adventurer, a conqueror, and explorer until he dies his natural death, or the Abyss vanquishes him in combat. The terror of the sublimity of freedom is that we have a choice. A choice to die with bang or a whimper. Most choose to die with a whimper. For Nietzsche, and for his heirs, I suppose this is the real tragedy of History and life—that few choose to die with a bang.

There is, then, a certain appeal to the active nihilist mentality in the dying stage of civilizational life. After all, the active nihilism—the embrace of the futility of struggle—provides for a momentary spell of excitement. This is likely to be individualistic, itself a symptom of the modern tearing away of all relational bonds; though, it may also take its form in fraternal through the camaraderie of cohorts embracing this futility of struggle for group excitement rather than group solidarity.

Nevertheless, the thrill of battle, the thrill of engagement, the “thrill of being shot at without success,” is something deeply alluring to many who have wasted away their life in a catatonic and mindless state of self-pleasing consumerism. Yet, Nietzsche is very much the product of the modern mindset; he merely substitutes, in the excitement of the struggle for self-overcoming, the bodily pleasure of liberalism in the contemporary Epicurean hedonistic sense with the biological pleasure of the excitement wrought by fight. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that the will to power and the struggle of self-overcoming is the “excitement of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even if in the most cautious doses – namely, the will to power.” Rather than indulge the passive pleasures of the body as liberals or socialists seek, Nietzsche advocated for the active pleasures of the body brought forth by reigniting that spark of the struggle for survival he interpreted as the driving genus of Darwinian evolution; that is the “excitement of the strongest, most life-affirming drive” which is severed in the passivity of no drive liberalism. As Heidegger wrote concerning Nietzsche’s philosophy of self-overcoming, the struggle “lifts us beyond ourselves, but in such a way that, seized by our excitement, we are no longer masters of ourselves.”

Therefore, the active nihilism of Nietzsche is an aesthetic transformation. It is an aesthetic experience rooted in the biological experience of the determinative drive of the will to power which allows for the possibility of self-overcoming. But the empty man, and Nietzsche’s man is undeniably empty, can only experience and thrive on this aesthetic explosion because the sensation of the Sublime, of the Abyss, of the encounter with nothingness, from which this experience “lifts us beyond ourselves.” This is why, in Nietzschean active nihilism, one must continuously lift oneself beyond oneself—and this struggle for more is the only excitement worth embodying. Few, however, would likely consider this a way worth living. Even the rise of dare games, which sweep the internet and target the passive cows of adolescence like a memetic virus, is a symptom of this decadent and passive culture of non-excitement which, through lack of foresight, jumps blindly in the thrill of the possibility of the excitable terror of the Sublime Abyss because there is no other possibility of excitement in the lives of these passive animals chewing away their lives in meaninglessness under the posh pastures of the sun.

Print