The Will to Live

In 1868, in Russia, Dostoyevski published Crime and Punishment, and later in 1880 published The Brothers Karamazov, not long before his death.  In the 1870’s, a continent away in Europe, Nietzsche was developing himself and his philosophy, and it wasn’t until after Dostoyevski’s death that Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil.   My experience of these authors, however, was the opposite order.  I first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the early 1990’s, and a few years later Crime and Punishment.  There could hardly have been a better parry to “God is Dead” than Dostoyevski’s “If there is no God, everything is permitted,”  and that ended the “debate” for me, for the time. 

These many years later I found that both Dostoyevski and Nietzsche were responding to similar philosophies, Dostoyevski to Russian nihilists, Nietzsche to German skeptics.  If you don’t believe in an Evil One who works to deceive the human race, I can sympathize.  But evidence of such influence appears in the similarity of differing, dominating, and gloomy philosophies affecting whole societies—Russian and European—separated by distance and culture.  Two men worlds apart found the need to respond forcefully to the emptiness being urged upon them.

I have now read Nietzsche on his own terms, setting aside Dostoyevski and other post-Nietzsche commentary and critique of him, so that I can now glimpse the truth informing his outlook.  It’s worth noting the irony of saying that Nietzsche built on truths when his very premise discounts such things as good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lie.  But he was not pushing a philosophy of negation, a promotion of void.  Rather, he urged a philosophy of vigor.  The kernel of his ideas appears to be a simple elaboration on a fact any of us can observe.  Living things want to go on living.  What do we see when one is threatened with death?  Fight, flight, or freeze.  No matter the reflex, it surges with energy in an effort to survive.  Nietzsche therefore finds fault with most of what we consider civilizing beliefs—like good and evil—whenever they dampen one’s vigor, one’s Will to Power.

I cannot summarize Nietzsche’s philosophy better than the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Reference Encyclopedia of 1959, from which the following comes:

According to [Nietzsche] the function of philosophy is not to interpret and appraise values but to create them.  “The real philosophers,” he wrote in The Will to Power, “are commanders and lawgivers.”  ...  All life, for Nietzsche, is Will to Power. (Vol. 18)

Indeed, I met this Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.  From this principle several beneficial corollaries follow, which in my words (not Nietzsche’s) are these:

• The exercise of the will, choosing, is the core arena of living
• The will is neither absolutely free nor entirely encumbered
• Aristocracy is natural, unavoidable; the aristocrats exercise their wills to power more effectively
• Exercise of the Will to Power isolates one from others

A ready snare of being civilized, of being a good and faithful servant, is to be smug, judgmental.  Jesus told the well known story of the Prodigal Son, in which the elder brother, who did everything right, complained to the father for restoring the wayward brother with feasting and gifts.  And the elder brother showed signs of contempt for the younger.  It’s what happens to us who keep all the rules.  It can happen, but it doesn’t have to.  Nietzsche’s philosophy provides a vantage from which to step out of that mindset of comparison and contempt.  The title itself, Beyond Good and Evil, implies a challenge:  Will you act, or will you judge?

Here, I think, is an unintended overlap between Nietzsche and the Lord who gave him life.  Jesus said the following in different places:

• Judge not, lest you be judged
• If I will that he remains until I come, what is that to you?
• And when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, “We are unprofitable servants.”

To follow these sayings one must not be attached to the self-gratifying feeling of superiority that comes by keeping rules and commands.  At the same time, one must keep them.  This boils down to an essential:  the exercise of will.  Moreover the keeping of rules often has no other reward besides that feeling.  To ignore self-gratification, therefore, is also an active choice.  In this way, the two-fold act of will—do the commandment, disregard self-gratification—is indistinguishable from The Will to Power, that is, a will whose focused objective is to accomplish its task.  And such obedience is what Jesus modeled and asked.

So, was Nietzsche right?  It’s a natural question.  Nietzsche’s philosophy provides an example of what I have increasingly come to believe.  Every religion and philosophy contains something(s) good and true, and those things are out of their proper context.  Their fullness rests in the Truth of the Holy Trinity and His Church.  So far I have tested this with many of the truisms I grew up with, and here with Nietzsche.  Each time what I thought good and noble has turned out to be deeper and richer when seen in the life of the Church, in what Her saints have written, practiced, and prayed.  So what Nietzsche wrote, if left on its own, distorts reality, while at the same time, thriving on the reality it contains, and even offering helpful energy to many.

Was Nietzsche right?  It really doesn’t matter.  But for intellectual nerds like me, it’s very interesting!