Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence

I

At the center of Nietzsche's vision lies his concept of the "terror and horror of existence" (BT 3). As he puts it in The Birth of Tragedy:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. . . . When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon."

(BT 3)¹

Why is it best never to have been born? Because all we can expect as human beings is to suffer. Yet, still, this is not precisely the problem. As Nietzsche tells us in On the Genealogy of Morals, human beings can live with suffering. What they cannot live with is meaningless suffering—suffering for no reason at all (GM III:28). In Nietzsche's view we are "surrounded by a fearful void . . ." (GM III:28; cf. WP 55). We live in an empty, meaningless cosmos. We cannot look into reality without being overcome. Indeed, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche even suggests that "it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish . . ." (BGE 39; cf. WP 822).

And it was not just intellectual reflection that led Nietzsche to a belief in the horror of existence. He lived it himself.² In a letter of April 10, 1888, he writes: "Around 1876 my health grew worse. . . . There were extremely painful and obstinate headaches which exhausted all my strength. They increased over long years, to reach a climax at which pain was habitual, so that any given year contained for me two hundred days of pain. . . . My specialty was to endure the extremity of pain . . . with complete lucidity for two or three days in succession, with continuous vomiting of mucus."³ In Nietzsche contra Wagner, he tells us how significant this suffering was for him:

I have often asked myself whether I am not much more deeply indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others. . . . And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!—To it, I owe even my philosophy. . . . Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of the spirit. . . . Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time—forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths. . . .

(NCW "Epilogue")

Nietzsche's belief in the horror of existence is largely, if not completely, overlooked by most scholars.⁴ I hope to show that it had a profound effect on his thought, indeed, that he cannot be adequately understood without seeing the centrality of this concept. To begin to understand its importance, let us consider three different visions of the human condition.

The first holds that we live in a benign cosmos. It is as if it were purposively planned for us and we for it. We fit, we belong, we are at home in this cosmos. We are confirmed and reinforced by it. Our natural response is a desire to know it and thus to appreciate our fit into it. Let us call this the designed cosmos. Roughly speaking, this is the traditional view held by most philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through the medievals. And for the most part it has disappeared in the modern world—few really believe in it anymore...