Joy and Laughter in Nietzsche's Philosophy

Alternative Liberatory Politics

Paul E. Kirkland, Michael J. McNeal, Paul E. Kirkland, Michael J. McNeal

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350225251
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophie
• Sous-sujet: Politische Philosophie

Analyzing the importance of joy, laughter, and cheerfulness in Nietzsche's thought, this volume addresses an under-examined topic in the secondary literature. By exploring disparate aspects of these interrelated emotions it provides new insights into his key ideas. The contributors-among them philosophers and political scientists-illustrate the significance of these feelings to reveal political ramifications of their affirmative potential and their broader role in Nietzsche's philosophical aims. These include how the joyful disposition Nietzsche commends informs his free spirit's self-overcoming, attempts to revalue all values, and prospects of ultimately transfiguring humanity. Among other topics, scholars assess the Übermensch and shared joy, learning to laugh at oneself, Schopenhauer's jokes, Pascal's cheerfulness, and the Dada movement's subversively playful aesthetic. By contemplating Nietzsche's emphasis on joy and laughter, the volume reveals a thinker who, far from being a caricature of hopeless nihilism, is in fact the hitherto unrecognised champion of an alternative liberatory politics.

Part One Joy and Knowledge

1 A Gay Science Avant La Lettre? Knowledge and Joy in Human, All too Human

Ruth Abbey

In an overview of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Andrew Huddleston repeats and seems to endorse the view of Human, All too Human (HH) as one of Nietzsche’s positivist works. Although he provides no clear definition of positivism, Huddleston seems to mean three things by this: (1) “physiological or mechanistic explanations of a variety of phenomena,” (2) a sober approach, and (3) “the simplistic assumption that … everything we do is ultimately driven by a desire for our own satisfaction” (2019: 346). Huddleston contrasts HH with The Gay Science (GS) where Nietzsche moves away from this putative positivism to seek “a form of ‘science’ [Wissenschaft] that will be joyful, centred in particular around the idea of life affirmation—finding life as something valuable to be celebrated” (2019: 348, emphasis in original).

Space does not permit me to outline why the imputation of each of these three features of positivism to HH is misleading at best and distortive at worst. For present purposes, I explore the possibility that, pace Huddleston, Nietzsche’s quest for a gay science is already present in HH. While the term fröhliche itself does not appear, there are a number of cognate or comparable terms that signal that in HH, Nietzsche is already reaching for a way in which knowledge seekers can experience some joy or happiness, even if the truths they uncover are not particularly salutary or reassuring.

I start by noting that a number of scholars join Huddleston in characterizing HH as positivist. I consider whether there is any justification for this, based on the way Nietzsche introduces this work in its first chapter and reviewing his remarks about science there. Moving mostly chronologically through HH, I bring to light some of Nietzsche’s profound concerns with the possible deleterious consequences of seeking and finding the truth. Yet I go on to identify those moments where he allows that finding truth might also spark joy, without losing sight of truth’s difficult and perhaps dreadful nature. Moving through Nietzsche’s remarks on knowledge and joy chronologically rather than thematically allows us to track some of twists and turns this work takes along its way. I point out what a high note HH ends on, a note more positive than positivist. I conclude by recommending that we henceforth banish the term “positivist” when describing HH while also noting what a difficult, if not impossible, text this is to summarize, given its highly experimental and volatile character.

My discussion is confined to the work originally entitled Human, All Too Human, which, in Keith Ansell-Pearson’s estimation, shows Nietzsche “clearly … at his most positivistic” (2018: 8). HH was published in early 1878. Assorted Opinions and Maxims (AOM) appeared in 1879 and The Wanderer and His Shadow (WS) in 1880. These latter two works were, at the suggestion of Nietzsche’s publisher, amalgamated to form volume 2 of HH in 1886 (Handwerk 2013: 561). At that time, Nietzsche appended a preface to each volume. In recognition of this publication history, I approach these three works separately and, due to constraints of space, can give only the first work the attention it deserves. The preface to volume 1, having been appended eight years later, is not treated here either.¹

1. Positivism

Huddleston is not, as just noted, the only scholar to have dubbed HH positivist. As Ansell-Pearson conveys, HH “is typically construed as … being his most positivistic text in which the scientific interpretation of the world is privileged and guides the inquiry into religion, metaphysics, art and culture” (2018: 17).² Ansell-Pearson reads Nietzsche as negotiating “the competing claims of the positivist goal of science and eudaemonistic philosophy by aligning himself with the former” (2018: 8, cf. 18, 31). Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter describe HH as “the high watermark of Nietzsche’s ‘positivist’ phase in which he accepted, somewhat uncritically, that science was the paradigm of all genuine knowledge” (1997: vii). Jonathan Cohen sees Nietzsche as embracing his own form of positivism in HH, taking Nietzsche’s brand of positivism to mean the belief that science can contribute to reliable human knowledge and to human flourishing (1999: 101).³ Julian Young writes of Nietzsche’s “turn to positivism,” according to which “nothing exists ‘behind’ nature; nothing exists but nature … nothing is beyond the reach of natural science, nothing is knowable save that which is, in principle, knowable by science” (2010: 242, emphasis original). More generally, Young identifies the “defining presupposition” of HH’s new research program as “the potential omniscience of science” (2010: 243).

