SelfAffirmation The Demons Test
The classic text for Nietzsche's conception of self-affirmation is this section from The Gay Science:
The heaviest weight.—What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing 'Do you want this again and
expressive of a solid bonding with herself, devoid of self-contempt' (Swanton 2003: 135—6). On the other hand, Nietzsche consistently advocates the 'pathos of distance' (see BGE 257; GM I. 2, III. 14; TI, 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man', 37; A 43, 57): the 'enhancement' of humanity demands social conditions in which the few of higher caste and quality can unashamedly look down upon the rest. Only in such conditions, Nietzsche claims, did the nobles of GM I gain the right to consider themselves 'good'; and only in such conditions can one aspire to 'reverence towards oneself' and to 'expansions of distance within the soul'. Thus it may be—though Nietzsche gives no thought to this when discussing affirming one's entire life or giving style to one's character (GS 341, 290)—that his ideals of self-affirmation and self-satisfaction could be realized only in a society that fosters caste-like distinctions. But, even if that is so, it need not be the case that one affirms or is satisfied with oneself on the grounds that one is superior to others. It is rather that one's superiority to others is expressed in one's ability for self-affirmation and self-satisfaction.
innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Here I shall not discuss the notorious notion of eternal return (or recurrence) per se, nor even the question whether the thought ofeternal return is, in the way Nietzsche believes, a good test of the degree of one's self-affirmation.7 My aim is simply to clarify the attitude of self-affirmation itself, the state of 'being well disposed to oneself and to life' that Nietzsche proposes can be tested by this thought. However, I agree in two respects with a broad understanding ofthe eternal recurrence favoured by Maudemarie Clark and Alexander Nehamas among others:8 (1) that the truth of the cosmological proposition that every event recurs eternally is not required for Nietzsche's purposes in this passage (or in any of his published references to the idea of eternal recurrence); (2) that the function of imagining the reaction one would have, if one were to entertain the idea of eternal recurrence, is that of testing one's attitude to one's actual life.9
As we read 'The Heaviest Weight' we are apt to focus on the extreme polarity of possible reactions Nietzsche canvasses: despair versus elation. But it is worth noting that these reactions are imagined in two distinct instantiations. In the first instance Nietzsche envisages someone struck all at once in a vulnerable and disoriented moment by the scenario of infinite repetition, which is announced so as to carry an air of authoritativeness, but comes into no intelligible connection with their overall rational
7 There are various conceivable positions here. One might hold (1) that the test of facing up to the thought of eternal return is essential to Nietzsche's conception of self-affirmation; or (2) that, even though affirmation is characterizable without recourse to eternal return, confronting the thought of eternal return would be one way genuinely to test the degree of such affirmation. On the other hand, one might claim (3) that the eternal return scenario is not a coherent thought-experiment and/or is a prospect one should remain indifferent to, and hence that it would not provide any good or worthwhile test of affirmation; or most negatively (4) that Nietzsche's trespassing on the ground of eternal return at all spoils and interferes with his conception of affirmation. All these positions are compatible with my claim in the text that Nietzsche has an intelligible conception of self-affirmation that might somehow be tested. Both negative challenges (3) and (4) are found in Ridley (1997). The more or less standard objection (3) is found, for example, in Simmel (1986); Danto (1965); Soll (1973); Nehamas (1985); Clark (1990). For a fuller list—and a defence of the coherence and significance of eternal recurrence—see Loeb (2006). 8 Clark (1990: 245—86); Nehamas (1985, esp. 150—1).
9 As Nehamas puts it, 'what [Nietzsche] is interested in is the attitude one must have toward oneself in order to react withjoy and not despair to the possibility the demon raises' (Nehamas 1985: 151); and, as Clark puts it, 'A joyful reaction would indicate a fully affirmative attitude towards one's (presumably, nonrecurring) life' (Clark 1990: 251).
