Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way. The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ … And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind. Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.” In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's *amor fati* falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures. ### Episode Highlights 1. "The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing from imparting its gifts." 2. "Love that is neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness—that is the kind of love Nietzsche thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth." 3. "Nietzsche aspires to transfiguration of all things through value-bestowing life, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans." 4. "God’s love for creatures is unconditional. It is agapic love for the states in which they find themselves." 5. "Love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die." **Show Notes** - Miroslav Volf’s engagement with Nietzsche’s work - Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as life-denying and his vision of the will to power - Schopenhauer’s hedonism vs. Nietzsche’s anti-hedonism: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power.” - The will to power as Nietzsche’s supreme value and “hyper-good” - “The will to power is not a philosophy of life—it’s a philosophy of vitality.” - Nietzsche’s agonism: the noble contest for superiority among equally powerful opponents - “Every GOAT is a GOAT only for a time.” - Amor fati: Nietzsche’s love of fate and affirmation of all existence - Nietzsche’s ideal of desire without satisfaction: “desiring to desire” - Dangers of epithumic (need-based, consuming) love - “Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than a two-year-old’s toy... If it took an abode, it would die.” - Nietzsche’s nausea at the weakness and smallness of humanity: “Nausea, nausea... alas, man recurs eternally.” - Zarathustra’s conditional love: based on worthiness, wisdom, and power - “Joy in tearing down has fully supplanted love’s delight in what is.” - Nietzsche’s failure to love the unworthy: “His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.” - Volf’s theological critique of striving, superiority, and contempt - “Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.” - The biblical God’s love: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.” - “Even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.” - Jesus’s unconditional love versus Nietzsche’s agonistic, conditional love - Kierkegaard and Luther on the distinction between person and work - Hannah Arendt’s political anthropology and enduring love in the face of unworthiness - Volf’s proposal for a theology of loving the present world in its broken form - “We can actually long also for what we have.” - “Love that cannot take an abode will die.” - A vision of divine, presuppositionless love that neither requires need nor merit
Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way.
The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ …
And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind.
Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.”
In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's amor fati falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures.
Episode Highlights
Show Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final good. Thus very important work in nature's philosophy for nies. Striving is good. Happiness does not dress in feeling that one's power is growing. The consequence however, that embracing, striving for superiority have or niches relationship to the world are momentous.
In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, puts it crossed everywhere with infinity. And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving. But this means there's no determinant goals like swift footed Oculus in the parable of Zob, Ilia infinity impedes them. He cannot overtake the tortoise, the will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time, and that goal can never be reached.
You are always equally behind striving for superiority, so as to enhance power does not just elevate some the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increase the weak, become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased successful. Striving for superiority.
Inferior rises.
Evan Rosa: Friedrich Nietzsche loved the world by loving our fate in it. This love embraces one's vitality in the world. One's power, one's struggle in beyond good and evil. He wrote, life itself is essentially appropriation injury, overpowering of what is foreign and weaker oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, and at least at its mildest exploitation even equals Nietzsche says, will quote, "have to incarnate, will to power.
This will to power. He says, "will grow spread out, pull things in. Try to gain the upper hand, not due to any morality or immorality, but because it lives and because life. It simply is will to power. So Nietzsche's vision of the ultimate good is a striving to enhance one's power, to exert one's agency and will, and to embrace the world of contending forces.
But what does that kind of love imply about our relation to the rest of the world, the rest of our peers and the human species? In this episode, Miroslav Wolf's third Gifford lecture explores Nietzsche's will to power, agonistic or struggling love, and his affirmation of suffering. Miroslav critiques the devaluation of humanity, and proposes Jesus's unconditional love as a more enduring and encompassing response to the world's brokenness offering.
A love that transcends individual power worthiness from striving and personal need. This is the third in our recent series and was given as part of the lectures Miroslav Volf delivered at University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures. His series entitled Amor Mundi, considered God's love for the world and What it should mean for our love, our love of God, our love of creation, and our love of one another. Special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in our podcast and for the sport of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped to make the lectures possible. Hope you enjoy listening. Here's the third of Miroslav Volf's Gifford lectures, Amor Fati: Nietzsche's Universal Affirmation and limited love.
Miroslav Volf: Ladies and gentlemen, friends.
Some of you who know my work will know that I am a great fan of Nietzsche.
