On an Aesthetic Justification of Existence

Knowledge, art, and suffering in the economy of life

If any statement has become emblematic for Nietzsche’s supposed irrationalism and aestheticism, it is his notorious declaration in The Birth of Tragedy that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence eternally justified.” The concept of an aesthetic justification for existence contrasts with a moral or metaphysical justification, according to which the sins of this world are expiated in another, a transcendent realm in which justice reigns supreme. Aesthetic justification is what remains after the death of God, when all moral and metaphysical justifications have devalued themselves in nihilism. Against irrationalist interpretations, I want to sketch how Nietzsche’s idea of aesthetic justification arises in response to a general problem about the role of pain in the economy of life and its relation to knowledge about the world. Rather than opposing aesthetics to knowledge and reason, Nietzsche presents art and beauty as necessary complements to the will to truth when the latter is grasped as the capacity of a finite, embodied organism.

In the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche recalls how “as a thirteen-year-old boy, [he] was preoccupied with the problem of the origin of evil,” to which he dedicated his first philosophical essay (GM, Preface, §3). Nietzsche, consistent with youthful Christianity, “quite properly gave God credit for it and made him the father of evil,” but he would not long remain under the spell of the theodicy problem. The problem of evil, as Nietzsche encountered it in his juvenilia, was only a clue to the deeper, genealogical question of the value of values: “under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves have?” Nietzsche’s discussion of an aesthetic justification for existence in The Birth, however, remains closer to the theological standpoint of his youth than the later considerations of the Genealogy. If Christianity requires a moral justification for why an omnipotent and benevolent God would create a world that contains evil and suffering, the Ancient Greeks offered an aesthetic justification for the lived experience of evil and suffering in a world bereft of any such divine creator: “Thus the gods justify the life of men by living it themselves—the only satisfactory theodicy!” (BT, §3). The earlier, unpublished draft entitled “The Dionysian Worldview,” gives a different formulation of the same thought, arguing that because “[i]t was out of necessity that the artistic genius of [the Greeks] created these gods…theodicy was never a Hellenic problem,” since the Greek gods did not create the cosmos and were also subject to the laws of Ananke, necessity (see BT p. 125). Despite the superficial contrast, both express the same point: for the Ancient Greeks, an experience of profound suffering at the nature of existence demanded the beautiful illusion of the Olympian world, which acknowledged the ineradicable reality of cruelty but still honored suffering humanity in its immortal nobility.

In its classic form, the theodicy problem concerns the apparent contradiction between the Christian God’s omnipotence and benevolence and the existence of evil. Though the thirteen-year-old Nietzsche sought a resolution to the theodicy problem in its classic form, by The Birth this initial impulse has lost its Christian theological trappings and become recentered on a more fundamental question: how can suffering be justified at all, with or without God? Though the assumptions of omnipotence and benevolence lend the dilemma a stronger bite from a logical standpoint, one needn’t be a Christian, or even a theist, to see terrible and unjustified suffering as an objection to existence as such. As his thought develops, Nietzsche takes a historical and genealogical approach to this question, seeking to understand the human need for justification that arises in response to the knowledge that existence involves ineradicable suffering and evil. In The Birth, however, Nietzsche has only begun to pose the genealogical question about the relationship between knowledge and the overall economy of life and action that will become a persistent theme in his writings by Human, All Too Human. As Nietzsche puts it in the opening aphorism of The Gay Science, “[m]an has gradually become a fantastic animal that must fulfill one condition of existence more than any other animal: man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists; his race cannot thrive without a period trust in life—without faith in the reason in life!” (GS, §1). And while the human animal’s need for existential justification may be distinctively strong, it still expresses a tendency common to all life insofar as it is capable of experiencing pain: “We hurt those to whom we need to make our power perceptible, for pain is a much more sensitive means to that end than pleasure: pain always asks for a cause [emphasis added], while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself and not look back” (GS, §13). The root of suffering, for Nietzsche, is not pain itself, but unjustified pain: “If you have your ‘why?’ in life, you can get along with almost any ‘how?’” (TI, Arrows and Epigrams, §12).

