Nietzsche, Stoicism, and the Will to Power of Philosophers

Aphorisms from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil #7

I would like to continue commenting on aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil (1886). We continue reading the first chapter of this book: “Prejudices of Philosophers.”

As a reminder, you can find the previous posts on the following page: Nietzsche.

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You desire to LIVE “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power — how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live — is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, “living according to Nature,” means actually the same as “living according to life” — how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature “according to the Stoa,” and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise — and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves — Stoicism is self-tyranny — Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?… But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern, The Project Gutenberg, 2003)

First of all, I would like to apologize to those of my readers who follow Stoicism. As a way of life, I find Stoicism interesting and do not share Nietzsche’s hostility to Stoicism. His arguments are not made in good faith, but I think it is worth engaging with his views.

In this passage, Nietzsche attacks the Stoic idea of living according to nature. He claims that the Stoics project their own values onto nature and then pretend that these values are inherent in nature. This leads him to accuse the Stoics of hypocrisy since they, according to him, reshape nature to fit their moral ideals while claiming to simply follow it.

Nietzsche’s denunciation of Stoicism is, of course, controversial. In fact, he is probably not really targeting Stoicism per se or its many variations, whose influence on philosophy and human behavior remains rather modest. Rather, he was attacking contemporary philosophies as they appear to him to be self-justifying of their own legitimacy and validity.

Under the rubric of “Will to Power” (Wille zur Macht), he denounces the tendencies of the human mind, especially the philosopher’s mind, to impose its own views on nature and to assume that these views are consistent with what nature is.

Indeed, many philosophical views in the past have consisted of attempts to draw a view of the “world” (Welt) or to imagine an original cause of all things (causa prima). For Nietzsche, this shows the arrogance of philosophers, their submission to the representations and values they hold, and the bias that forbids them to see things as they really are.

He thinks that we philosophers should doubt what we have inherited from tradition and the ways we are inclined to think. But, of course, for today’s thinkers it should also consist in doubting Nietzsche’s words as well as the philosophers between him and us.

But doubting does not necessarily mean rejecting. It means having as a criterion the object of the knowledge we are trying to grasp, not the means we are using.

As the Mandalorian would say: “This is the way.”

To be continued…

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