Those of you who know me personally and know that I have read Nietzsche's work for years
uh, every evening for devotions. I'm serious.
Um, I taught a class, uh, at the school,
Evangelical school when I was teaching at Fuller on Nietzsche.
And, uh, I made it to rule that no negative comments about Nietzsche may be said in this in this class.
Well. The time has come, dear Frederick,
to move beyond gratefully receiving your profound critique of Christianity.
And say how deeply I think you are wrong about what you propose instead.
And if Nietzsche can hear me, he'll also recognise that even in my critique, uh, I have learned from him.
So last lecture ended with Schopenhauer. So let me start very briefly with Schopenhauer and immediately go, uh, to Nietzsche, his pupil.
The world has failed Schopenhauer's expectations, it has proven itself incapable of giving any of his desires -
appetites - immediate, full and abiding satisfaction like an irrationally demanding lover.
He has been rebuffed. And yet asking whether something might, and yet instead of asking whether something might be wrong with his expectations,
Schopenhauer decides to blame the world and wish its non-existence.
For him, a specific kind of desire is a given,
sovereign. It's unfulfillment is suffering, and any suffering pushes the value of existence below zero.
Though Schopenhauer was his teacher,
Nietzsche soon lost patience with him, except that he made Schopenhauer's question about the value of existence his own.
Nietzsche's entire philosophy is an alternative to Schopenhauer though not just that.
Of course, Schopenhauer is a hedonist.
His chief dis-value is suffering and his chief value abiding satisfaction.
Nietzsche is an anti hedonist. His chief
dis-value is weakness and his chief value enhancement of one's own power.
Schopenhauer's odium mundi
hatred of the world, to that Nietzsche responded with Amor mundi.
Love of faith. We ought to love the entirety of what is past, present, and future,
The massive weight of suffering in the world notwithstanding.
Unlike Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we often mix and match, and we do so even with our chief values, guiding values.
Even those of us who embrace hedonistic ideals of satisfaction can find ourselves
resonating with Nietzsche's vision of great striving and growing power.
It is hard for us not to inwardly nod our heads in approval.
When we read Albert Camus asserting the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to feel man's heart.
We can understand why Nietzsche would celebrate power.
We may more worry, however, about his signature idea, his love of what is, what was, and what is to come.
Nietzsche made much of it, and of what he believed were the inadequacies of Jesus love for the world.
In siding with the ill constituted and the suffering, the God revealed in Jesus Christ
suppresses vitality. The Christian concept of God represents,
he believed, the low mark in the development,
in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated into a contradiction of life. In God,
nothingness defied, will to nothingness sanctified.
In this lecture, I will argue that both Nietzsche's chief value - enhancement of power - and his signature
idea - amor fati - systematically undermine any love that is worthy of that name.
I do so. To do so, I will examine his notion of will to power two statements about loving concrete human beings, and then his idea of amor fati.
At the beginning of the only volume of his planned revaluation of all values,
he actually, uh, that he actually wrote Nietzsche asks and answers in catechetic style,
two fundamental questions for the life of every human being: what is good and what is happiness?
In answering them, he names what he considers to be the most his most basic value the criterion for value of everything,
what Charles Taylor calls a hyper good.
So what is this kind of good for Nietzsche?
Everything that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in humans.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance, the resistance is being overcome.
For Nietzsche, striving to enhance one's power is not a specific, specifically human trait.
The basic human instinct is the same as the basic instinct of all living things.
Each aims at enhancement of its own power. Making such striving,
his highest value is, for Nietzsche, the central aspect of loving life as it is.
Given that Nietzsche
often — though not always — associates overcoming resistance with having
opponents
the form of resistance that serves self enhancement is often the counter force of competitors. In the "Genealogy of Morality"
he writes that the will to power is a will to overwhelm, will to topple, will to become master, thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs.
Similarly in "the Will to Power,"
he writes that the feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the fact that the will is never satisfied unless it has opponents and resistance.
In many instances, then the will to power aims concretely at superiority,
at being more powerful than other others in philosophy and arts, no less than in sports, politics, and, of course, warfare.
Nietzsche also highlights striving for superiority in contrasting his will to power, to Darwin's struggle for survival.
He writes the great and small struggle,
everyone revolves around superiority around growth and expansion, around power in accordance with the will to power,
which is simply a will to life.
Human beings do not just want power, neither do they just want their power to grow.
Human beings want growing power that is greater than the power of their competitors.