Drawing from Nietzsche, Kantian philosopher Christine Korsgaard similarly argues that even in non-human animals, the experience of pain contains an embryonic form of rational agency, or the form of life that Nietzsche will later call the “sovereign individual” (GM, II, §2). On Korsgaard’s account, the animal reaction of revolt against pain already contains an implicit normative—Nietzsche would say moral—dimension: “When something is a threat to its physical existence…the animal perceives this fact, and revolts against it. The animal is moved to take action to fix what is wrong” (Sources, p. 150). In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche offers an account of the origins of consciousness and rational agency in humans along just these lines, highlighting the long prehistory of discipline, torture, and cruelty that was required to hammer the chaotic material of animal instinct into the predictable, regular, consistent, and calculating creature that becomes capable of intentional action and long-term planning (“an animal with the prerogative to promise”) (GM, II, §1-2). “There seems to be a strict correlation between the phenomenon of pain…and the biological process that leads to the formation of the brain,” writes Pierre Klossowski, explaining Nietzsche’s reasoning: the brain’s function in focusing bodily responses on an aggressor produces representations of external stimuli “as degrees of excitations oscillating between pain and pleasure” (Vicious Circle, p. 25). Pain functions as a mechanism for building a memory, and eventually consciousness itself, precisely because it cannot be borne mutely but must be mastered. And when physical pain cannot be mastered or overcome with superior power, the animal’s will to mastery turns inward, directing its tendency to dominate back against itself.

This is why well-functioning animal consciousness must possess powerful tools for purging painful memories. As with Freud, Nietzsche posits the “return of the repressed,” in which the unconscious compulsively repeats trauma that cannot be sublimated in the displaced form of the symptom. Nietzsche construes the protracted process of constructing self-consciousness as a matter of building a memory of suffering that would naturally be purged by an instinctive faculty of “active forgetting”: “The person in whom this apparatus of suppression is damaged, so that it stops working…can be compared to a dyspeptic; he cannot ‘cope’ with anything” (GM, II, §1). It is this mental dyspepsia that, after dwelling upon past sufferings long enough, generates the process of moral decline defined by ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal. This means that from the standpoint of life, knowledge of the world is a double-edged sword: an organism must be able to remember the causes of pain in order to avoid threats to its existence, but in doing so it risks reenacting trauma in ways that undermine its capacity to act and survive. A life-form that cannot strictly limit the experiences that enter its epistemic horizon will find its individual subjectivity overwhelmed and perhaps even dissolved in the deluge.

What distinguishes the human animal, it seems, is its ability to raise questions not simply about the cause or reason for its particular sufferings, but also about the justification for the existence of suffering as such. The human animal is fated to take existence seriously, and for this reason it requires that existence have a purpose in view of which suffering can be redeemed. One of the central paradoxes of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the way he both centers justification as a basic need of organic life and denies that any such justification for existence is possible. If the justification for suffering depends upon existence having a purpose, or telos, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence rules out the possibility of any final state or goal and asks us to find justification in precisely the unjustified nature of eternal becoming, or its innocence. The Dionysian wisdom contained in Silenus’s lament, which appears in The Birth as profound pessimism, is the innocence of becoming in early form: it is insight into the absence of any justification for existence. Hence the concept of the Dionysian cannot be separated from the moment of insight or recognition—anagnorisis—that marks the hero’s downfall in classical tragedy, a fact that a purely passional interpretation of the category cannot explain. An aesthetic justification for existence responds simultaneously to the deep need for existential justification on the one hand, and the manifest failure of religious and moral justifications to fill this role after the death of God on the other. Aesthetic justification aims to avoid the potentially fatal consequences of the madness that tragic knowledge induces without foreclosing or suppressing that knowledge, but by allowing it to speak in the form of artistic creation. It is art, on Nietzsche’s account, that offers the therapy required to cure us of the madness that comes from knowing the truth of nihilism. Life requires the beautiful illusion that art offers in order to safely delimit the horizon within which it can flourish, and to guard against invasion by truths that threaten to undermine life’s faith in itself.