The progenitor of this idea that HH embraces positivism is probably Lou Andreas Salomé. Her Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken was published in 1894, and the section on HH in her chapter entitled “Nietzsche’s Transitions” contains several references to positivism. She claims, for example, that after his break with Wagner, “Nietzsche’s intellectual development took a sudden turn toward the positivistic philosophy of the English and the French” (Salomé 2001: 53, cf. 59–60). She further maintains that Nietzsche was influenced by Paul Rée in this regard and indicates that for both of them, positivism’s appeal lay in its promise of answering “the question about the origin of the moral phenomenon” (2001: 63). At this time Nietzsche became a “historian who planted his feet on the firm ground of positivism” (2001: 63, cf. 73, 81, 82, 85).

2. The Status of Science

As a way of trying to understand why scholars might characterize HH as positivist, it is instructive to start with the book’s very first chapter, which reflects quite explicitly and consistently on the nature of knowledge and makes a number of comments in praise of science. HH opens by observing how much the philosophical project of Nietzsche’s own time resembles that of the Ancient Greeks. “At almost every point, philosophical problems are once again assuming the same form for their questions as they did two thousand years ago” (HH 1). For someone trained as a classical philologist, this could be the ideal opportunity, as his expertise in Greek thought and culture could afford him an immediate relevance to and credibility within the philosophical debates of his time. Not so for Nietzsche, who roundly condemns this sort of “metaphysical philosophy” that treats these traditional questions as if they were of unchanging relevance and importance. He prefers “historical philosophy [historische Philosophie]” that is more cognizant of and responsive to the reality of change. He aligns this “historical philosophy” closely with “natural science [Naturwissenschaft]” (HH 1).⁴

HH’s very next passage, however, initially effaces this promising subcategory of historical philosophy by accusing “all philosophers” of adopting an ahistorical approach to the human being. Devoid of all sense of history, philosophers confuse “the most recent shape of human beings” for their “fixed form” (HH 2). Yet Nietzsche insists, contrariwise, that everything “has become;⁵ there are no eternal facts just as there are no absolute truths” (HH 2). Because of this, he once again invokes “historical philosophizing” as the more promising path to knowledge and in doing so tacitly corrects his earlier suggestion that all philosophy is ahistorical. The clear implication is that Nietzsche will not only be championing, but also doing, this sort of historically aware philosophy, which, as we just saw from HH 1, he associates with natural science.

Yet the possibility of this sort of historically aware philosophy is once again effaced when, just a few passages later, Nietzsche contrasts science with philosophy in general to posit an “antagonism between the individual fields of science and philosophy” (HH 6). By this rendering, all philosophy is metaphysical philosophy, and one of its preoccupations is to endow human life with “as much depth and meaning as possible.” This is one of the reasons why throughout HH, metaphysical philosophy is associated with aesthetics and religion, for both of those latter endeavors also impute depth and meaning to human life. Science, unlike all these other approaches, “seeks knowledge and nothing further—whatever may come of it” (HH 6). From a remark like this last one, we can see why HH can be associated with positivism.

Science and philosophy are once again posed as antagonists in the very next passage that illustrates one of the ways in which philosophy has striven to provide depth and meaning to life. Nietzsche claims that since the Socratic school in Ancient Greece, philosophy has sought “that knowledge of the world and of life by which human beings will live most happily [am glücklichsten lebt]” (HH 7). The implication is that philosophers have subordinated truth to happiness whereas science, by contrast, has been unconcerned with the impact of its findings on human well-being. And once again we are led to infer that Nietzsche’s own approach to knowledge will be closer to science than to philosophy.⁶ Later in HH he asserts as a “fundamental Insight” that “there is no preestablished harmony between the furthering of truth and the well-being of humanity” (517). But the implication of this fundamental insight is that, conversely, there is no preestablished disharmony between truth and well-being. One cannot assume automatically that truth will lead either to happiness or to misery. As I read Nietzsche, he is calling for an open, scientific approach to the truth rather than an a priori one. While some truths might prove fatal, others could be salutary.

This idea that science is historically aware and informed in a way that philosophy has not been returns in section 16, which announces that “the steady and laborious process of science … will someday finally celebrate its highest triumph in a genetic history of thought.” This passage confidently predicts that this genetic history of thought will vindicate Nietzsche’s claims that so far most philosophical knowledge has been a form of wishful thinking and built on a series of unsupportable premises and false dichotomies, such as those outlined in HH 1. Section 18 refers again to this “genetic history of thinking” that will bear out Nietzsche’s claims and show that “all metaphysics” has been “the science that deals with the fundamental errors of human beings, but does so as if they were fundamental truths” (HH 18).⁷ The fact that metaphysics is here referred to as a science should alert us to the fact that not all of Nietzsche’s uses of the term “science” are meant to evoke the modern natural sciences or even forms of knowledge of which he approves.⁸ Conversely, many of the errors he associates with metaphysics are not confined to that area of inquiry; they also infect mathematics (HH 19) and even language itself (HH 11).

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Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche’s Texts
• Introduction
• Part One Joy and Knowledge
• Part Two Nietzsche’s Joyful Teachings
• Part Three Predecessors and Heirs
• Part Four Perspectives on Laughter
• Notes on Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright Page