This belongs, I believe, to the logic of power in social context.
I have power only when I have more power than my competitors or relative comparands, and my power is the greatest
when I set the standard by which all others must be measured.
Importantly, the condition of superiority is always only temporary.
Struggle continues eternally, writes Nietzsche, echoing Heraclitus' dictum that war is the mother of all things.
Striving for permanent increase has no terminal goal.
Every - GOAT - greatest of all time,
every goat is a goat only for a time.
For the will to power, to be the mode of love of life
ongoing striving for superiority too would have to be the mode of love for life.
But is that plausible?
In his early essay "Homer on Competition", Nietzsche recommenced the form of human relations organised around the practice of agon - struggle,
with others conducted not as destructive combat but as power enhancing contest.
Three features of agon distinguish it from war. First, agon is not action of a struggle to the death, but action of competition.
Second agon is a context of opponents with rough parity of power.
Monopolies are non-agonal. Third, since agon is a contest for mastery of relative equals,
the contestants incite each other to action and growth just as they keep each other within certain limits.
But the line between life enhancing agon and life destroying violence turns out to be difficult to maintain in the later work
"Beyond Good and Evil", the eternal Nietzsche repeats some of the conditions of genuine agon,
noting that can take place only within small groups of equally powerful nobles who share basic values.
He immediately qualifies the condition. If we were to make equality and prohibition against violence basic principle of society as a whole,
we would promote, he writes, the will to denial of life, the principle of disintegration and decline.
Here's how he explains this position. Life itself is essentially - am I okay?
I'm okay. Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering or what is foreign and weaker.
Oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own form, incorporation, and at least at its mildest, exploitation.
Even those bodies within which individuals treat each other as equal must do to other bodies everything that the individual within it
refrain from doing to each other.
If the social body will have to incarnate the will to power, will to grow, will to spread, to pull things in, to try to gain upper hand,
And why? Not due to some morality or immorality, but it because it lives and because life simply is will to power.
Now in "Homer and Competition", the value of the image, I'm sorry,
in "Homer and Competition"
the image of raging tiger with wanton cruelty in its terrible eyes stood for the violence Nietzsche sought to overcome with the help of agon.
After having introduced his signature idea of the will to power the constraints on
violence that agon was meant to introduce had lost some of their force.
These constrained constraints, he explains, can in certain crude sense,
become good manners between individuals if conditions allow and the conditions do not apply at all to relationships between groups.
The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final good,
does very important work in Nietzsche's philosophy.
It allows him to place the meaning giving goal of life into life itself and deny it a position outside of life,
Where Platonism in Christianity, religion more generally had placed it.
This is where
Schopenhauer, too, had placed the meaning-giving goal, as he considered
striving that never came to full and lasting satisfaction -
both an argument against existence and means,
as you might recall, if you've been here yesterday, no day before yesterday,
and means of achieving nothingness in contrast to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche for Nietzsche,
striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling,
it rests in feeling that one's power is growing.
The consequence, however, that embracing, striving for superiority have for Nietzsche's relationship to the world are momentous.
First, in the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, puts it,
crossed everywhere with infinity, and therefore condemned to ceaseless striving.
By this he means there's no determinate goal.
Like swift footed Achilles in the parable of Zeno of Elea, infinity impedes him, he cannot overtake the tortoise.
The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time, and that goal can never be reached.
You're always equally behind. Second, striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones.
If the difference in power between parties is increased,
the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased.
Successful, striving for superiority
inferiorises. This too tracks, with a feature of modernity, its logic of increase. Nietzsche's power, agon,
more power is analogous to money capital.
More money. Without placing agon in a sternly moral and legal frame,
as the wise seek to do with economic competition, its effect will be the general inferiorisation of people.
Finally,
the inferiorisation that the will to power generates would be less troubling were it not that for that Nietzsche does not recognise any intrinsic values.
As a consequence, competitor and everything else that offers resistance are likely to become mere means for the enhancement of power.
Perhaps at the highest level of competition, one can point at some point,
Nietzsche writes about competition between three or few more geniuses.
Competitors can, under those circumstances, perhaps avoid treating each other as mere means.
When it comes to those he believed to be inferior or slave type of humans
He practice, he praises the idea that there are means to make possible superior types of human.