understanding of the world. 1° The imagined reactions to the demon's scenario are immediate affective responses: an ' Oh yes!' or an ' Oh no!' With this kind of reaction it is not relevant whether the scenario to which one reacts makes sense on critical scrutiny, or whether one has good reason to react in any particular way to it. It is more that, suddenly taken off one's guard, one evinces one's true feelings—perhaps in the way that an unexpected quickening of the pulse or sinking of the stomach upon meeting an acquaintance purely by chance might uncover a depth offeeling towards that person that was as yet inaccessible to oneself. In the last two sentences of the section, however, Nietzsche is talking about a different instance: a huge transformation in one's life, a long-sustained attitude of joy or despair towards oneself. He asks: Would it be crushingly burdensome or fervently desirable if this thought gained power over you'? This thought' (jener Gedanke, more literally that thought, or the previous thought) must refer back to what the demon first said: This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again.' The thought's gaining power over you suggests a persistent reliving of the imagined scenario of repetition, but also a prioritizing of the relived experience, its becoming vital to confront the thought as constantly as one can. 11
The least obvious point in the passage is, arguably, in its last sentence. Something is longed for as an ' ultimate eternal confirmation and seal', but what? Is the object of my longing (1) that my life repeat itself again and innumerable times again? Or (2) that I keep confronting the question whether I would want each and every thing again eternally? Or (3) that I should react with joy every time the question comes to me? I suggest that both (2) and (3) must come into play to make the 'longing' intelligible. The character addressed in this passage is portrayed as desiring to have something confirmed, and it is quite mysterious how (1) on its own could be a confirmation of anything at all. On the other hand, my being apprised of the fact that I would in all cases want my life again and again would provide me with strong
11 If the thought of eternal return is itself an incoherent thought, as many allege (see n. 7 above), then its use as a test in a moment of vulnerable confusion may be defensible. But it is much less appealing to envisage that I should make it a matter of lifelong policy to keep on confronting myself with a thought and never reflect on its coherence, or that I should realize its incoherence and carry on regardless with the attempt to test myself against it.
evidence of my being well disposed to life and self in high degree. (2) and (3 ) coalesce, in fact, into one complex object of longing: I long to confront myself repeatedly with the demon's scenario and, whatever life may bring me, always to react to it with joy.
Bernd Magnus has offered a particular reading of Nietzsche's proposed affirmative attitude to life, and has raised a serious objection against it. For Magnus, Nietzsche's affirmative person must 'love each moment simpliciter', rather than '[view] each moment holistically... as a necessary blemish in... the scenario of her total life'.12 On this reading, Nietzsche thinks of an affirmation of each moment, experience, or action for its own sake. And Magnus takes this to mean that you should 'have just the same attitude towards the cataloged moments of your greatest anguish that you [are] asked to imagine of your most cherished sexual ecstasy'." If this is the right reading, then Nietzsche is open to the objection Magnus makes: that the thought of loving each moment unconditionally for its own sake, no matter whether it be sublimest ecstasy or deepest trauma, manifests an attitude impossible for any human being to adopt. The objection is, put simply, that you can't always want what you get. That would be 'a self-consuming human impossibility',M something that no human being would be able to sustain as a psychological attitude. The thought of affirming each and every moment of one's life with equal vehemence is, as Magnus says, truly 'abysmal':" in trying to imagine someone capable of standing outside the ordinary ebb and flow of positive and negative to which we are all subject, we encounter an outlook so lofty and vertiginous as to be inhuman.
I would like to propose an alternative reading, the key to which is to distinguish pro- and con-attitudes of different orders. Numerous events in any life will be undergone, remembered, or anticipated with a negative first-order attitude; but that is compatible with a second-order attitude of acceptance, affirmation, or positive evaluation towards one's having had these negative experiences. If in some course of events one is, say,
14 Ibid. We might wonder if there is also a conceptual impossibility here, whether on pain of contradiction one could not affirm in the same manner both what is deeply distressing and what amounts to a positive or fulfilling experience.
15 This is Nietzsche's own word (abgrundlich) for the thought, but taken with a negative connotation by Magnus. See Z, 'Of the Vision and the Riddle'; EH, 'Why I Am So Wise', 3 (though the latter passage is not translated by Kaufmann—see KSA vi. 268).
humiliated, one's experience is as such unwelcome, painful, and so on: obviously it could not be exactly a humiliation that one underwent, unless one's primary or first-order attitude were set against, rather than for, the course of events. But instead of asking fruitlessly whether you can undergo humiliation as something positive, Nietzsche poses a different question: Would you be well enough disposed to want your life again, where that (second-order) wanting would embrace among its objects the particular hateful and excruciating humiliation from which you suffered? Facing this question is intelligible, indeed humanly possible. Answering yes to the whole of one's life in this way is scarcely easy for all human beings, but that is no objection for Nietzsche, who is searching for an extremely demanding ideal and looking to discriminate the rare few from the herd.
