The Nietzschean Tragedy of Life

It’s critical to note that Marx’s ideas on history, its creation, and its utility are governed, or rather underwritten, by a bias to inspire and provoke action from the intended reader—the working class of the mid-late 1800s. And on the other hand, with Nietzsche, it should be emphasized that as both a lifelong learner and teacher of history, through philology, he had a vested interest in finding a utility for history—an interest he himself acknowledges. Whether or not it is truly useful to “work against the time and thereby have an effect upon it, hopefully for the benefit of a future time,” the dead God only knows (Nietzsche 125).

Looking first at Marx, it seems that the main function of history, or its study, is to spur men onto action, or, as he puts it, “drug themselves concerning their own content” (Marx 597). In other words, Marx doesn’t claim the historical utility of history stems from facts, he argues it lays in what Nietzsche would call “the form” of history, that is, the aesthetics, morality, and feelings associated with a subjective interpretation of past events. He says that whereby men can create history, they are limited by what they can create, freed from tradition, through tradition itself, like how the learner of a new language necessarily “translates it back into his mother tongue” (Marx 595). In order to truly free the creation of history from history itself, as he believes is necessary for the working class revolution, man must move within this future, which was inspired by the past, “without remembering the old”, and by forgetting his “ancestral tongue” within it (Marx 595). Thus, the result of the application of the study of history is actually its mopping clean. In other words, it is to produce the newest state of unhistoricalness.

Moving onto Nietzsche, he argues that the study of history should be with the explicit end of serving life. Moreover, he proposes that the “true utility of history lies in stimulating a sense of how to handle reality, more through the form that is attached to the events than through the events themselves” (Nietzsche 590). It follows that Marx and Nietzsche would both agree viewing historical events as a process of rigid cause and effect would be incorrect. Instead, they understand the individual events and circumstances of history as deeply subjective and only truly comprehensible from within that period. However, “the form,” this interpretation of the emotive atmospheric effects surrounding an event, does yield utility in not just correctly understanding those events, but in knowing how to approach future events during which that “spirit” is once more present (Nietzsche 590; Marx 596).

Throughout this essay I have used the words “spirit” and “form” to refer to what Marx coins “the phrase”. What then is Nietzsche’s “ content” and how might it “go beyond the phrase?” (Marx 597). In the same way Marx pushes readers to believe that this new working-class revolution will be like no other, letting the content, not the phrase or performative spirit, serve as its own “drug”, Nietzsche believes that all life requires some element of this unhistoricalness, so as to not paralyze action; for without the belief in a spontaneous, or wholly originally, life, the will-to-life would fade, replaced by static existence.

In On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, Nietzsche argues that, unlike the “unhistorical” animal, the human “chain” to the past binds us to “strife, suffering, and boredom” (Nietzsche 127). In fact, this was the script of Nietzsche’s own life: a prodigy eventually undone by his own prodigiousness. He spent years attempting to solve this question: if the “will-to-truth” eventually corrupts itself, what, then, is the object of life in a world plagued by the vicissitudes of fortune and paralyzed by the past? While Nietzsche’s character may not have escaped the “play” of his own suffering, the answer is clear to his audience. It lies in the distinction between the objects of existence and life.

Existence is a static, abstract universal property possessed by all living things from the moment that they exist to that moment that they don’t. In this way, the object of existence is death. Life, on the other hand, is shared by all beings, and its object is a constant willing out and away from mere existence towards happiness via presence and experiences. But while life’s object is different from existence, it does make a stop at death, when it parts ways with its present will. And, at this point, the ultimate aim of the willer is realized in a single moment of retrospection. A sickness of his own history ravages his whole being, and the death of his body coincides, as such, with the death of his will, but not until this moment of memory, in which, from life, his will squeezes one more moment of barrel-aged happiness before wheezing its farewell to life: “I lived.”