With a will to power as his chief goal Nietzsche might not have so much rescued
life from Christian and Platonic nihilism as devalued not just most competitors, but also most of their accomplishments
as I will argue in the last lecture. Everyone is a disposable means to feeding the growth of individuals vitality.
Nietzsche's philosophy is not a philosophy of life, but the philosophy of vitality, which enhances the power of some but degrades most.
Agonism implies ascribing positive value to suffering.
Schopenhauer, a hedonist objects to the claim of Jewish and Christian traditions that life without suffering is possible.
Nietzsche, an anti hedonist, objected to the biblical claim that life without suffering is desirable.
Commenting on Genesis two and three in the "Will to Power," he writes God created man happy, idle, innocent, and immortal.
Our actual life is a false, decayed, sinful existence and existence of punishment.
Suffering. Struggle. Work. Death are considered as objections to the and question marks against life as something that ought not to last,
for which one requires cure and - and has such cure.
From the time of Adam until now, man has been in an unfit, abnormal state.
God himself has sacrificed his son for the guilt of Adam in order to put an end to this abnormal state.
The natural character of life is a curse.
Christ gave back the state of normal and said to him who believes in him makes him happy, idle and innocent.
The whole struggling, battling actual existence full of splendour and darkness.
Only a bad false existence.
The task is to be redeemed from it.
Nietzsche’s concern
with Genesis 2–3 is that it distorts most basic character of human beings.
To hold innocence, idleness, immortality and happiness,
to be supremely desirable is to make human destruction desirable.
The criticism is powerful,
I think. If we fail to distinguish sufficiently between two forms of the world, this present form of the world and the form of the world to come
Those of you who are here at the first lecture will remember that I try to introduce this distinction,
distinction between world as such and different forms of the world.
So now this world and the world to come are those different forms of the world, um, as distinct from the world as such.
For the present form of the world, vulnerability, suffering and death are essential,
I believe. In the world to come they will be absent.
Building on David Halsey's work, I want to suggest that we should not place the two forms of the world on the same scale of value,
one imperfect and the other perfect, though the nature of the goodness of the two forms of the world, meaning this world and the world to come.
Though the nature of the goodness of the two forms of the world overlaps, each is also good in its own way.
Immortality and abiding happiness are goods of the world to come.
Vulnerability, suffering, and death are goods of the present world, though that, though they are goods that make possible some of the worst evils.
It is a false choice either to reject all suffering as Schopenhauer does, or to embrace it all, however severe as Nietzsche does.
I realise that what I've just said is pretty controversial,
so I will expect few questions about it. Agonists, notes Nietzsche, plausibly take upon themselves suffering in overcoming resistance.
They also inflicted upon their opponents. In "The Joyful Science", Nietzsche brings together these two sides of our relation to suffering.
He contrasts heroic individuals with weaklings who, in the prospect of pain, hear a command to take in the sails.
There are human beings who hear exact opposite command when the great pain is approaching,
who are never prouder, more warlike and happier than when facing down the storm that blows in.
Indeed, pain itself gives them their greatest moments.
These are heroic human beings.
But then in the middle of the sentence he shifts from enduring suffering to inflicting suffering.
These heroic human beings, Nietzsche continues, are the great pain bringers of humanity.
Those few or rare types who deserve precisely the same apology as pain in general, and truly it should not be denied them.
They are species preserving and species promoting forces of the first order.
For Nietzsche, one such hero was Napoleon Bonaparte,
whose military expedition, expeditions left about 6 million dead and many more wounded. To most of them,
he brought only bow and served, which served no positive purpose.
Nietzsche had no better comfort for such sufferers than to tell them that their
death and pain help heroic individuals to do their species promoting work.
Once again, Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.
Shift from, um, will to power to amor mundi.
Slow shift, transition. After ten years of solitude
Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra is coming down from the mountain.
On the way, he meets an old saint and tells him I love humans.
The saint responds by explaining why he has chosen to live in the desert.
I love God. Man, I love not.
Man is for me too imperfect a thing. The love of man would kill me.
Zarathustra seems like takes a step back and responds,
I bring man a gift. Love, it seems, just is bringing his gift.
Certainly a nobler act than the saints flight from imperfect humans into love for God.
But what kind of love is Zarathustra's gift giving?
Zarathustra had retreated to the mountaintop, in part to flee from contemptible humanity.
Why, then, is he coming down? Behold, I am weary of my wisdom like a bee that has gathered too much honey.
I need hands outstretched to receive it.