Nietzsche could imagine an alternative, counterfactual life without his crippling illnesses and disastrous personal involvements, without his sister's espousing the anti-Semitism (or the particular anti-Semite) that he detested, without a future in which he collapsed into a wretched final decade of insanity. On the reading canvassed by Magnus, he must aspire towards wanting each of these misfortunes for its own sake, in just the way he wanted the exhilarations of mountain air, the fulfilments of writing, or the rare peace of an untroubled sleep. On my reading, this is unnecessary. Nietzsche could, if he were strong enough,16 wholly affirm his life while discriminating those of its contents that are against his will, negative, suffered, from those to which he has a first-order pro-attitude. Indeed he must make this discrimination: it is necessitated by the way he sometimes talks of affirmation. Consider the affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems' in the final section of Twilight of the Idols," and the associated conception of the tragic outlook as an intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence'. 18 If one is full enough and healthy enough to affirm what is hard, terrible, and problematic as hard, terrible, and problematic, then one must affirm it as something suffered.
16 As Loeb (2005: 74) points out, Nietzsche confesses that he would not be able to fulfil the ideal he sets up: ' as we know from his notes, letters, and published works, Nietzsche does not regard himself as strong or healthy enough to affirm his life's eternal recurrence: ' ' I do not want life again. How have I borne it? Creating. What has made me endure the sight? the vision of the (Übermensch who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself—alas!'' io:4[8i]).'
17 TI, 'What I Owe to the Ancients', 5. Nietzsche also quotes this passage again in EH, ' The Birth of Tragedy', 3. 18 BT, 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', 1.
So the question for Nietzsche is whether second-order affirmation can stretch to embrace everything to which one's first-order response is negative. Magnus says that 'each of us would affirm the eternal recurrence of our lives only selectively'; 'Who among us', he asks, 'would not prefer some other possible life and world, no matter how content we may be with our present lot? ... no matter how content I may be with my life I can always imagine a better one.'" But note that there are two distinct points here. The latter assertion is likely to be correct for most human beings: they can usually imagine a better life. But this does not answer the first question Magnus poses, whether any ofus would prefer some other possible life and world. For it could be that someone able to imagine a better life nevertheless affirms and loves nothing other than his or her actual life. I argue that this is what Nietzsche has in mind—that one could be strong enough to love everything about one's single, actual life, not wanting or wishing for anything that is merely imagined, or imaginable, however good that might have been.
In general there is no logical difficulty about being able to imagine a better X, but preferring the X one actually has. I can imagine a better car than mine, but that is not incompatible with my fervently wanting to keep my car in preference to others. Cognizance of some defect does not necessitate detachment of preference. We can identify a kind of preference for something because it is mine, in the sense not of property ownership, but of affective belonging, a weaker analogue of attaching to something that one loves. And in the case of love proper, many of us can probably imagine a friend or a parent or a lover being better—lacking certain faults as a person—without thereby being constrained to wish that we had as friend, parent, or lover someone who lacked these faults. I can be attached to things in a quite basic and intelligible way because they are my own, intimately a part of my personal world.
Nietzsche's affirmative ideal is to 'own' oneself without remainder: to be so intimately attached to everything about oneself—for no other reason than its simply being oneself—that no imagined possibilities are wished for in preference to the actuality. 'One must learn to love oneself with a sound and healthy love, so that one may endure it with oneself and not go roaming about' (Z III, 'Of the Spirit of Gravity', 2). The Nietzschean
self-affirmer is a deliberate counter to the total life-denier idealized by Schopenhauer,20 but unlike his or her antipode Nietzsche's ideal is not someone possessed of a 'correct' recipe for life who sets him- or herself a priori to affirm just whatever happens. Nietzschean affirmation responds to 'the question in each and every thing ''Do you want this?'''—each part of one's actual individual life as it unfolds is the potential occasion of a renewed test. So the object of fervent longing—that ultimate confirmation and seal—is systematically elusive. At any point, right up until its end, life could become too difficult to affirm. But what is important for Nietzsche is not whether one ever reaches a point ofabsolute certainty concerning one's well-disposedness to oneself, rather that one longs for such a confirmation, aspires towards an ideal of self-affirmation in which one is able to affirm all of the particular parts of one's life until these affirmations amount to an affirmation of it all. This ideal is—I have argued—humanly possible, coherent to imagine, and a genuine alternative to the self-denial Nietzsche has argued to lie at the heart of our moral evaluations.
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