Nietzsche’s defense of aesthetic justification can only be interpreted as a form of irrationalism, as in Marxist critics such as Gyorgy Lukács, by denying the existence of the tragic problem of knowledge he raises. By calling attention to this central problem of how the living organism incorporates its knowledge of the world into a horizon of rational intelligibility, Nietzsche anticipates later critiques of the metaphysical ideal of knowledge as a “view from nowhere,” insiting instead that all knowledge is embedded in forms of life (Wittgenstein), or norm-governed social practices engaged in by living beings with values and interests. Denying the psychological struggles of the organism in incorporating knowledge presupposes, whether explicitly or implicitly, an essentially Cartesian model of reason in which mind and body, thinking substance and extended substance remain metaphysically separate. Even where Nietzsche’s frames the problem of intelligibility and existential justification in the most grandiose terms, it is not difficult to grasp his intuition in a perfectly ordinary way. We are all familiar with the experience of devastating grief at learning of the death of a loved one, the nauseating discovery that a close friend actually loathes us rather than admires us, or the steady drumbeat of depression that accompanies the daily ritual of “doomscrolling”. Nature furnishes us with examples of this tendency in its most violent extremity. Imagine the epistemic plight of the male praying mantis, whose apparatus of repression must be unspeakably strong to suppress the discovery that his female mate will eviscerate him the moment the reproductive act is finished. Nietzsche’s idea of aesthetic justification therefore reflects his appreciation of embodied cognition, the inseparability of reason and affect, and the psychic challenges of maintaining self-knowledge and intelligibility in the face of an indifferent world. The danger of the modern scientific worldview and its characteristic optimism, according to The Birth, is that it has forgotten this indispensable lesson:

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number of points on the periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and medicine (BT, §15).

Though it may seem like an afterthought, Nietzsche’s reference to “the mid-point of his existence” reveals a subterranean connection to his personal struggles with madness. This theme of a midpoint recurs throughout Nietzsche’s writings, as in Ecce Homo, where, as discussed in previous entries, he specifically associates it with the age at which his father died: “My father died when he was thirty-six years old…My life went downhill the same year as his: at the age of thirty-six I hit the low point in my vitality, I kept on living, but without being able to see three steps ahead of me” (EH, “Why I am so Wise,” §1). At the time, he had written to Gast: “I am at the end of my thirty-fifth year—‘the middle of life’, as people for a millennium and a half have said of this age. It was at this age that Dante had his vision”—a reference to the opening line of The Divine Comedy, “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” The midpoint motif frequently appears in the temporal metaphors that Nietzsche deploys throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra, most notably in the “great noon” at which humanity “will look back and look out” from the standpoint granted by knowledge of the eternal recurrence (TSZ, IV, “At Noon”; Spring-Autumn 1881, 11[148]). It is easy to miss how this passage expresses Nietzsche’s personal fear of going mad from inheriting Ludwig Nietzsche’s “softening of the brain”. It reflects Nietzsche’s recognition of the dangers that accompany any confrontation with those “boundary points” past which human knowledge falls silent, and how much these attendant risks of madness must be managed.

On this picture, aesthetic justification is the effort to redeem existence from the threat of madness that necessarily arises from the search for knowledge. The modern, scientific quest to assemble an edifice of objective knowledge tends to obscure the way that reason is always the faculty of a finite, living organism, one that must incorporate what it knows into a horizon of intelligibility and a chaotic multiplicity of passions, desires, and interests. Far from dismissing suffering as unimportant, an aesthetic justification for existence takes suffering just seriously enough to redeem it, but not so seriously as to succumb to a moral or metaphysical world picture that only exacerbates the causes of suffering. To strike this balance means to be the tightrope walker, advancing ever onward along the narrow bridge from animal to Übermensch.