Humans are repulsive, but they might be redeemable.
What he loves in human beings is not who they actually are.
But the fact that they are made to be a transition, bridge to the Ubermensch. Zarathustra brings his wisdom.
But is disheartened to find no hands to receive it?
The multitude will have none of it. They laugh at him, but when he gathers disciples, they too prove disappointing. They're mere followers,
incapable of being fellow agonists, of making the will to power the principle of their own lives.
Finding no one worthy of his love, he returns to the mountaintop full of contempt.
Zarathustra's two way journey enacts his oscillation between what he haltingly and rather inappropriately calls love and deep contempt.
Instability of Zarathustra's love is rooted in its nature.
First, he comes to relieve himself of the weight of pain, of his wisdom.
As a lover, he is the giver in need of recipient, and that not as a person who has experienced great joys, joy and is bursting to share it.
But as someone requiring relief. Love here is epithumia,
only now it is not seeking to fill a void, but to alleviate pain.
Second, an essential condition of his love is that its recipients are worthy of it, that they themselves be transformed by his wisdom.
When recipients are unworthy, contempt is appropriate.
Now his love is eros which, facing unworthiness, turns into contempt.
As the pain of the need to give remains unrelieved, it increases
Zarathustra’s contempt for those who are not wise enough to benefit from his superior wisdom, and to honour it.
Both his neediness and the recipient's unworthiness limit the scope of his love.
There's yet another limit to Zarathustra’s love. Let's assume for a moment that he found fellow agonists ready to embrace his vision of the good.
Do agonists governed by the desire for enhancement of their power, love each other?
We've encountered that question before. Possibly that's three geniuses.
But if so, then only as long as they prove good agonists and thus worthy of love,
love is in danger again of morphing into contempt, since the will to power is essentially insatiable.
The worthiness of the fellow agonists is always a moving target, while agon brings about enhancement of power and therefore also worthiness,
it simultaneously devalues inferirises,
whatever has been overcome, as I've noted earlier.
What counted as worthy prior to enhancement becomes unworthy after it.
The objects of Zarathustra's kind of love can be only a very small minorities.
Most humans will always nauseate him.
His love cannot have humanity and Earth as it object.
For that Nietzsche would need a different kind of love.
The one neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness.
He would need precisely the kind of love that he thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth.
In the "Joyful Science" Nietzsche
offers a similar account of love that I've just offered by analysing Zarathustra's relation to multitude and his disciples.
He does so in the process of explaining his very questionable take on the difference between female and male loves.
As I will show shortly, he will connect Zarathustra’s love with what he calls male love.
What woman means by love is clear enough to Nietzsche at least.
Complete devotion, not merely surrender with soul and body, without any consideration, any reserve,
rather with shame and horror at the thought of a devotion governed by clauses and conditions.
Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this from her. Woman wants to give herself and be taken.
Her love is the very opposite of the will to power. Male love is the obverse of female love.
Man wants to take, and so to be made even richer in himself through the increase of strength, happiness,
faith that the woman gives him in giving herself. Male love is the mode of the will to power. Explaining why loyalty does not belong to this,
the essence of this love Nietzsche writes, male love, after all, is wanting to have.
And then, but wanting to have comes to an end with having.
In other words, his love is, in my terms, earlier terms, epithumic.
The passage is significant not just because it illustrates how comfortable Nietzsche is reducing a person to mere means to an individual's will to power,
and calling that reduction love. It also specifies how Nietzsche understands the dynamic of desire and possession.
It assumes a need based account of desire and the denial of intrinsic value of any object.
As we've seen, Schopenhauer does. Once the need is satisfied and having the desire ceases and the desire turns to a new object for Schopenhauer.
However, this shows the impossibility of satisfaction.
The presence of desire being for him a form of suffering.
An indicator of dissatisfaction. But not so for Nietzsche.
Nietzsche rejects the idea of satisfaction that would fully extinguish desire.
Instead, he embraces the notion of desiring to desire. In "Ecce Homo", Zarathustra is deemed the
highest form of all beings,
in part because he has the soul which having being, dives into becoming.
The soul that has but wills itself into wanting and longing, not at all wanting and longing for what it has,
but refusing content, contentment, wanting and longing for new things.
The idea that satisfaction is not in having, but ongoing desiring, is resonant with the idea that happiness consists in indefinite growth in power.
