The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (review)

The title of Bernard Reginster's book reflects his central thesis that the core of Nietzsche's entire philosophical enterprise consists in the attempt to foster the affirmation of life despite its inherent difficulties. He claims that Nietzsche's seemingly scattershot writings can be seen to hang together as a whole, inasmuch as they contribute to this basic project of showing how life, despite its ineluctable suffering and its lack of intrinsic meaningfulness, is worth embracing as fully as possible. I believe that Reginster's basic approach is sound and serves as a corrective to much of the Nietzsche literature, which has given pride of place to Nietzsche's discussions of metaphysical and epistemological issues—which are at the center of current philosophical discussions, but at the periphery of Nietzsche's own philosophical interests.

Reginster's book is also notable in its greater than usual recognition of the extent to which Nietzsche's work developed out of his confrontation with Arthur Schopenhauer, whose impact upon Nietzsche was not just confined to those ideas that Nietzsche adopted, but also includes those ideas that Nietzsche devoted much time and effort to combating.

Reginster tends to identify the Nietzschean project of affirming life with that of overcoming nihilism (the theme of chapter 1, echoed in the title of the book). This simple identification may seem justified inasmuch as there are some passages in which Nietzsche seems to characterize any view as nihilistic that expresses or supports a rejection of the value of life. But there are a number of other passages in which Nietzsche discusses nihilism more narrowly, as a consequence of his doctrine of "the death of god." This is the thesis that in the Europe of the last half of the 19th century most people no longer really adhered to the traditional belief that there is a transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent deity who imbued our world with worth and significance, and who also created a code of conduct and a system of values. As the belief in such a god erodes, so does our sense that there are objective values that, if discovered and followed, would give our lives meaning and worth. While Nietzsche certainly was occupied with the problem that the loss of belief in god and god-given values poses for the affirmation of life, one should not, as Reginster seems to do, identify Nietzsche's fundamental problem of the affirmation of life with this issue, which is only one historically and geographically limited aspect of what for Nietzsche was a universal human problem.

The problem of the loss of belief in objective values that follows upon the loss of belief in a deity is, for Nietzsche, not even the most important of those aspects of life that make its affirmation problematic. Let us not forget that Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), analyzes classical Greek culture as developing from a confrontation with the problematic nature of affirming life. Thus, he clearly views the problem as arising well before any loss of religious belief in Europe takes place and independently of any such loss. It emerges in that context principally from the problem of the inevitability of substantial suffering in human life, a central theme in Greek tragedy and Nietzsche's philosophy—not from the loss of our faith in the existence of objective values.

Reginster's discussion of Nietzsche's treatment of the problem of whether there are objective values (the theme of chapter 2) is in many ways illuminating. It tends, however, to bury the fact that Nietzsche was not interested in the problem for its own sake, but only as it might affect our ability to affirm life. At several junctures, Reginster loses sight of his central task of arguing for his thesis about what constitutes the core of Nietzsche's philosophy. Following his own philosophical muses or demons, he pursues at length issues that are of more intrinsic interest to himself and other current philosophers...