How then does one live? One lives in the successful opposition or inversion of self and life-denial. In other words, we turn ressentiment against asceticism. In this process, we identify all that asceticism says about living and turn it on itself. So let us identify the ideals of asceticism and determine their “slave morality” (Nietzsche 357). First, we cannot say whether life is truly judged against some “higher” world; we can say that, if there was some superior judge, surely the way to impress them would not be through a demonstration of how much we can “will nothing.” Thus, the goal of life isn’t its overcoming, but its living, that is, “set[ting] [one]self down on the threshold of the moment” and “stand[ing], without dizziness or fear, on one single point like a victory goddess” (Nietzsche 127). Second, and logically following, sensuality is not a cord of sin binding the body to this world, and neither is pain or earthly presence a divine punishment from which one should retreat into yogic contemplation. No, they are the silver cords which necessarily bind the kindred heart to its spirit, and, thus the earth to its eternal heaven. Therefore, to live is to see this world, and all worlds which may come after it, as one and the same and to will with equivalent actions in this world the same happiness which they would in all others, after. And thirdly, we must redefine what it means to sin—the rejection of Amor Fati. The sinner is then one who views happiness and suffering as separates and, furthermore, life as an entity in need of meaning, instead of life as meaning in and of itself. Happiness and suffering, these are the derivatives of the will-to-life. Their integral, the meaning of life: a cumulative summation of the displacement—which is caused by living—between the first moment of existence and the last.

But what does that mean? If that is the theory of how to live, what is its practical application? The answer is the child. The child exists as this liminal space between complete unhistoricalness, between a complete lack of previous experiences and any real conceptualization of the overarching, shared history of humans (Nietzsche 126). Nietzsche says this state of “blissful blindness between the…past and the future” is like the “vision of a lost paradise” to man who has long since come to know the phrase “‘it was’, the watchword that brings human existence into suffering, strife, and boredom” (Nietzsche 126). He characterizes life as a “never to be perfected, imperfect.” But if that is the case, why do we strive for a perfect life? In fact, it is these assumptions and internal motives which appear from nowhere with the wisdom of age to work against our living perfectly.

See the child has no conception of perfection. Their horizon is the moment, and that moment, though individually-bounded, is constantly ever-expanding and changing and will continue to do so for eternity. Once the threshold of a moment passes it disappears and is unrecoverable by the child. But they do not lament. While all of this is happening, the child continues to play. To the child, the only things that matter are what it feels now, and, in fact, just as soon as it felt then, it forgets, and now feels anew. Furthermore, it has not yet grasped the society’s truths and metaphors for it to speak them as its own tongue, so it is wholly limited to understanding and communicating through one of the only universal languages we all share: emotion. And so as the child sits in each moment, willing happiness and suffering from its actions, it does so without distraction to another future or past moment, it does so without any expectation from the present moment, except that it will not prevent him from willing upon it.

But we are not the child, in fact, we possess one key difference, we are aware that the moment changes, that time passes, that meaning is found in our engagement in each moment, and, most importantly, we remember how we lived. So, the only question we must put as context above each and every moment of our life is this: “What if I forgot everything after this moment, and I can only extract the truest and fullest happiness from this minute by being here and here alone; aware that I will only have the lucidity of now—of all my historicalness and unhistoricalness in the fleeting horizon of this moment and the nerve stimuli I have now—now?” And, in this way, we look up from the path we’ve trodden dozens of times between our room and the dining hall, not forsaking it as equivalent to any other time. And, suddenly, the walkway seems wider, the colors brighter, the language of life comprehensible to us. And, slowly, the sun rises at us from within the abyss of that tragic knowledge to shine light on the void illuminating the once forgotten centerpiece of our childhood: while the “truth” isn’t accessible to us, we do not suffer because, in fact, the “truth” is meaningless to us. For the knowledge of the “truth” would be tragic in itself, corrupting the only thing we truly can control and fill with meaning: life. Ultimately, by disregarding the attainability of a perfect life and allowing the weight of historicalness to self-sublime into a moment of unhistoricalness, we find that at our farewell to life, our terminal sickness becomes an eternal antidote—the final realization of a life that has perfected itself only by completing its journey in those last, fleeting moments.