In the second lecture, I noted how pervasive in the culture of modernity, um, epithumic love is and how it devalues, my term was garbages the world.
Nietzsche affirms an analogous relation to the world.
In fact, he elevates it to a principle of life - joy in the destruction of the most noble and at the site of its progressive ruin.
In reality, joy in what is coming then lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things, however good,
joy in tearing down and clearing away is fully, has fully supplanted love's delight in the good
that is. Nietzsche's account of desire leads him to endorse openly the kind of devaluation of the world
most of us in late modernity practised without noticing it.
As I argued earlier, epithumia, especially when affirmed as desire to desire,
undermines the reality of love, and does so right at the point where love in some sense properly gets going.
When lovers have come into possession of the object of their love,
instead of forming attachment and caring for them, they discard and destroy them in preference for new ones.
Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than the two year old's toy.
Unlike Christian, some Christian theologians, I do not think,
I do not think that abiding love requires desiring the end of desire, perhaps in some possession of the object of love in our temporal eternity.
To the contrary, as I see, the end of time would be the end of anything we imagine as human love.
Another controversial statement. But, uh, there it is.
I take Nietzsche to be right. The desiring this kind of release from time implies radical alienation from the world, is rejection.
But what makes love for the world also impossible are two related claims that are central for Nietzsche that the will to power is insatiable,
and that love ceases with having. The two together imply endless striving for an unending stream of new conquest, new achievements, new things.
As a result, love can only flicker.
It moves from place to place because it cannot live it, because it can live only between places.
If it took an abode, it would die.
As I have noted at the end of the previous lecture, a better way of thinking about the relation between desire and possession is available.
We can actually long also for what we have, and unless we do, we will never genuinely love the world or anything that is in it.
But what about Nietzsche's great yes to life?
His love of fate. At the beginning of book four of the "Joyful Science", the book that ends with Zarathustra,
over rich with wisdom, descending from the mountain to bring it to the world.
Nietzsche expresses a good year wish: I want to learn
more and more to see the necessity of all things as beautiful.
And then I will be one of those who makes things beautiful.
Amor fati, let that be my love from now on.
I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse.
I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my sole negation.
And all in all, and on the whole, I want at some point for once to be only a yes sayer.
As he was writing "The Joyful Science", occasionally he would actually find himself in such a state.
In a letter to his friend Overbeck, he writes, I am in the mood of fatalistic surrender to God.
I call it amor fati. So much so that I would rush into a lion's jaws.
As we saw in the passage quoted, he aspired to amor fati not as an occasional mood, but as an enduring state.
Now, like most New Year's wishes, Nietzsche's was never fulfilled.
He never became only a yes sayer.
Not so much, it seems, because he was incapable of it, though for that reason as well.
But because he came to believe that the aspiration formulated in so general a way was itself, in an important sense, mistaken.
No saying is essential to the will to power and to his whole project.
As he noted at the beginning of that same book, my way of thinking demands a war like soul, a desire to harm, lust for no saying.
Later, he described the tension between yes and no,
evident in this in these, quotes as the psychological problem with Zarathustra-type. How someone who says no to everything,
to an inordinate degree, can nevertheless be the opposite of no saying spirit nevertheless carry his yes, saying blessing into all abysses.
To see how Nietzsche's "no"s and "yes"s relate,
we need to distinguish between our relation to the world as a whole and now relations to people, things and events within it.
Many robust "No"s along with joyful "yes"s, are appropriate for things within the whole.
The unconditional yes without any no should be said to the whole: a yes saying which encompasses literally everything,
all glories and horrors alike, and everything in between.
The world as it is, without subtraction, exception and selection or selection.
This is Nietzsche's affirmation of life applied more narrowly to one's own life.
It means to say yes to it as a whole and desire it exactly as it was, as it is, and as it is to become all of its smaller "no"s and yeses included.
Now, this kind of unconditional affirmation of life is the content of what
Zarathustra calls his abysmal thought.
He's referring to the idea of eternal recurrence of all things.
At the end of that very same book of the "Joyful Science", book four,
which started with a New Year's wish, Nietzsche announces for the first time eternal recurrence.
Here's how it goes.
This life as you live it now and have live it, you will have to live once more and countless times more, and there will be nothing new in it.
Rather, every pain and every joy, every thought and every sigh will return innumerable times.
How would you respond if that were true?
He says if a demon would fluster that into your ears.
Here, he invites his readers to experience the weight of the recurring life and world, not so much as the highest burden.
But as the highest joy. To crave nothing more than just such a world.
This would be living in the mode of universal, unconditional and strictly all encompassing love.
But why should a person whose life principles will to power aspire to such a love. With God dead
Nietzsche thinks that the world is like an infinite and often chaotic ocean.
One can strive for increase of one's power without loving the terrifying world by resigning oneself to it and living in it
begrudgingly. But on the whole, one might then even think that it's better to live in such a world than not.
But that would be to take a stance too close to Schopenhauer's, the one Nietzsche made his life work to combat.
For Nietzsche, only those are truly great who love,
who crave just the world in which they live with its torment, destruction, and annihilation.
They're able to affirm not just their own striving for superiority,
but the whole world in which life itself is competition, overpowering oppression and exploitation.
But can they really love even the striving that inferiorises from the eternal return, not only of their overcoming, but of their being overcome?
What kind of love could this be? It is not eros.
Love, motivated by intrinsic value of its object, for nothing has intrinsic value for Nietzche.
It is not epithumia - a love directed to object that satisfies a thirst.
It's hard to see how faith, which includes many things of marked
dis-value can be object of either of these two loves.
Béatrice Han-Pile proposes that Nietzsche has in mind love,
which confers value rather than responding to it either as valuable in itself or as a good means for slaking some thirst.
Nietzsche writes, I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful.
Then I will be the one who makes things beautiful.
To see things as beautiful and to make all things beautiful is on Han-Pile's
reading a transfiguration of their value brought about by our love for them.
As constant and great sufferer,
we always have to remember that when Nietzsche writes about suffering, that he was suffering just about the entirety of his of his life.
As a constant, a great sufferer, Nietzsche's
with amor fati, Nietzsche invented here a modest but voluptuous happiness - a happiness like that of a eye before which the sea of existence,
even the raging sea of existence has become calm, and now can not see enough of the surface and of the multitude tendered trembling skin of the sea.
The question why do we love what we love
drops off, and how do we come to love
replaces it. And so love comes to us in Han-Piles' reading as an act of grace.
And it does so primarily through great suffering.
No justification or reasons are involved at all.
We feel the pain that attaches to such experiences, but find ourselves able to love them,
nevertheless, without holding them as objections to life.
If indeed this is what Nietzsche's after, it would take a great deal of unmotivated trust to achieve such love.
And even if he were to love the world with this kind of love would not,
would it not rest on perceptual and existential illusion?
Seeing something as beautiful which makes things beautiful.
We see as beautiful what we at the same time know to be hideous.
Nietzsche has no way to resolve this attitudinal existential tension. As I will note shortly,
Martin Luther and Hannah Arendt actually do.
When discussing his abysmal thought Nietzsche has, Zarathustra say more than once, nausea.
Nausea. Nausea?
Woe unto me. He imagines a snake crawling into Zarathustra s mouth to illustrate the feeling.
But what triggers are Zarathustra's powerful loathing?
It cannot be the destructiveness and cruelty in the nature and history or awareness of the ghastly absurdity of existence.
These are just all terrible features of the world.
Amor fati should have taken care of them.
Here's the cause of his nausea.
Alas, man recurs eternally. Small man, recurse eternally. Naked
I once, I had once seen both the greatest man and the smallest man.
All too small to each other. Even the greatest.
All too human, all too small. The greatest. That was my disgust with man and the eternal recurrence even of the smallest.
That was my disgust with all existence. Alas, nausea, nausea, nausea!
The smallest, smallness of humans. Their weakness.
the
all-too-humanness, nauseates Zarathustra. As the reference to the nakedness of the greatest
and the smallest human indicates Zarathustra is
disgusted not just with the rabble. But with the human more broadly comprehensibly.
The main ways Zarathustra overcomes nausea is isolation in the highest height,
a solution not entirely different from that of the old world hating saint whom Zarathustra meets on his back down the mountain,
the one who had retreated into desert because the love of man would kill him.
But isolation does not help because it confirms
Zarathustra's inability to affirm life fully when he is in the proximity of the weak.
It only lays bare his failure to say eternal yes to all things at the end of his active life,
Nietzsche notes that disgust that humans is his greatest danger,
and in fact embraces isolation as the push, as the path to redemption from disgust.
His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.
So what are we to make of Nietzsche's project? In striving for superiority in his affirmation of life and in his love of faith,
Nietzsche is largely a despiser of life in its concreteness, albeit one with no other worldly hopes.
The will to power is an attempt to rescue life from Christian nihilism and from Schopenhauer’s disappointed hedonism.
But it generates too much contempt to count as love at all.
When it comes to the scope of worldly love and its quality too, Jesus I believe, has a distinct advantage over Zarathustra.
Nietzsche's favourite metaphor for the Zarathustra is the sun.
From the sun, I learned this, that it goes down over rich.
It pours gold into the sea out of its inexhaustible riches, so that even the poorest fishermen still rows with golden oars.
It's amazing. This is, this is some of the best of Nietzsche's prose.
And if you read, uh, "The Joyful Science," you'll get you'll get pages of it.
It's incredible. I think. That's why I love the guy.
The image is beautiful and illustrates well the superabundance
Zarathustra
feels. And yet it fits ill with two features of Zarathustra's love
that I had identified. The need from which it springs and the demand for worthy recipients on which it depends.
Combination of epithumia and eros. Even though Zarathustra
imagines the sun could not be happy without those for whom it shines.
The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth.
It gains nothing for me, parting its gift certainly not relief.
And unlike Zarathustra gifts, the gifts of the sun,
the sun bestows manifestly do not required worthy recipients.
The poor fisherman does not need to make himself worthy for the sun to turn the oars in his calloused hands into gold.
The sun's love is all encompassing and unconditional.
Now Jesus too uses the image of the sun to illustrate his core teaching about love.
God makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good alike.
Jesus love is beyond the distinction between good and evil, beyond the difference between worthiness and unworthiness.
No one nauseates Jesus, the masses of the poor and sick, many of whom follow him from from wrong reason,
do not.
Those who have no ears to hear his message, no hands to receive his gifts, do not either. The disciples, not even those who deny and betray him.
Nietzsche inspires the transfiguration of all things through value bestowing love.
But he cannot overcome nausea over humans. He cannot eliminate demand of worthiness from his love for humans.
The scape of, the scope of his love remains therefore severely limited.
Jesus loves with universal, unconditional love, not motivated by his own need and utterly undaunted by the unworthiness of its object.
Martin Luther built his entire theology on the foundation of the primacy of God's unconditional love,
such love is what makes creation be.
What gives it existence, its preciousness.
Such love is also what attends to creatures' violated integrity and seeks to make them beautiful,
transfiguring both how they are seen,
Nietzsche's interest, and the way they are implicit in unconditional love is the distinction between what Luther called person and work.
In a familiar way of speaking, we, you and I, are more than the worst thing we have done.
And as Kierkegaard would say, we're also more than the best we have achieved.
I mentioned his comment on Solomon, and here again, Solomon is more glorious as a human being than he is as a king.
Possibly better than using categories of person and work would be to distinguish between human beings as such.
Their sheer existence which makes it possible to stay,
I'm sorry, uh, sheer existence and their qualities as Hannah Arendt does. So for Luther, Kirkegaard and Arendt,
this distinction is, in essence, worth the fruit of the incalculable grace of love,
which makes it possible to stay with those we love through the history of their transformations,
whether positive or negative, to love them and care for them in whatever state they find themselves.
Theologically, the distinction is rooted in God's presuppositionless and unconditional love for creatures,
love that in is in suppressibly alive, irrespective of the value or this value of creatures, capacities and achievements.
God's love for creatures themselves is unconditional.
It is agapic. Love for the states in which they find themselves, their capacities and achieve.
It is conditioned by their qualities. God's relation to the state in which humans are is erotic.
As I explained in lecture two, eros and agape are not mutually exclusive.
They're complementary. But agape is primary and overarching.
Eros is subordinate and regional.
For Luther and Kierkegaard,
the distinction between sheer existence and existence with certain qualities is anthropological. Arendt too applies this distinction to humans.
As members of a shared world, I propose to expand it extended to the lives, to the lived world as a whole.
It requires us to distinguish between the world as such and the particular form of the world or state in which it finds itself.
As I've explained earlier, the state, the distinction can help us imagine how could it be possible to love the world,
which in so many ways does not deserve to be love, to love despite widespread, gratuitous suffering and cruelty in it?
We might then even come to love the world in certain sense because of such stubborn suffering and cruelty, as I will argue in my next lecture.
Thank you very much.
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf.
Production Assistance by Taylor Craig, and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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